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Cruelty-free meat, healthy dessert, and agriculture that is restoring the land? Believe it!
This Pig’s Bacon Was Delicious. But She’s Alive and Well.
Mission Barns is cultivating pork fat in bioreactors and turning it into meatballs and other products.
I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. (Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.) I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense, but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat.
Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins — essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock.
Of course, in this new frontier of food, the big question is: Who exactly is this for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it’s divorced from the cruelty of factory farming? Would meat-eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile?
Regardless of the trajectory of cultivated fat products, Dawn will continue mingling with llamas, soaking up the sunshine, and getting belly rubs in upstate New York — even as she makes plants taste more like pork.
– Matt Simon
This is edited from a story originally published by Grist that is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Elderberry Bolsters Watershed Resilience
A Santa Barbara County–based nonprofit is restoring the local ecosystem and supplying demand for this native perennial berry.
In 2023, we broke ground on The Elderberry Project, a multiyear project focused on the native western blue elderberry.
Because of their immune support properties, elderberries are experiencing a surge in market demand. But this native perennial found along waterways worldwide also offers a unique solution for restoring our watersheds, too. The elderberry actively contributes to climate resilience by sequestering carbon, enhancing soil health, improving water quality, mitigating floods, and preserving wildlife habitats, presenting a climate-appropriate crop that could create a substantial market for small to mid-sized farmers in our region and beyond.
We are working with local farmers, ranchers, and other producers to grow elderberries with the implementation of climate-smart agricultural practices, such as cover cropping. Once the berries are harvested, we employ a unique gentle drying process to maintain the crop’s nutritional value at a regional processing facility in nearby Santa Maria. Over the next five years, our partners will be working to connect brands with this new supply chain, bridging the gap from production to the marketplace.
– White Buffalo Land Trust
Healthy Snacks Made Cool
Yommi Frozen Superfood Bars are made with nutritious, locally grown ingredients in Massachusetts — and they’re delicious.
Summer is my least favorite season — I prefer a fluffy snowfall to muggy heat any day. When I sat down to chat with the folks behind Yommi Frozen Superfood Bars, I forgot all of my sweaty seasonal gripes. I made quick work of a Blueberry Lemon Bliss bar as Caroline Harris and Ryan Gussen, owners of Yommi, joined me on the shady porch.
Yommi started with the mission of making a nutrient-dense alternative to typical sugary summer treats. Caroline hopes it can also be a good sweet treat option for folks who are diabetic, gluten-free, or dairy-intolerant. They even use coconut milk free of carrageenan, a seaweed-derived emulsifier that folks with tick-borne illnesses, especially alpha-gal syndrome, can become sensitive to.
When working on new recipes, Caroline and Ryan keep seasonal produce in mind as well as customer requests. Some flavors they’re dreaming up for the future include matcha, apple cider, pumpkin spice, creamsicle, and key lime pie — all made from locally grown, locally sourced ingredients. Purchasing produce from local farms whenever possible is one of Yommi’s top priorities, and their operations are extremely low-waste, too.
“Everything we have can be blended and put into popsicles,” Ryan explains. “All of our food scraps, like strawberry tops, are used to feed chickens. Some people will make dye out of our avocado pits. All of our other production waste is recycled — it’s paper and cardboard.”
Yommi has found its audience on Martha’s Vineyard — during peak popsicle season they’re hand-making and wrapping nearly 2,000 popsicles a week!
– Julia Cooper
