Until this time, King had largely addressed the environmental crisis as a series of single issues: palm oil, animal rights, poverty. After a time, however, he realised that the common causal factor behind most of these challenges was food. The world’s insatiable craving for protein had created industrial animal agriculture, a behemoth whose byproducts included deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate chaos. Change the food system, and you change the whole equation. (King, for his part, follows an almost entirely plant-based diet, allowing himself the odd oyster and clam, since bivalves “don’t have brains or an environmental impact”.)
Part of King’s pitch is that plant-based proteins means producing more food, not less. It also subverts consumer behaviour.
Food Frontier is run by a young, tight-knit team of six, and is based in a co-working space in North Melbourne. Funded by grants and donations, it was driven from the outset by a determination to reach across the ideological divide. “I remember in 2018 giving one of my first presentations for Food Frontier in Wodonga at an agricultural conference to 150 farmers,” King says. “I was a little hesitant – they’d see alternative proteins as a threat, but the interest was very strong. They reflected back to me the same respect and openness and curiosity that I tried to bring to that interaction.”
Part of King’s pitch is that plant-based proteins means producing more food, not less. It also subverts consumer behaviour. “Traditionally it’s been thought that attitude change leads to behaviour change, but often it’s the other way around,” he said during a recent interview on ABC TV. “When people have options to make better choices, then they come around to it in their thinking.”
Of course, this depends on having plant-based options that people actually want to eat, which is where “chicken bites” come in. Precision fermentation offers similar promise. Precision fermentation is the engineering of microorganisms like yeast and bacteria to produce complex organic molecules, like protein. The CSIRO is using precision fermentation to produce the same caseins and whey proteins that are found in cow’s milk, without the need for milking facilities and huge herds of gassy bovines. Together with venture capital funding, the CSIRO has created a start-up called Eden Brew, which hopes to be selling the first batch of animal-free dairy by late 2022.
The CSIRO is fast becoming one of the driving forces behind meat alternatives. In 2019, the CSIRO and Jack Cowin, founder of the Hungry Jack’s burger chain, were among the chief financial backers of v2food, an Australian start-up, which is developing plant-based products made from legumes. “The last taste test I had, I thought they were tricking me,” Cowin told The Sydney Morning Herald at the time. “Over the decades I’ve eaten probably as many hamburgers as anyone has in this country. When you taste it, people won’t be able to tell the difference.”
The meat alternative created by v2food is now used in Hungry Jack’s Rebel Whopper burgers and sold in supermarkets across Australia. v2food, which recently expanded into China and Europe, has a number of projects on the go with the CSIRO, spanning nutrition, protein-extraction technology and flavour and structure work.
When he was younger, King hid his age, fearing that people wouldn’t take him seriously. “People have this idea that young people’s ideas are less worthy because they have less life experience,” he told the ABC. “But that’s silly because almost all of the problems we face come back to inherited thinking. Young people aren’t conditioned by structures, so they are more able to challenge the status quo.”
But thinking differently comes with risks, especially if you’re only 25. “It’s sometimes called the entrepreneurial trap,” says Jan Owen, who met King in 2016, when she was CEO of the Foundation for Young Australians. “It’s very lonely when you’re doing something at the bleeding edge.”
Future foods and alternative proteins have gone ahead in “leaps and bounds” in the past five years, says Owen. “And leading that is terrifying because you’re way out in front, saying stuff no one wants to hear or believe.”
You can even upset your allies, as when King suggested to Bob Geldof at the EAT Stockholm Food Forum in 2017 that at least some of the answers to climate change might lie in science. “Business and science won’t fix this!” Geldof yelled. “They are the problem!”
Climate change is an urgent issue, but King is cognisant of keeping a cool head. It was Winston Churchill, he reminds me, who first predicted lab-grown meat in a 1931 essay. Within 50 years, and under the right conditions, wrote Churchill, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”.
Churchill was out by 40 years. But King has a prediction of his own. “By the time I’m in my 40s, what we consider today to be ‘alternative proteins’ will not be called alternative,” he says. “It’ll just be called food.”
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