Cattle are one of the most consequential climate problems hiding in plain sight on the dinner table. Livestock are responsible for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and cattle alone account for about 65% of that sector’s output. Most of it doesn’t come from manure or land use — it comes from inside the cow. Approximately one billion cattle on the planet burp around 3.7 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent emissions annually, more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. A growing number of researchers and companies are focused on a deceptively simple approach: change what a cow eats. A red seaweed called Asparagopsis taxiformis contains bromoform, a compound that blocks the enzymes used by methane-producing microbes in the rumen. Today’s guests didn’t learn about this from a graduate seminar. They’re high school students, and they built an idea for their first company around it. Every January, I judge a Shark Tank-style competition that caps a month-long entrepreneurship program at the Bush School in Seattle. This year, a pitch by three students stopped me cold. Zara, Ellie, and Kai Aizawa are the co-founders of MooBlue, whose tagline — Cut the burp, keep the beef — got a laugh, but whose business concept is entirely serious. Kai is heading to Haverford College in the fall. Zara and Ellie are still freshmen.
MooBlue proposes harvesting Asparagopsis from the Mediterranean, where it is an invasive species currently harming marine ecosystems, processing it into an oil-based feed additive and building a certification and labeling system so consumers can identify beef and dairy products raised using reduced-methane feeds. What struck me wasn’t just the idea. It was the depth of the research: from the biochemistry of rumen fermentation to the intellectual property landscape to a two-segment go-to-market strategy targeting large corporate operations and family farms. They covered the competitive white space, the supply chain, the financial incentives for farmers, and the consumer psychology of premium labeling, all with the ease of people who had genuinely internalized what they were talking about.
The conversation shows that the internet has exploded ceiling of what a curious teenager can discover. When Zara, Ellie, and Kai needed to understand the biochemistry of enteric fermentation, they found recent, peer-reviewed research. When I was their age, those journals would have been available only at a university library, if they existed at all. Today, a high school freshman in Seattle can find a paper out of, understand the biochemistry well enough to explain it clearly, and build a company around the discovery. That changes what a generation can imagine. And it may change what we can collectively accomplish.
You can learn more about the Bush School’s entrepreneurship program at bush.edu.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello! Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.
Today we’re going to talk gas, specifically, the methane gas ruminating in the gut of cattle around the world. Livestock are responsible for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Cattle alone account for about 65% of the livestock sector’s greenhouse gas output, and most of that isn’t from manure or land use. It’s due to enteric fermentation, the microbial process in a cow’s rumen — its gut — that produces methane that reaches the atmosphere as a burp or a fart.
Approximately one billion cattle live on the planet, and they emit around 3.7 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent emissions annually — more than the entire aviation and shipping industries combined. That hamburger on your plate isn’t coming without a significant environmental price. Methane is a particularly potent problem: over a 20-year period, it traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, because methane breaks down in the atmosphere in roughly a decade. Reducing the volume of this bovine gas can deliver climate benefits faster than almost any other intervention, and that’s why the Global Methane Pledge, signed by more than 150 countries, aims to reduce methane emissions by 30% before 2030.
That’s also why a growing number of researchers and startups are focused on a deceptively simple question: can you change what a cow eats and meaningfully change the climate math? The answer increasingly appears to be yes. A red seaweed called Asparagopsis taxiformis contains bromoform, a compound that inhibits the enzymes relied on by methane-producing microbes in a cow’s gut — in other words, it stops the gas. Peer-reviewed studies, including landmark research out of UC Davis and James Cook University in Australia, have shown that adding small amounts of Asparagopsis to cattle feed can reduce enteric methane emissions by up to 80%, with no adverse effects on the animal, its milk, or its meat production.
But I didn’t learn about this from reading research. It was explained to a group of adults by three high school students, and here’s the backstory. For the past couple of years, in January, I’ve been a judge at a Shark Tank competition that caps a month-long entrepreneurship program at the Bush School in Seattle. The class is taught by a friend and former business partner of mine, and it’s a rigorous program: students research real markets, build real business plans, and pitch to a panel that doesn’t pull punches. I’m the meanest shark, by the way.
This January, a pitch by three students struck me deeply, and I turned into the shark who was ready to invest. So my guests today are Zara, Ellie, and Kai Aizawa, co-founders of MooBlue.
Their tagline, Cut the burp, keep the beef, Got a laugh, but their Asparagopsis-based business concept is serious. MooBlue proposes harvesting the red seaweed from the Mediterranean, processing it into an oil-based feed additive, rather than a powder, as many other companies are considering, and building a certification system so that consumers can identify beef and dairy products raised using reduced-methane feeds.
What struck me wasn’t just the idea. It was the depth of the research these students had done, from the biochemistry of the rumen fermentation process to the competitive intellectual property landscape to a two-segment go-to-market strategy targeting both large corporate operations and smaller farms. They talked about these topics with ease, and it got me thinking about how much more information is available to students now than 50 years ago, when I was their age. They stand not just on the shoulders of historic giants like Newton or Einstein, but of cutting-edge researchers who, in the 1970s, typically worked out of sight and out of mind, sometimes for decades, until their research was found to be relevant and useful. But today, students can find out what’s going on in the lab almost immediately, and that changes the potential for innovation in everything.
So we’re going to talk with Zara, Ellie, and Kai about how they discovered the science behind Asparagopsis, why they chose an oil-based formulation over what competitors are doing, how they think about the intellectual property challenges in this space, and what it’s like to build a climate tech business plan when you’re still in high school. You can learn more about the Bush School at bush.edu.
So, can three high school students with a seaweed, a tagline, and a serious grasp of atmospheric chemistry chart a path toward lower-methane beef? Let’s find out, right after this quick commercial break.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:14
Welcome to the show, Zara, Ellie, and Kai. Could each of you introduce yourself so folks can hear your voice?
Zara 5:20
My name is Zara, and I’m a freshman at the Bush School.
Ellie 5:24
My name is Ellie, and I’m also a freshman at the Bush School.
Kai 5:27
I’m Kai, and I’m a senior at the Bush School.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:29
Well, welcome to the show, guys. You did a great job during the Shark Tank competition, and I wanted to start off by asking you to quickly do the pitch you did for us.
Zara 5:38
So our idea is a product called MooBlue. Together, we can cut the burp and keep the beef. It would be a for-profit business working to make the livestock industry more sustainable.
Kai 5:49
In order to do this, our product would use Asparagopsis, a seaweed found in tropical areas that has been shown to reduce methane emissions from cows by up to 98%. Our company aims to harvest and turn Asparagopsis into oil-based feed additive capsules.
Zara 6:04
Currently, there’s a lack of sustainability in the agricultural industry, especially with the over-farming of ruminant animals, which are a high contributor to methane emission output. We hope that people will feel better when they buy methane-reduced meat or dairy products, because they’re helping the environment by contributing minimal methane output to the atmosphere.
Ellie 6:25
We have clearly identified this problem for decades, and scientists have discovered this natural solution years ago. Yet this technology isn’t well known, and so it hasn’t been implemented on a wide scale. We want to make it easier for people to help.
Kai 6:36
The two potential target audiences that we identified were large corporate farms and smaller farms in rural areas. We decided to focus on large corporate farms that have thousands of cattle. If one farm adopts your product, you can reduce emissions at scale immediately, which can help reduce methane emissions more quickly. They also have more capital and face increasing pressures from regulators, investors, and food companies to reduce emissions.
Ellie 7:00
Currently, there are a handful of companies trying to do the same thing as us, but this is still a very new market with lots of white space. We were also thinking that within a cooperative competitive relationship, we could help increase widespread adoption of sustainability, because at the end of the day, our goal is sustainability, not just profit.
