Milk is a staple. But the liquid in your breakfast cereal is in for a big change. Two bioengineers in Silicon Valley are using genetically engineered yeast to create animal-free milk.
Yes, it’s artificial milk. And, as Steve Judge pointed out for Mother Earth News, “It could represent the biggest change in agriculture in generations.”
Because yeast cultures will create real milk proteins, the synthetic milk will taste like cow milk and keep its nutritional benefits, Perumal Gandhi, a co-founder of the start-up Muufri (as in, “moo-free”), told National Geographic. That means it wouldn’t taste like almond or soy milk.
“If we want the world to change its diet from a product that isn’t sustainable to something that is, it has to be identical [to], or better than, the original product,” Gandhi said, according to National Geographic. “The world will not switch from milk from a cow to the plant-based milks. But if our cow-less milk is identical and priced right, they just might.”
With co-founder Ryan Pandya, the pair plans to pull together all the components of milk — the proteins, fats, minerals and sugars. By inserting DNA sequences from cattle into yeast cells, they plan to grow cultures at a set temperature and then harvest the milk proteins after a few days.
“Although the proteins in Muufri milk come from yeast, the fats come from vegetables and are tweaked at the molecular level to mirror the structure and flavor of milk fats. Minerals, like calcium and potassium, and sugars are purchased separately and added to the mix. Once the composition is fine-tuned, the ingredients emulse naturally into milk,” wrote Linda Qiu.
“By controlling the ingredients, however, Pandya and Gandhi hope to make milk more healthful. The team is experimenting, for instance, with sugars other than lactose, which 65 percent of adults have trouble digesting. And it has engineered a more healthful, unsaturated fat that retains the distinct flavor of dairy.”
Pandya said people shouldn’t be concerned about the genetically modified aspect of Muufri: “We’ve essentially crippled the yeast, so if it does go out in the world, it’ll produce only milk proteins and die within hours.”
What does cow-less milk mean for farming?
It doesn’t signal the end of dairy farming, wrote Judge, who is a microdairy expert at Bob-White Systems in Vermont. But if people enjoy cow-less milk, the dairy industry could shrink dramatically.
In 2010, there were only 315 commercial dairy farms in Maine, down from about 1,000 in 1985. They range in size from 10 to 1,700 milking cows and support more than 4,000 industry-related jobs, such as those related to grain and equipment sales, animal health and milk processing.
Muufri isn’t on shelves yet, but you may be able to buy it by 2017. It will likely cost twice as much as cow-produced milk at first. And some dairy scientists are skeptical that Muufri will replace naturally produced milk.
“We’ve been milking [cows] for seven or eight thousand years,” Philip Tong, director of the Dairy Products Technology Center at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, told National Geographic. “I doubt biotechnology could fully reproduce what Mother Nature intended.”
But others remain hopeful that cow-less milk could improve the planet’s health by reducing the use of herbicides and chemicals. There’s also the potential for it to reduce the number of cows drinking large amounts of water and emitting methane.
Would you buy cow-less milk? Let us know.
