The Future Is Tasty: Cooking With Bioengineered Ingredients
A few weeks ago I had a science fiction dinner, made with biotech products that now are commercially available. I bought the new Pink Glow Pineapple by Del Monte Fresh, loaded with the antioxidant lycopene, and I also bought a pint of a wonderful tasting Vegan ice cream, that nonetheless, has whey, manufactured by Brave Robot! It’s another biotechnology product, produced with protein made in microscopic fungi using genes taken from cows. I understand that for a lot of people this sounds alarming, however, there is nothing to be worried about, I am personally very excited to eat these delicious foods and I gladly will cook and eat them to show I am excited about this technology.
I want to share the experience with you, because it’s a glance to the potential of biotech in our lives, of how it can make food not only more sustainable, but tastier, healthier and even cheaper.
My good friend Dr. Karl Haro von Mogel joined me on a Zoom meeting-dinner and he also cooked pineapple based dishes. For me, the menu of the night was a pineapple based cocktail: a GM Bay Breeze, with vodka, pineapple juice and cranberry juice. The main course was pineapple sticky chicken with pineapple fried rice, served on pineapple boats and for dessert, some vanilla Brave Robot ice cream topped by more Pink Glow pineapple. Karl cooked some Tacos Dorados with shrimp and grilled Pink Glow pineapple.
Let’s start with the pineapple by itself: The color is indeed remarkable, it almost looks more like a watermelon than a regular pineapple. It also smells different, it’s hard to describe, but in addition to the smell of a regular pineapple (and what a wonderful smell it is for someone raised in the Tropics!) there are berry-like notes. It’s not overly sweet, and despite eating fairly large amounts of pineapple, I did not feel any burning. I would have liked to eat more, but since I was cooking, I needed to save most of it for the recipes.