Kai 7:20
A brief overview of our marketing plan would be to promote our product through agricultural media, such as Successful Farming magazine, and a strategic partnership with Wendy’s. With Wendy’s, we plan to create a limited-edition burger made using beef from calves with reduced methane emissions. This partnership builds off Wendy’s iconic Where’s the Beef? advertising campaign by reintroducing it as Where’s the Methane?. To distribute our product at scale, including in rural areas, we hope to partner with Cargill, the largest cattle feed distributor in the United States. We’ll also place a clear, visible “methane reduced” label on all of our meat products in stores. This allows farmers to differentiate their beef and charge a higher price for verified low-methane products, giving them an incentive to use our product.
Ellie 8:00
We hope to harvest our Asparagopsis from areas in the Mediterranean, relieving those ecosystems of the negative effects of this invasive species.
Zara 8:09
So in the long run, this product will improve air quality and public health by reducing methane-related ozone pollution, and it will slow climate change by targeting one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. So you should cut the burp and keep the beef with our company. Thanks.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:24
That was great. And again, this is exactly why I was so impressed with your presentation. You thought this through end to end, not something you would expect in a high school entrepreneurship competition. Tell us how the three of you came together as a team, and what was it that sparked your interest in methane emissions from cattle in the first place?
Ellie 8:46
So for the Cascades program, each of us had to do an individual two-minute elevator pitch on our own unique idea. For me, I’d always kind of known about cows and how they’re a massive contributor to global methane emissions. It’s one of those facts that you learn and it just always stays in the back of your mind. I actually think I first learned it from a weird-but-true book I read in elementary school. I had also done a small project on the effects of Asparagopsis in middle school, but it wasn’t really anything concrete. So when I was running out of ideas for the class pitch, I decided to take my bare-bones MooBlue idea to the class, and it was received really well by my classmates and the teacher. The teacher ended up pairing us three together for the final project.
Speaking just for myself, I was excited to continue this business venture because I wanted to do something that mattered — not just to the individual consumer, but on a wider scale, touching the entire chain from farmers to consumers to the earth. So, basically, how Asparagopsis works: not just cows, but actually all ruminant animals — sheep, goats, even giraffes — have something called a rumen, the largest section of their four-part digestive system. The rumen is essentially a big fermentation vat. It contains tons of microbes and methanogens that help the animal break down the very fibrous plant matter it’s eating. When you see cows chewing their cud, that’s the regurgitation from the rumen to help break things down further, because it’s hard to digest.
This whole process of microbes breaking down fiber is called enteric fermentation, and this is what creates methane as a waste byproduct of the anaerobic microbes. The cow releases it through burping — which is a common misconception, because most people think it comes from farts. Asparagopsis reduces methane because it contains the active compound bromoform. When ingested by the cow — even at just 1% of their diet — bromoform blocks the enzymes used by the microbe to create methane. And there’s actually some hope that the energy the cow no longer wastes on producing methane could be redirected into feed efficiency, potentially lowering costs and boosting productivity for farmers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 11:08
That’s a really impressive and thorough explanation. How did you learn about all of that? One of the things that impressed me most is the research you had access to. How did you find it, and what was the process you went through?
Zara 11:23
During the time we were discovering what our unmet need was, we were looking for clear research, images, or articles that could point to the core of what our solution was going to be. I researched on many reputable sources, such as ScienceDirect, the National Institutes of Health, and Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. We wanted our unmet need to be grounded in a specific research topic: reducing methane emissions in the atmosphere.
I came across an article from UC Santa Cruz written by Sarah Mastrani on algae adoption for cattle feed to help reduce the methane emissions cows were producing. It gave people the main idea of our product in simpler terms. This research article provided me with the reputable knowledge needed to see the real effects of algae — how, in very simple terms, people could really understand the main mission of our company.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:21
One of the ways you translate the mission of the company is into your labeling that you want to put on beef products, dairy products, and so forth. Tell us about methane-reduced labeling. How’d you come up with that idea?
Zara 12:33
We looked at the cage-free eggs comparison. Why do people choose to buy cage-free eggs? They’re more expensive, but consumers want to make a more humane choice. So we came up with a similar incentive for methane-reduced meat — yes, it’ll be more expensive, but it helps the environment and reduces the methane in the atmosphere. We played off the cage-free eggs example and the kind of motivation that makes people pay a premium for something that does good.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:06
When you think about what that label looks like — is it a big, prominent label? And how do you convince people it’s legitimate? Because a lot of consumers wonder: can I trust this label, or is this just marketing?
Ellie 13:22
I think it’s really important, with something that has a large emotional marketing factor and represents newer technology, that it be authentic. As this technology gains more momentum, we hope to have an actual governing third-party oversight board, or some type of committee, that could certify products like this. A large label on the packaging that simply says “methane reduced” immediately draws the consumer’s eye, and I think even though it’s framed neutrally, it conveys the same weight that “grass-fed beef” and “cage-free eggs” do. Even though the idea is different, it draws out the same emotions and motivations in consumers.
Ultimately, people want to help the earth. They just don’t know how to do it, and they feel helpless. Something as simple as a label on beef can make people feel happy and proud and guilt-free about their food choices — the same way buying a carton of cage-free milk does.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:33
Kai, you were the marketing mind behind this. Tell us more about your thinking.
Kai 14:38
We really wanted consumers to be bought in — we wanted returning customers, people who cared about the environment. By having a methane-reduced label, they could feel like they’re contributing, like they’re invested in our meat products.
We were always thinking about incentives. The science alone wasn’t going to keep our product afloat. Even if the technology works, adoption is only going to happen when there’s a clear benefit for the farmers, for the company, and for the consumers who feel like they’re helping the environment. So the label was an easy way to align all three of those values quickly: for consumers, it created an easy emotional signal that the purchase was going to make a difference; for producers and food companies, it created a market advantage against other meat products that don’t carry the methane-reduced label.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:29
As I listen to you, what I’m struck by is that you believe business can make a positive impact in the world. What attracted you to the entrepreneurship program in the first place? How do you feel about the tools you have available to create a better world?
Zara 15:45
For me personally, I got into entrepreneurship from watching my mom start her own company — career consulting and college counseling. Seeing her go through the steps of finding customers and running a business over the past few years was really influential. And then when I saw the Cascades program, I got excited, because I’d attended a summer entrepreneurial program called eBay, in Berkeley, about two years ago, where you created a company based on one of your ideas and pitched it to your family after a three-week course. I really just enjoyed the idea of building a business, and those two experiences played a huge part.
Kai 16:52
During our Shark Tank program, we got to visit a lot of businesses outside the sustainability space as well — we heard the whole story from Nor’east Candles on how they grew their business from start to finish. I was personally really inspired by how quickly someone can build a business. The key factor was that you have to solve a problem. A clear problem in our world is climate change and global warming, and a really powerful way to address it is to bring as many people as possible into the solution. Creating a product to reduce methane emissions is one way to do that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:40
And Ellie — you were the initial founder. What about you?
Ellie 17:44
What drew me to entrepreneurship was the impact it can have when done right. You can go into government and fight for policy, and you can be a scientist and come up with new things, but it’s all somewhat wasted if there’s not someone actively working to implement it. I had noticed that California had passed policy to reduce methane. I read an article saying Asparagopsis was the future of agriculture. And I thought: we have the policy to move it forward, and we have the solution — but nobody is working to connect the two and actually solve this pressing problem. That’s what drew me to entrepreneurship: the impact it can have, and the way it brings people together to actually solve a big issue.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:46
That’s a great place for us to take a break. We’ve set the table for a great methane-free conversation. Let’s take a quick commercial break — we’ll be right back. Stay tuned.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue the conversation with Zara, Ellie, and Kai Aizawa, co-creators of the MooBlue project and students at Seattle’s Bush School. As I listen to you, one thing I wanted to ask: would you be as interested in entrepreneurship and business in general if there weren’t shows like Shark Tank, which of course was the idea that brought us together in the first place?
