Guest post:
In the summer of 2019 Tom Jara worked on the Real Vegan Cheese Project. Here’s his story…
The goal of this project was to create cheese from transgenic caseins proteins harvested from E. Coli. Cheese is created from proteins in cow's milk but, in the case of the project, it would be real cheese proteins like caseins and whey just made without a cow, hence the name Real Vegan Cheese. When one makes cheese a common practice is to add lemon juice to the milk and then gather the curds and separate the whey. The lemon juice is acidic and lowers the pH of the milk and causes the casein proteins to undergo a chemical change and group together and form these curds which become cheese. There are many different types of caseins and Real Vegan Cheese started focusing on one that could meet the chemical requirement of curdling to be mass produced.
As one part of the project team works on expediting the harvesting process, I worked with another section focused on the flavor profiles of cheese. Cheese makers use different bacteria to add different flavors and types of cheese. The goal of Real Vegan Cheese is to create cheese without using any animal products, so if we are to culture bacteria for cheese production we must use vegan media. My job was to see if various lactic acid bacteria used for cheese making can survive on vegan media and see how that media changes its flavor profile. Determining the flavor profiles would have to be done elsewhere with access to Mass Spectrometry Gas Chromatograph instruments. I got to sharpen my microbiology culturing skills culturing a wide variety of lactic acid bacteria, always on the lookout for contamination. I also got to learn how to make media from scratch and partially design my own media gaining inspiration from wild sounding medias such as Tomato Juice Media. In addition I needed to isolate and confirm the identity of various lactic acid bacteria, I did this by using 16S sequencing from Genewiz and BLAST on NCBI.
I got to see the future of food working at Real Vegan Cheese. It will only be a matter of time until most animal products will be made in vitro, once molecular agriculture is perfected that casein that I saw in a beaker will be upscaled to huge bioreactors. No longer will production need large grazing areas demanding grand amounts of water, feed, antibiotics and fuel. This dream is slowly becoming a reality; at the time the company Perfect Day had just debuted their synthetic ice cream. Their company is currently creating ice cream from a whey protein made by an undisclosed micro-organism. I suspect it could be a fungus because you can collect the hydrophilic whey protein in the growth media once the fungus has excreted it rather than cracking open a microorganism like E. Coli to get the target product. This kind of biotechnology is the tip of the iceberg for this fast growing field. Starting with experimental non-profits and then expanding into larger conglomerates. A whole molecular agriculture revolution is on its way.
The Real Vegan Cheese Project has a whole world of cheese to crack into. The work with vegan media seems promising but that was only a review on lactic acid bacteria. There is a whole other facet of cheese making that uses fungi as ripeners like the blue in blue cheese and in Brie cheese. Some media ingredients may cross over but more work will need to be done. However with the growing interest in synthetic foods, we will have those answers in due time.