These future foods could help the planet, if we can stop being weird about them

This is an oil used to make everyday foods like peanut butter and chocolate

and it's made from garbage, specifically food waste. It's supposed to taste the same as using

other oils for other peanut butters and chocolates, but this oil has a few extra perks

Mainly, it doesn't cause deforestation or loss of animal habitats, nor does it exploit labour

all of which are common problems of the palm oil industry. We are here at the Science Museum in London at the Future of Food exhibition

a free exhibition that explores the sustainable practices of food production, lab-grown meats versus factory farming, and sort of looks towards the future of

bioengineering and technology and the impact that it has on our plates and the impact it has on the planet

Pushing into new food science can also push the limits of what you may find appetizing

Take yeast for example. It has a long history in aiding food fermentation

and is one of humanity's oldest food technologies. Here's a 3,500-year-old piece of bread

discovered in Queen Hatshepsut's tomb in Egypt. The sourdough starter has come a long way But now yeast has a new job in making a sustainable substitute for palm oil Palm oil and other oils are responsible for a very large amount of greenhouse gas emissions

and with a growing population we need to find new ways to feed people and to support our food system

What we're doing here is we're capturing a yeast, a rather special yeast, a wine yeast

called Mechnicoviapolchurima. Now this grows on food wastes, on grass clippings and we can

create an oil equivalent to palm oil, equivalent to cocoa butter or even rapeseed oil from this

yeast as we culture it. So we grow it up on the waste feedstocks. We have it's a maximum biomass

and it makes a little oil droplet inside the cell. We break the cell open, it releases the oil

and then we can use that in all sorts of products from chocolate and margarine all the way through

to breads and peanut butters that we're displaying in the museum. Yes, this oil comes from industrial

food waste, foods discarded during production before reaching the customer. It may not sound too appetising. The team says it's safe to eat, but there's a

chance consumers might be too grossed out to try it. I think we quite sort of detached from the reality of how food is produced anyway so cell meat is a topic that sometimes people think oh I wouldn try that it feels a bit disgusting But when you kind of think about the reality of industrial factory farming

the technology there is so cruel and environmentally problematic, and it's not really any more natural

And considering 85% of the meats Eastern UK is factory farmed, when you compare the two different approaches there

you could sort of re-evaluate what you think about in terms of disgust

and, yeah, what's natural. Cell-grown meat is also spotlighted at the exhibition

as are GMO foods, which have been facing controversies in the past four decades

We showed genetic engineering how it emerged as a technology in the 1980s as GM

but it's also a technology that's been going on for millennia in the way that we've been breeding and selecting for particular plants

On display we have some ancient wheat grains, which are early example of humans domesticating wheat

So they selected over many years wheat varieties that didn't drop their grain so easily

so you could harvest them better. So we're quite keen to put Genesca engineering

in this much longer history of selective breeding We also looking at alternatives to farming and how biotech can kind of maybe engineer plants that don need fertiliser There lots of different ways of

looking at how we might solve these big global problems. The agriculture and food industry is

currently facing multiple challenges including climate change. The increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are shifting crop calendars, contributing to food insecurity

in economically vulnerable areas and communities facing conflict. And sometimes the way we cultivate and distribute food contributes to the problem

Researchers estimate that 29.7% of all carbon emissions come from the agriculture sector

and current industrial farming practices require excessive water use and can lead to deforestation and biodiversity loss

It's a real garbage situation that maybe soon could get a little better

thanks to solutions like this oil, made from garbage. But would you try foods made from waste

Or would you be happier not knowing how they're made? Let us know in the comments

And if you want more stories about the technology shaping our future, subscribe to our channel