Kai 19:31
I personally love watching Shark Tank, and it’s been a pretty big motivator for me to try entrepreneurship. But I think the core of entrepreneurship is trying to make as many people happy as possible.
Zara 19:48
Watching Shark Tank and other entrepreneurial shows definitely played a big part for me. When I was younger, my dad would work out in the gym and I’d come in and sit on this little bench watching whatever he was watching, and it always turned out to be Shark Tank. We’d watch episodes back to back, and it became a big bonding thing. It really influenced me into wanting to see the entrepreneurial world create connections between people who watch it and people who want to do good. And the idea of being able to build your own company — to profit or to do good for the environment — played a big part too.
Ellie 20:43
I’m a little different from Zara. I don’t really like watching Shark Tank because I don’t like seeing the investors tear down the business owners. But I think I’d still be just as interested in entrepreneurship without it, because to me, the marketing for entrepreneurship is the outcome. All of these successful businesses are really what made me think, huh, maybe I could do this one day. The success stories are actually a really big draw.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:20
I want to jump back into the actual plan. One of the things you were particularly focused on was the difference between an oil-based approach to using Asparagopsis in feed versus powder, which is what most companies do. What was the reasoning behind that decision?
Zara 21:41
The oil form is typically considered better than the powder because it offers better stability for the active compound bromoform — lasting at least 12 weeks — whereas the powder can lose its effectiveness a lot faster. The oil also masks the seaweed’s strong taste and smell, making it easier for the cows to consume the product and increasing palatability — meaning it enhances voluntary intake. Cows are more willing to eat it because it doesn’t smell as bad and it tastes a little better mixed into their feed.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:26
It’s great that you thought about the cows, too, rather than just force-feeding them. Another element of the plan was harvesting the seaweed in the Mediterranean, where it’s an invasive species. Who would do the harvesting, and how did you think about the full supply chain and the benefits it could create for people in those regions?
Ellie 22:47
One thing we noticed when we were researching this is that there’s currently no way to farm Asparagopsis on a scale that would support a business — it’s all very small, experimental farms just getting started, with a lot of ongoing research into the future of that. Rather than our company spending more time and money investing in that research, we decided we could temporarily kill two birds with one stone and harvest Asparagopsis in parts of the Mediterranean where it’s an invasive species wreaking havoc on some natural ecosystems.
We thought we could create partnerships with environmental task forces overseas that are already looking to remove Asparagopsis from those areas, as well as with local divers. We would pay them to harvest it and ship it back to the United States, where our scientists would process it. To be clear, Asparagopsis is causing real harm in those invasive environments — it creates behavioral feeding issues in some invertebrates and releases bromoform into the marine environment, which is toxic to submarine life. We acknowledge that as research progresses and someone does find an efficient way to farm Asparagopsis, it may no longer be cost-effective to import and hand-harvest it. But hopefully by that point, we’ll have made a real impact on the Mediterranean ecosystem as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:47
Another element of your idea was to focus on large cattle feeding operations — CAFOs, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations — compared to small farms, to make your initial impact and prove the product’s efficacy. Why not start with a small farm and actually measure and reduce their emissions? I’m curious about your thinking there.
Kai 25:11
That’s a really good question, and we went back and forth on it for a long time. During our initial presentation, we actually said smaller farms, and then we revised that multiple times. I do see the argument for starting with smaller farms — you could test it out, see how it works, and change your approach if needed. But with our MVP being so achievable, I think jumping straight to the large corporate farms could be a pretty valuable move.
Ellie 25:42
Part of our reasoning for targeting bigger corporations is that smaller and family farms are a lot more likely to try this simply because they’re less profit-driven and more invested in the craft of farming. We didn’t want to take the easier path. Large corporations aren’t keen on spending extra when they don’t need to, so bringing them the research on potential feed efficiency improvements would be meaningful — and they also simply have more cattle, so the emissions impact is much greater.
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:28
So you found that using the Asparagopsis oil might actually mean you have to feed the cattle less, saving farmers money in the long run?
Ellie 26:38
Yes — the research is still ongoing, but scientists are suggesting that because the bromoform inhibits methane production, the energy that used to be wasted as a byproduct of that process could instead be redirected into feeding energy. It’s still being investigated, but if confirmed, it would create a meaningful financial incentive for farmers on top of the environmental benefits.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:10
You have a slide in your pitch called Why This Matters, pointing out that we are in the process of breaching the 1.5°C threshold right now, which increases the urgency of reducing emissions. Cattle methane is a significant source, at around 14% of annual emissions. How do you respond to people who say the real answer is just to stop eating beef altogether?
Zara 27:34
I think we would respond by saying that beef and dairy are a huge staple in many communities’ diets. I’m not a vegetarian, and a lot of people rely on dairy products to feed their families. Cows also provide natural fertilizer, which is often overlooked.
Ellie 27:58
I do think the over-consumption of meat and dairy products is unsustainable as it is right now, especially with factory farms. Maybe one day we’ll be able to consume less beef and dairy or diminish factory farm herd sizes. But I also think it’s easier for people to add things to their lives than to take things away. If all farms used Asparagopsis — not even as a marketing strategy, just as a standard practice — we would virtually eliminate cattle’s effect on the climate from enteric fermentation. And I think it’s ultimately up to the consumer. For most of them, it’s easier to wrap their head around buying a piece of beef with less methane output than giving up steak forever. Reducing herd sizes would also take too long to implement, because it would drastically reduce profits for farms that depend on that income.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:04
That’s a fair answer, and it’s a debate that’s going to continue for a long time. As you talk about your access to information and research, I’m really impressed with how much you know. But I wonder — what’s your perception of your ability to find out anything in this world? When I was your age, the likelihood that any of this information would have been available at my local library was very low. You can get on your computer or phone and find this information instantly. Do you have a sense that anything is discoverable and anything is possible if you just find the information you need?
Ellie 29:44
I think it’s a great tool that we have access to so many of these sources, because — drawing it back to this specific example — this research has been out for nearly a decade and almost nobody knows about it, even with the internet. And it makes you think: if we didn’t have the internet, how much less would it be known? We probably wouldn’t even be developing this product, because it wouldn’t show up anywhere we’d find it. I think internet access is really moving science forward by making more people’s work findable. But it can also be dangerous if you’re reading the wrong things.
Zara 30:35
Going off Ellie’s point — on the internet, you don’t know how many people are actually seeing the same document you’re seeing, or whether they’re trying to solve the same problem. So I also think a good research approach involves direct, physical conversations with someone who’s been directly affected by or connected to the problem you’re trying to solve. Those firsthand experiences bring in sources directly from the source, and that allows you to see what people have actually lived, rather than just what the internet describes.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:36
You’re going to continue your educations, and I’m curious: do you think higher education, the way we traditionally think about it, is the right path for you to keep making progress toward a positive impact on the world? What are your thoughts on your next steps?
Ellie 32:04
Kai’s the next one going to college.
Zara 32:06
Yeah, he’s the one.
Kai 32:08
I’m obviously pretty interested in entrepreneurship. This fall, I’m going to Haverford College. I want to continue doing projects like this, where I’m trying to solve a problem. And I think it’s important to know that it’s not just the knowledge itself you’re gaining, but also the mentorship networks and the environment where people are constantly pushing you to think more and think bigger.
For me, the goal was to combine traditional education with hands-on experience — exactly like the Shark Tank program. This project wouldn’t have happened without the mentorship we had. David, our teacher and mentor, was such a great guide. He walked us through all the steps. I went into this literally knowing nothing about entrepreneurship, and by the end I felt like a pro — like I could walk someone else through building their own business step by step. Having someone constantly challenging your ideas makes a huge difference.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:11
It sounds like the experience of learning is what’s most engaging for each of you. Is that right?
