Mouthing plenitudes: Of famines, leghemoglobin, vertical farming, and future foods

Mouthing plenitudes: Of famines, leghemoglobin, vertical farming, and future foods 11 Food is a serious business, for humans, for non-human animals, and for plants.Humans are the only animals that have monetised and trade food, although some spiders, crickets, and birds engage in nuptial gifts of food to facilitate mating.In crickets, males offer food produced from special glands to feed females; spider males themselves form the tasty morsel during the mating process, and birds offer favoured fruit or insects to females in courtship rituals.Plants make their own food, for which they need access to light.Food trading requires a surplus; global markets now take the place of bartering traditions or food-for-work of earlier times.Reading Lizzie Collingham's The taste of war: World War II and the battle for food brought to the forefront the chilling decisions that were being made in war rooms around the world: whom to starve and whom to feed; what to feed and how much?It was calculated that the armed forces needed more calories, while civilians needed less, although those doing hard physical labour in agricultural fields really needed more.Shipping blockades strategically starved nations; while food was called in from the colonies to feed soldiers, the colonised starved and even experienced famines.Not only food, but plant-based pesticides, e.g., pyrethrins that were extracted from Tanacetum daisies, had to be sourced from Kenya, since the major source of these plant pyrethrins from eastern Europe and Japan were no longer available during World War II (Greenhill 2007).The book (Collingham 2012) tells the story of Roosevelt's lend-lease policy that was later also applied to food trade, of the food mandarins in various war offices, of the British nutritionist John Boyd Orr who went on to head the Food and Agriculture Organization that was formed in 1945 and to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949, and about the politics of food.The book also focuses on the need for fat during war time and how due to the shortage of butter, margarine was promoted and circulated to meet nutritional needs.Interestingly, margarine itself was invented as a result of an earlier war.Hippolyte Me `ge-Mourie `s was a French chemist who responded to a challenge set by Napoleon III to come up with a substitute for butter that had become scarce in France during the Franco-Prussian war of 1869.Me `ge-Mourie `s delivered the synthesis of oleomargarine from animal tallow in 1870; since then, margarine is also produced from vegetable oils.Wars tend to focus creative energies.Today, the peacetime challenge is to feed 9 billion people by 2050; the world is already at 8.1 billion people.How might this be done so that the intimate connections between food, water, and biodiversity are also maintained (Martin et al. 2024)?Today, we know that synthetic pesticides are compromising food security by their impacts on pollinators (Kita et al. 2024).We also know that a vegetarian diet is more planet-friendly than a diet based on animal protein (Allen and Hof 2019).However, much of the world craves animal protein.Is there a solution in sight?Can burgers that are infused with leghemoglobin derived from plants, and that have the appearance of animal protein-based burgers, become an acceptable substitute?Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers are food companies that hope so, and their burgers certainly look and apparently taste like the real thing, by infusing them with leghemoglobins.Plant hemoglobins are believed to have been acquired by horizontal transfer from bacteria (Va ´zquez-Limo ´n et al. 2012); leghemoglobins are specifically expressed in the root nodules of legumes associated with Rhizobium nitrogen-fixing bacteria (Larrainzar et al. 2020).Another potential substitute is Quorn Ó , which is a mycoprotein made via a fermentation process using the soil fungus Fusarium venenatum (Galanakis 2024).The fungal hyphae have the dimensions and texture of animal protein fibres and hence are deemed suitable animal protein substitutes.Red algae are also on the future agenda.They have been found to have the essential amino acid content of ovalbumin (Rawiwan et al. 2022), and are the most abundantly used alga, while many green and brown macroalgae are also valuable sources of protein (Pereira et al. 2024).Red seaweeds of the genus Porphyra have