Zara 33:19
That’s fair, yeah. Our school really prioritizes experiential education, which is what the Cascades program was designed to do — we got to go visit local businesses and see how they were actually operating. That played a big part in letting us retain so much information, because we got to see how things worked in practice. And as Kai said, David always challenged our ideas and always gave us something to think about, which really pushed us to want to discover more and make the idea even better.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:56
What’s your advice for adults? What would you recommend they do to unlock all of this knowledge you have and give you a shot at changing the world? How can adults help you get there faster?
Ellie 34:10
Well, everyone always says kids are the future, which is true. But when people say that, it sounds like they’re saying, “Okay, let’s wait 20 years for some kid to do this great thing.” Adults are still in power, and kids are always coming up with newer ideas and fresh perspectives. That’s genuinely great. But without adults using their power — in government, pushing for new legislation, or just supporting these ideas in practice — a lot of these ideas won’t get off the ground. Adults have experience that these kids don’t. If they use that experience to advocate for young people’s ideas and make them more widespread, that would really help get them off the ground.
Zara 35:07
I agree with Ellie on that. Kids are the future, but why would you wait 30 years for a problem you could solve today if you just helped a kid out? We can definitely come up with great ideas, but we can’t execute them without adult support — parents, ultimately, have the final say. If we had a joint team effort with everyone working together, it would really help take big ideas to the next level.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:42
Multi-generational solutions are where we need to go. How would you change school? Would you make it more like adult life? Or more like childhood used to be, before students had to work 24/7 to impress parents and get good grades?
Kai 36:01
I mean, personally, I would love to be prepared for what I’m actually going to do in the future. But I also understand the value of letting people creatively express themselves, and a lot of that involves experiential learning — at the Bush School, that’s really highly valued. You’re always trying to solve problems on your own, not relying on someone else to hand you the answer. I think that’s very valuable.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:25
The Bush School is a remarkable environment. It does allow you to stand up and do your thing, and that’s a great model for the rest of the country’s educational system.
Zara 36:35
We’re all very grateful to be able to attend this school.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:38
What’s one thing that each of you learned during this project — whether about climate science, business, or entrepreneurship — that surprised you or changed the way you think about our potential to build a sustainable world?
Zara 36:50
I think the biggest thing for me was learning about scale in business. We start with these small ideas, but if we can scale a product, it can reach bigger communities and bigger levels. MooBlue is about creating a more sustainable atmosphere by reducing methane emissions from cattle. That’s a good idea, but an idea needs to be scaled and taken in steps to actually be achieved. If we could get it in front of people with more power than three students, that would take it to the next level. Scale is the big thing I learned.
Kai 37:47
For me, it was the importance of aligning incentives. At the beginning, I personally assumed that if something was a good idea and people could easily see its value, it would naturally become a successful product. But that’s not how it works. As we got deeper into the project, we realized that adoption only happens once it also makes financial sense. It kind of shifted how I view entrepreneurship entirely.
Ellie 38:16
For me, drawing it into the climate science aspect of your question: doing research into the sustainability side of science has really opened my eyes to just how much work has been done to create environmentally conscious solutions to some of the most pressing environmental issues. The discovery of Asparagopsis as a viable way to reduce methane is great research, but as I’ve said before, it’s essentially nothing if we fail to implement it. Sustainability will continue to build momentum, but only with the help of business owners working to implement it and make it achievable for ordinary people.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:51
Y’all have done such an amazing job, both on the pitch and in this conversation. Thank you so much. So — is MooBlue going to be a world-changing effort? Are you going to stick with it?
Zara 39:04
One day, we’d love to see meaningful methane reduction in the atmosphere. We’d have to talk about it as a team, but I think it would be incredible to see that happen.
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:19
Well, thank you so much for your time, guys.
Zara 39:23
Thank you so much for having us.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:30
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Zara, Ellie, and Kai Aizawa, co-founders of MooBlue, a business concept developed as part of the entrepreneurship program at the Bush School in Seattle. Their idea — harvesting Asparagopsis, a methane-suppressing red seaweed, and processing it into an oil-based cattle feed additive to reduce emissions — is serious climate tech by any measure, even if its authors are still a freshman, a freshman, and a senior in high school.
What struck me most in this conversation is how clearly these three students understand the full shape of the problem they’re trying to solve. They didn’t arrive at Asparagopsis by accident. They found peer-reviewed research from UC Davis, James Cook University, and the National Institutes of Health, synthesized it, and then built a go-to-market strategy that accounts for farmer incentives, consumer psychology, supply chain logistics, and competitive intellectual property dynamics.
The clarity of their problem framing — that a scientifically validated solution has existed for nearly a decade and simply hasn’t been implemented effectively at scale — reflects the kind of systems thinking that is usually hard-won in adulthood, not assumed by people who are still learning to drive. And Zara, Ellie, and Kai’s understanding of the role business can play in bringing scientific ideas to life is a challenge to the idea that profit will always win over positive outcomes.
Ellie put it precisely: you can have policy and you can have research, but if nobody is working to connect them, the problem doesn’t get solved. And Kai came to the same conclusion from a different angle — he started with the assumption that a good idea would naturally succeed, then learned through the project that adoption only follows when incentives are aligned for everyone in the chain, from the farmer’s feed costs to the consumer’s sense of agency at the grocery store. That insight is one that a lot of experienced entrepreneurs are still working out.
Starting with the problem rather than a solution in search of a problem is the best first step when launching a company. And our conversation about media and information access was the most encouraging segment for me, and I think the most consequential.
The Shark Tank format was familiar; it’s a model that equipped them with tools for presenting and pressure-testing an idea, and it clearly shaped their intuition about what was fundable and what a good pitch looks like. But the deeper point is that the internet has done something extraordinary to the ceiling of what a curious teenager can discover. When I was their age, the journals containing this research would not have been available at my local library. They would have been at a university library, if they existed at all. Most of these journals are a product of the internet.
Today, a high school freshman in Seattle can find a paper out of James Cook University, understand the biochemistry well enough to explain it clearly, and identify white space in the competitive landscape, and then think about building a company around what she found. That changes what a generation can imagine, expanding the scope of what’s possible for all of us, and it can give us genuine hope in the climate era.
I think Zara, Ellie, and Kai are living proof of that. The harder question, which they answered honestly, is what it takes to close the gap between discovery and impact. Their answer: adult support, legislative leverage, and the willingness of established businesses to act on incentives that align sustainability with profitability. These are key to thinking about the future of our circular economy, our sustainable economy, and human life.
Kids are the future. And as Ellie challenged us: why would you wait 30 years for a problem you could solve today? That’s not being naive. That’s exactly the kind of impatience we need. Adults can step up and help these kids make the changes they imagine. After all, it is a multigenerational challenge that we face, and we’ve left the world in a state that’s going to take generations to repair.
So stay tuned, and I hope you’ll take a look at our archive of more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear — perhaps sharing one with your friends. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform helps your neighbors find us. You’re the amplifiers that spread ideas and create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: The MooBlue Team Keeps The Beef, Without The Burp appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-the-mooblue-team-keeps-the-beef-without-the-burp/
Most baby items contain a lot of plastic: Plastic rattles, plastic bottles, polyester clothes – and yes, plastic diapers.
But plastic materials can emit phthalates which can potentially disrupt the endocrine system and be detrimental to human health. Phthalates are mainly used as plasticizers added to polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics for a softening effect.
This post was sponsored by Kudos. All thoughts and opinions are my own; for more information, please see my disclosure policy.
For babies, phthalates can lurk in items like teethers, squeeze toys or bath books. And the problem lies when baby goes to suck or chew on these items, or puts their hands in their mouth after handling them. Even just crawling on the floor where dust and synthetic carpet fibers are can increase exposure.
Babies are especially sensitive to harmful chemicals because their bodies and brains are still developing. According to a recent study, children’s exposure to phthalates adversely affected their levels of reproductive hormones, anogenital distance and thyroid function.
Unfortunately plastic can be hard to avoid with a newborn, especially with disposable diapers needing plastic to be efficient. And being a new parent is already hard enough without tacking on shame or guilt.
However, there are steps you can take to reduce baby’s plastic exposure. You don’t have to do all of these, but even trying just one non toxic swap helps!
rethink your diapers
Many diaper components are made up of plastic, giving it that waterproof quality mothers need to get through the day.
Reusable cloth diapers are a great option, but they’re not always accessible due to how expensive they are. Plus, not everyone has a laundry machine in their homes, making washing them more challenging. And if you utilize daycare, some centers may not accept cloth diapers due to concerns about sanitation and storage space.
Disposables tend to be cheaper and easier to find, but they’re not all created equal. It’s best to prioritize brands that minimize the amount of plastic in their products.
That’s where Kudos comes in, the first disposable diaper brand with a 100% cotton liner. To be clear, Kudos still have plastic in them (like all disposable diapers), but they’re the first to switch out the plastic topsheet (i.e. that inner liner of the diaper) for cotton. The liner matters because it’s the part touching your baby’s most sensitive area.
Their U.S. sourced cotton is dry processed without water, chemicals, or process heat. This ensures it’s breathable and hypoallergenic for baby.
Best of all, Kudos was designed by a mom (and an MIT engineer) who understands no one wants their baby exposed to harsh chemicals. For that reason, the brand’s diapers are made without lotions, fragrances, natural latex, parabens, and phthalates.
On top of this, Kudos are OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 certified, use FSC certified wood pulp for their cores, and are Totally Chlorine Free (TCF).
Lets break down why each of those matter:
- OEKO TEX STANDARD 100 certified means every component of the product has been tested for harmful substances, and found safe for human health.
- FSC certified wood pulp means the wood pulp Kudos sources for the core of their diapers comes from sustainably managed forests.
- Totally Chlorine Free (TCG) means there is no chlorine used to bleach the diapers (a process done to make diapers appear whiter and cleaner). Chlorine bleaching leaves behind toxic residue or chemical by-products called dioxins which the World Health Organization (WHO) warns can harm children’s reproductive and immune systems.
Plus, Kudos diapers are designed for strong overnight performance with award-winning and patented DoubleDry absorbency. Aka, two absorption layers instead of the usual one, allowing for 12+ hour absorbency! Comfort without sacrificing efficiency.
RELATED: 7 Best Non Toxic Diapers For Babies
be selective with toys
Many baby toys, from rattles to activity toys, are made from plastic. Most babies explore the world by putting things in their mouths, so it’s important to prioritize plastic-free toys when possible.
If you can, choose toys made from wool, natural fabrics, or natural rubber when possible. Some examples include cotton plushies, wooden play blocks, and natural rubber teethers. For plushies, just make sure the insides are also stuffed with natural materials (like cotton or wool), instead of plastic foams.
For tummy time, try to use non toxic tummy time mats and play gyms. Even just using a soft natural fiber blanket works. Lalo and Lorena Canals both create play rugs and mats made with polyester-free materials.
For when baby gets a little older, it’s also a good idea to rethink other art supplies too. Many crayons, paints and markers contain plastic and other synthetic ingredients. Try to look into beeswax crayons and plant-based paints when possible.
You can make edible fingerpaint for six month olds using cornflour and natural food coloring. That way, if baby gets any in their mouth, it’s no problem!
Woodlark also has some wonderful natural DIYs safe for kids, like homemade chalk and naturally dyed playdough. These DIYs are suitable for slightly older children, so it can be good to save for later down the line.
choose natural fibers
Many baby clothes are made from synthetic fabrics like polyester, rayon blends, and fleece. These are man-made materials, aka plastic, and not natural fibers.
Whenever possible, opt for better fiber options, such as organic cotton, hemp and wool. Check thrift stores and clothing swaps to cut down on costs and give clothes a second life (babies grow fast after all).
Train yourself to look for certifications like GOT (Global Organic Textile Standard) and OEKO-TEX, as this ensures fewer chemicals were used to treat the clothes.
Try to avoid confusing labels such as cotton blends (usually a mix of polyester and cotton), soft touch/ultra soft (refers to finishing processes), and bamboo (heavily processed through chemicals).
Obviously, people are going to gift baby a ton of clothes. So if you can’t fully avoid synthetics, make sure to wash it before first wear using gentle, fragrance-free detergent. And immediately replace once the fabric tears or shows signs of break down.
This also pertains to rugs and baby blankets: Whenever possible, try to choose natural fibers like cotton or wool over synthetic materials. This will further reduce baby’s exposure to microplastics.
don’t heat up plastic
A new study shows that plastic baby bottles, when heated or shaken, release microplastics into the liquid. Because of this, bottle-fed infants around the world may be consuming more than 1.5 million particles of microplastics per day on average.
Consider switching to glass baby bottles if you can. If that’s not an option, rethink your bottle preparation routine. Try heating up formula in a glass container, letting it cool, then transferring it to a plastic bottle.
Avoid using the microwave to heat up both breastmilk and formula, as this can lead to pockets of superheated water next to the plastic, triggering more microplastics to shed.
If you’re up to solids, consider making your own baby food and storing them in upcycled glass jars you can reheat without issue. Just steam or boil fruits and vegetables, then puree them in a blender before transferring them to airtight containers (ideally glass).
For your sanity, you can also consider freezing homemade baby food in silicone molds, then reheating on the stove in a pot. Souper Cubes makes 100% FDA food-grade silicone molds and their ‘cookie tray’ is perfect for freezing breastmilk or solids in small increments. Their lids are also BPA-free.
So, how are you reducing baby’s plastic exposure? Let me know in the comments!
And, a huge thank you to Kudos for sponsoring this post. Be sure to visit Kudos.com to get their hands on their 100% plastic-liner free diapers!
The post Tips For Reducing Plastic Exposure With a Baby appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: IFT’s Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science
About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.
Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn’t carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all “processed,” and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We’re not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.
To learn more about IFT’s work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe (0:09)
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about food. Food is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, and the climate is now responsible for a growing share of what happens to our food. Food systems face dramatic challenges. Droughts are reshaping olive country in the Mediterranean. Warming oceans are increasing the frequency of shellfish pathogen outbreaks. Hurricanes are taking out manufacturing facilities. Sea level rise may flood key ports where food flows, and fluctuating precipitation is driving mycotoxin contamination in crops. And that’s only a partial list.
The food system must feed 8 billion people while the conditions it was designed for are unwinding underneath it. Meanwhile, the public conversation about food and climate gets stuck at the two ends of the chain: agriculture on one side, consumer choice on the other. But our guest today wants us to pay attention to what happens in between—the processing, packaging, distribution, and storage that turn a fall harvest into something you can eat in February. That middle segment is where a quarter century of food science meets the climate problem, and where most of the practical levers actually live.
Brendan Niemira is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a Chicago-based scientific association that has served as the voice of the global food science community since 1939. Its 200,000-member network spans academia, government, and industry. He stepped into this role on December 1, 2025, after more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, where he led a team of more than 30 scientists, engineers, and students developing tools to kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish.
Brendan’s specialty is non-thermal food safety systems that use cold plasma, high-intensity monochromatic light, irradiation, and pulsed light treatments to disinfect food without cooking it. He’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds patents on the technology, and the 2024 citation rankings place him in the top 0.01% of food scientists worldwide.
Brendan joins IFT at a moment when food science is being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, climate pressure on supply chains, food safety, and resource efficiency is intensifying—the subject of IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap for circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, food waste valorization, and emerging technologies like cellular agriculture and precision fermentation—that is, growing food in vats.
On the other side, the public and political conversation about food is fixated on ultra-processed food, and the MAHA Commission—the Make America Healthy Again Commission—frames processing itself as the central problem rather than part of the solution. IFT has been one of the loudest scientific voices arguing for definitions grounded in nutritional quality rather than processing intensity. That’s a position that’s both scientifically defensible and complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes much of the food industry.
So we’re going to talk with Brendan about what the climate case for a redesign of the food system is, what IFT’s recent white paper does and doesn’t quantify, and where precision fermentation and cellular agriculture actually stand in 2026. We’ll also look into why food safety remains under-researched within climate science, and how IFT is navigating the MAHA debate. To learn more about IFT’s work, visit ift.org; the white paper we’ll be discussing is available there as well.
The climate fight runs through the food we eat, but most of the action is happening in the part of the supply chain that nobody sees. So let’s find out what Brendan Niemira sees right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Brendan. How are you doing today?
Brendan Niemira (4:46)
I’m doing great, Mitch. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe (4:49)
I’m well. It’s a beautiful morning here in Southern Oregon, and I’m excited about this conversation. You spent 25 years at the USDA. What does the food system look like from this new vantage point at IFT? How’s it different from the perspective at the lab bench?
Brendan Niemira (4:59)
Well, first let me say that I really enjoyed being a scientist for the USDA. There were a lot of great scientists working at the USDA, and I was absolutely proud to be one of them. Even with the recent losses, there are great scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts in different areas of the federal research continuum. The research done in those labs remains a crucial part of the overall science landscape for the US.
My work as a food microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service was focused on food safety and advanced food processing technologies—again, to improve food safety and extend shelf life. Now, as the Chief Science and Technology Officer for IFT, I get to engage with all of the technical areas of food science: microbiology, chemistry, sensory science, sustainability, food laws, and regulations. I also get to engage in the larger space around advocacy and science communication. I get to work with colleagues across the whole food system—all the way from primary producers like farmers and ranchers, to processors, product developers, all the way to nutritionists and retailers. So I get a much bigger-picture view.
Mitch Ratcliffe (5:56)
When you think of it from that perspective—from the industry side—what do you think the key issues we need to consider as a nation are in our food system as it stands today?
Brendan Niemira (6:08)
Food has to be safe, healthy, and wholesome, but it also has to be available, it has to be sustainable, and it has to be the kind of food that people will want to eat. It doesn’t matter if you produce something that’s super healthy and even super affordable; if it doesn’t meet the cultural needs of what people want to eat, if it doesn’t meet their expectations for how it looks, how it tastes, how it performs in their lifestyle, then it’s going to stay on the shelves, and all that science that you did to produce this product is not going to be any good, because it’s not going to provide any nutritional benefit to people.
Mitch Ratcliffe (6:43)
IFT draws a sharp line between food processing—what you do to the ingredients—and food formulation, which is the ingredient list itself. Why does that distinction matter, and why has the public conversation lost that distinction?
Brendan Niemira (6:56)
Well, we draw that distinction because if you take either one of those aspects alone—just the ingredient list, or just the ingredient processing—neither one is going to give you a complete indication of the healthfulness or the nutrient value of the food. If you use either one just as a simple shorthand—you say, well, there’s a certain thing on the list of ingredients, or a certain thing was done to that stuff—you miss the mark. You’re going to have to take both of them into account to look at the total healthfulness of the food.
Part of the issue with the public conversation is that, frankly, it’s a little bit more straightforward to give short, simple messages about which foods are healthy and which foods are not. Look for this ingredient, or look for that processing step, and it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The fact that it’s simple is true, even if those short, simple messages don’t give a complete or, frankly, a fully accurate picture. Food is more complicated than that, and complicated stories are harder to tell.
Mitch Ratcliffe (7:53)
Our dialogue is, let’s just say, relatively simplistic right now. Are we diverging from the real issues we need to be exploring as a nation when we talk about the MAHA concerns?
Brendan Niemira (8:05)
Science communication tries to make complex issues of science and nutrition, nutritional availability—even getting to things like cultural tolerance, cultural acceptability, economics, and all that sort of stuff—it tries to make these very complex issues understandable. Not everybody is a nutritionist; not everybody is an economist. People just want to be able to get food that they want to feed their family. They want it to be safe, they want it to be healthy, they want to be able to afford it, they want to be able to provide for their family, and they want to be able to enjoy it.
Food is about more than just nutrition. Food is about culture, food is about satisfaction, food is about joy. Those are things that simple stories can speak to, but the science behind this can be very complicated. So it’s the job of us here at IFT, and the job, really, of all science communicators, to take these complicated issues and present accurate, factual, complicated science information in a way that people can understand, and that they can use to make decisions on.
Mitch Ratcliffe (9:08)
Having written about technology and sustainability and a variety of things over the years, I find that one of the challenges is that experts resort to their jargon, partly because it’s shorthand—it makes it easier to say something to somebody else—but it relies on an understanding of that jargon. Are we at an inflection point? I hate to put it this way, but is Bobby Kennedy simplifying this conversation in an important way?
Brendan Niemira (9:36)
This is why science communication is a distinct discipline. You can be a terrific microbiologist or chemist or toxicologist or nutritionist or economist, but if you’re not able to communicate to people outside of your discipline, then you run the risk of miscommunication, where you’re trying to say something but you’re just not communicating accurately. And unfortunately, you also set up a situation where people can take what you say in your good-faith effort to explain it properly, take a word here or a sentence or a phrase, and things get misunderstood or taken out of context. When people draw conclusions from material that is misinterpreted, then base decisions on that, or policies based on that, you can get to a point where the science is over here, the communication is in the middle, it gets a little bit muddled, and then policies arising from that are based on something not directly related to what the science is actually telling you.
That’s why we try to support good science communication and try to give people tools to communicate the science. At IFT we bring a lot of different scientists together in different disciplines, and we try to give them the tools to make sure that people are understanding their science and connecting on it appropriately.
Mitch Ratcliffe (10:56)
I think that’s a really important point: that we need to create full access to the conversation, so people who want to dig in further can go further and learn more, in order to deepen their understanding of the decisions they face, either as a consumer or as a policymaker. I’ll just give a quick shout-out to ift.org. We have lots and lots of information—some of which is intended for scientists, technicians, food scientists, and food technologists, and is very jargon-heavy—but we have a lot of information that is intended for the general public to consume, and that is intended for decision-makers in industry, academia, and government.
A moment ago, you talked about the food system needing to be sustainable. A recent meta-analysis found that processing, packaging, transport, and retail steps in the food process account for just a modest share of the overall greenhouse gas footprint of our food system—farm production and distribution account for most of the rest. If most of food’s climate damage is upstream, how big a sustainability lever can processing innovation actually be? Can we really lower the overall impact of our food?
Brendan Niemira (12:03)
Well, you’re absolutely right, a lot of the impact is on primary production, and that’s why people are also working on reducing the carbon footprint, water usage, and overall sustainability impact at the primary production stage: farms, ranches, fisheries. If you go talk to groups like the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Meat Science Association—all those folks—they are working hard. They’re doing all of that science to develop and implement ways to improve sustainability in terms of carbon footprint, water-use efficiency, land-use programs, wildlife setbacks, insect refugia, and a host of other approaches.
Now, IFT does food. We do food processing, food science, food technology. So we are in the center part of that continuum, but we are actively working with those other scientific organizations to support the work that falls under those sectors, the overall food system, and to improve what we can do in processing, packaging, transport, retail, and so on.
Mitch, I would say this is one of those cases where we can’t allow ourselves to be tripped up by the false thinking that if we can’t do everything, then we shouldn’t do anything. Our Sustainable Food Systems interest group is an active and vibrant part of all the food science that we support. There’s a lot of communication between what they are doing and what other efforts are underway in other societies and other parts of it.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:26)
Absolutely—we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress. We have to take important steps.
Brendan Niemira (13:31)
Here at IFT, we’re doing what we can, and we are supporting the other people that are working in their areas as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:37)
When I read the white paper that I mentioned in the introduction, there was not a lot of quantified environmental data, but it seems to me that what you’re saying is that that’s an area we really need to dig into now. How do we do that?
Brendan Niemira (13:50)
It’s by talking to people who are on the ground doing that work. I would not sit back here as somebody who focuses on food production and food science and go talk to a soil scientist and tell them what to do, or what they should be doing, or what I think is most important in their area. When we’re all focused on the same overall goal of improving sustainability and reducing the impact of how we grow, how we harvest, how we process, how we ship, and how we consume our foods, then we need to listen to each other. There are people who have expertise in lots of different areas.
Our food is complicated. People think, well, there’s an apple on the shelf, or there’s some hamburger in the cooler. Food is complicated—it really truly is. And all of the different people that are contributing in all the different ways, all up and down across the food system, the food continuum—we need to draw on their expertise and get together to solve problems that will work across the entire system. If one person working on just one part of it rolls out a solution and says, ‘Yep, I’ve done my thing, and all the rest of you should change to do what I want,’ then that may not be a usable solution, because it breaks other parts of the system. There has to be a holistic approach.
Mitch Ratcliffe (15:04)
As you say that, I realize how hard it is just to get food from my garden at the beginning of the season onto a plate at the end of the year.
Brendan Niemira (15:12)
Yeah, and that’s encompassing. There are different people who grow different products, different commodities, different regions. You grow different kinds of tomatoes in different parts of the country, and there are different ways of growing food. Even on a very, very small scale, it gets to be very complicated. You have to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge, a lot of different kinds of infrastructure, a lot of different kinds of expertise and equipment, and so on. Plus, you have to comply with different regulations, different laws controlling different sorts of commodities in different parts of the country at different times of the year. All of this knowledge has to come together and be brought to bear on the problem.
Mitch Ratcliffe (15:50)
Again, it’s a huge storytelling problem, but we have to look at this as a system rather than a bunch of separate parts that don’t necessarily interact with everything else.
Brendan Niemira (15:58)
Absolutely, absolutely. It’s all one. That’s why we talk about the food system and the food continuum, because going right from primary production through all the various stages of getting food to you, and then on the back side, taking food waste—say, away from restaurants at their point of sale, point of service, point of consumption—some of those aspects of where the food goes, and what kind of advantages we can gain from paying attention to where those nutrients are ending up.
Mitch Ratcliffe (16:26)
One of the other—and probably the most shocking—parts of the white paper that I read was how our dietary recommendations are being undercut by climate change. For instance, the Mediterranean diet is recommended; it consists of olives, olive oil, tree nuts. But those come from regions that are warming 20% faster than the rest of the globe. How should we think about US dietary guidelines in terms of how climate stress is going to change the availability of food over the course of the next decades?
Brendan Niemira (16:58)
I think it starts with a clear-eyed understanding of what it takes to grow, deliver, and consume food. If you’re saying, well, I’m going to lean into one kind of a diet or another—whether it’s the Mediterranean diet or other specialty diets, either recommended by your doctor, by a nutritionist, or recommended by your own cultural or societal predilections—where does that food come from? Is it grown locally? Is it shipped far away? Does it come from other parts of the country? Does it come from other countries?
And then you have to understand: this is what food costs—not just the money, but in terms of the carbon you’re using to produce the food, the water, the land use. Once you have that accurate information and you have an accurate understanding of what goes into producing the food, then you can start to make some other decisions about the health and nutritional benefits of the food that you’re consuming, or one aspect of it, and then you can make other decisions about the other sustainability parts of how you’re getting your food and how you’re eating it.
Mitch Ratcliffe (18:07)
You mentioned the cuts we’ve seen in federal research recently. As a microbiologist, where do you think federal climate-health research should be focused at this point?
Brendan Niemira (18:17)
My specific work with food microbiology was in food safety, and so I was always very concerned with understanding the risks for human pathogens on foods. Despite the best efforts of food producers, you still do have instances where you have E. coli, salmonella, or listeria on one commodity or another. The way that you respond to that—there’s a sort of three-legged stool of responding to a food safety problem from a microbiology and food safety standpoint.
You can prevent these harmful organisms from being on your food commodity in the first place—that’s called exclusion. That’s where you do water quality monitoring, you do land-use history analysis, you do exclusion activities to make sure that the bad bacteria or viruses or parasites don’t get on the food in the first place.
Then you have containment, which is a monitoring system. That’s where you do continuous testing of foods being produced at the point of production, point of packaging, when they’re in shipping. Sometimes you pull samples, you hold them back a little bit, you test to make sure there are no pathogens on them, and then if you find any, that’s when you do the recalls and the trace-back analysis. Our Global Food Traceability Center at IFT is working very hard to develop protocols so that if we have a problem, we know where it came from, we can trace that back, we can isolate it, and we can contain it.
Then the third leg of the stool is eradication—that is to say, you apply techniques and technologies that will eradicate potential organisms. In one big way, we heat. If you’ve got ground beef, you can cook that ground beef, and you apply a thermal process that kills any potential E. coli or anything that might be on it. Now, heat is one technique, but you can’t apply that to lettuce. That doesn’t really work, which is why my research—and other people’s research—is working on other kinds of processing technologies that you can apply to more sensitive foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, berries, melons, other sorts of more sensitive products. Different kinds of novel sanitizers in the organic space, non-thermal processing technologies, other sorts of interventions that will kill the organism so they can’t cause any harm. So you’ve got exclusion, containment, and eradication, and all these different efforts working together. Those are the kinds of research that you’re going to do to have a good food safety impact.
Mitch Ratcliffe (20:56)
Well, because exclusion is getting harder—because of the rising temperatures globally encouraging the growth of more pathogens, or at least the propagation of more pathogens—it sounds like that’s raising the bar for containment and recall.
Brendan Niemira (21:09)
Yeah. If you find yourself in a situation where one of those things is not an option, or you’re not able to do it as well as you were before, then you lean into the other two. If effective technologies for eradication don’t exist, well, that’s where you need to put some research dollars in to create them.
I’ll give you an example. Years and years ago, we had lots and lots of outbreaks on sprouts. Sprouts were the cause of continuous outbreaks again and again, and research was put into place to find: how can we eliminate E. coli and salmonella on sprouts so they can be as safe, healthy, and wholesome as they can possibly be? But just because we were working on eradication steps does not mean we were ignoring the other two. There were things like seed certification processes to make sure the seed coming into these sprouting facilities is as healthy as it can be. There were containment efforts—let’s do better trace-back analysis, let’s do better testing, so that we know what’s on there, so we can act when we find it.
So it’s not a case of, ‘Well, we’re just going to work on one and ignore the other two.’ You’ve got to have an understanding of what the problem is. You can address all the different aspects of science at once. I would say this is one of the issues that happens when you start to see cuts in science: then you have to start making some hard decisions—well, we’re going to dial back on one and we’re going to keep our remaining resources and put them into one of the others. Maybe you’re leaving yourself in a situation where two years from now or five years from now, you might say to yourself, ‘Darn, I really wish we’d been working on that.’
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:45)
Do you think that the private sector can step into the gap that has opened? Or are we really at a point where we need to seriously reconsider our federal funding for food science research?
Brendan Niemira (22:55)
Private funding—corporate funding—has always been a huge part of food science research. Companies fund their own research, and then there’s funding through grants and consortia funding larger works. Industry funds provide grants for academic researchers, and academic research is a huge part of this. Government research is a huge part of this. And in a time when you’re looking at research funding that is cut or under threat, one of the unwanted outcomes is that there’s research that’s not being done.
Some of our advocacy priorities at IFT include seeing that we want food science research—including food microbiology, food safety, food toxicology, whether it’s chemical toxicology, chemical safety issues, or biological safety issues. We want to see that funding. We’d like to see it increase, honestly, but at least we’d like to see it not cut. Because you can’t have good data without good science, and you can’t make good decisions without good data. So, if you want to be able to make good decisions and develop good policies, you need good data, and for that, you need good science.
Mitch Ratcliffe (24:10)
We certainly have had a foundation of solid data in the United States for the past 50 years. I think we’ve got a great sense of the problems that we need to talk about. Let’s take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to come right back and talk more with Brendan.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to the conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a 200,000-member network focused on food production and safety.
Brendan, let’s talk about bugs. The paper discusses a Costa Rican study where they’re taking a variety of food waste to farm edible insects. What’s the realistic potential for adoption of food made of insect protein in the United States, and is there a path even to regulatory approval for that in this day and age?
Brendan Niemira (25:07)
Okay, here’s the thing. I actually just wrote a book chapter on edible insects and digging into all the ins and outs of this, so I happen to have a lot of this fresh in my mind. There are only a very small number of animals that we can take things that humans can’t eat—like cellulose—and convert. Humans can’t eat grass; humans can’t digest grass or the cellulosic material. Historically, the way that we have made cellulose into something that we can eat is to feed it to an animal and then eat the animal. Right now we do that with cows and other ruminants.
But you can do that with crickets. Crickets have some advantages over cows: they use a lot less space, they have a shorter generation time, so you can be more responsive to market changes, they use less water, they use less energy, and so on. But then at the end of the day, you have this insect protein, and what’s the realistic prospect for that?
I would say that, because of the cultural nature of Western society, Western society does not have a cultural heritage of entomophagy—eating bugs. That’s the Greek word for it. There are other parts of the world that do have a cultural heritage of this, and so they have lower cultural barriers to having insect proteins as part of the diet, either as just edible insects—as a commodity, where you look down and say, hey, here’s a cinnamon-crunch-flavored cricket. These are products that are on the market.
Mitch Ratcliffe (26:44)
I’ve tried these. They’re not the worst thing in the world, but they’re also not something that most people would pop in their mouth at a movie theater.
Brendan Niemira (26:50)
Well, certainly not in the US, and not in most Western societies that derive their cultural heritage from Europe. So if you’re not going to have these things that are identifiable as an insect, could you have insect protein powder as part of an insect supplement? I think these things are still in the market. I’ve tried it. I’ve got insect powder, and—you know, put my money where my mouth is—I’ve made brownies and cookies with cricket powder. They taste like brownies and cookies. It was okay.
As a large-scale process, I think you have to start with the cultural issue and the consumer issue, because if you’re going to make a product that—let’s generalize—very few people want to buy, it’s a very, very niche product. Then you are going to have that process remain a niche process, and so the overall impact on large issues of sustainability, or carbon usage, or moving away from conventional animal sources or plant sources of protein, is going to be kind of limited.
Where you might see much more of a penetration, however, is in taking these insect protein sources and using them as feeds for aquaculture. Right now, fish are not really able to digest soybean meal very well, so you can’t raise fish the same way that you raise cows and chickens. They’re trying to work to breed new kinds of trout, let’s say, that are better able to use soybean meals so you can get some of those economies of scale. But if you can lean into insect protein production, you essentially use the insect farms almost as a kind of bioreactor to turn cellulose—indigestible cellulose—into a digestible form of protein that can then be processed through aquaculture or chicken farms, conventional animal agriculture, that then would go into the human food supply.
I think it is still kind of a long way away, at least in the United States, from a time when insect proteins are going to be a significant or a major part of our daily diet. The FDA rules on insect proteins and edible insects, right now, are that they have to be safe and wholesome. They have to be tested for human pathogens, and so on. These insects have to be in a production facility that is dedicated to that production—they cannot be wild caught. So you can’t just go out into your local meadow and swing a net and start collecting crickets. They have to—
Mitch Ratcliffe (29:30)
They might be contaminated with pesticides.
Brendan Niemira (29:33)
Pesticides, who knows—there might be other pathogens on them, there might be fungi on them, there might be potentially heavy metal contamination. So these have to be grown in a dedicated production facility. The FDA is certainly on the ball in terms of having an understanding of the potential risks for some of these things, and they have put rules in place to make sure that if insects are produced as human food, they adhere to safety rules and regulations.
Mitch Ratcliffe (29:58)
The metaphor of the insect as a bioreactor with legs makes a lot of sense to me. But precision fermentation using bioreactors is another one of the paper’s big bets, and I’ve personally been involved in trying to raise some funding to create dairy proteins using acetate fermentation, which would reduce the need for concentrated animal feeding operations, so dairy’s environmental impact could be drastically reduced. Can you explain how precision fermentation works for our listeners?
Brendan Niemira (30:30)
Sure, absolutely. Precision fermentation is a really fascinating area of research right now. The work that we’re doing with whole genome sequencing and proteomics and metabolomics has just led to opening a whole new chapter in what we’re doing with fermentation.
What is precision fermentation, versus conventional fermentation? People have been fermenting foods for thousands of years, relying on yeast and bacteria to process raw ingredients and turn them into edible foods—everything from beer to bread to kimchi. Those microorganisms only ate certain things, and from a metabolic standpoint, they only produced certain things. They were useful because they were able to break down cellulose and hemicellulose into digestible sugars for humans. They’re able to take food which was not edible or provided very little nutritive value, into things that do provide nutritive value for us when we consume them.
But because it was gathering wild strains—and even after you get into the Louis Pasteur days of breeding new strains of yeast to make better beer—it was still kind of old-school breeding to get better fermentation cultures. Now, thanks to modern food science, we can really dig into the cellular, molecular microbial ecology. I mentioned whole genome sequencing, microbial community metabolomics, and so on. We can specify what metabolite or nutrient we want to produce, and we can design a multi-species microbial ecology that will produce it, and we can do that based on specific inputs.
Bacteria in the wild almost never live alone. You never have one species of bacteria; you have multiple species of bacteria all working together in conjunction with other kinds of fungi, and so on, to produce lots of different kinds of metabolites. Now we have a much greater understanding of that multi-species microbial economy.
The way I like to think of it is, if you imagine Little House on the Prairie, and you’ve got families—settlers—going out into this wide-open space, and you’ve got 50 families in some state, they establish a town, and that town behaves in a certain way. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if you introduce one person that comes in and opens up a church, and now the behavior of the town changes. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if one person comes into town and opens up a casino. If you have a church and a casino, even though they represent only very minor components of the overall population, they create this incredibly complex interaction—metabolomics, consumption, behavior. You get complex inputs, complex outputs.
Up till the last 10 years, a lot of this stuff has just been so complicated, such a black box. We have a good understanding now—a much clearer understanding. So we can take side-stream products from food processing, we can take waste-stream products from food waste, and we can lean into precision fermentation, design communities of microbes, give them the feedstocks that we want, and we can get valuable nutrients out the other side.
Mitch Ratcliffe (33:48)
What can we make?
Brendan Niemira (33:50)
Well, if you want to make lactic acid, you want to make certain kinds of vitamins, you want to make certain kinds of proteins, you want to do conversions of things. There are a lot of things that are useful in the food industry. You can make surfactants, you can make flocculants. Flocculants are stuff that, if you’ve got a bunch of solids suspended in material, you add a flocculant, and it causes everything to clump together and drop out, so you get clean water out the other side.
Mitch Ratcliffe (34:19)
So, to put a finer point on it, we can make both food materials and materials that help us process a variety of things, including our waste.
Brendan Niemira (34:29)
Correct. Absolutely. Flocculants are used very extensively in wastewater production, where you’ve got a lot of suspended organic matter, or you’ve got a lot of other suspended material. You add in some flocculants, all that stuff clumps up, and it drops out, and that really simplifies the process of filtration and cleaning the water, so you can get clean water back into the environment.
From a food standpoint—stepping away from the wastewater stuff—let’s say that you’re producing beer, you’re producing wine, you’re producing yogurt, you’re producing some other kind of liquid product. You might add one of these ingredients to cause oil droplets to remain suspended, or to cause sediments to drop out, or to give you better colors, or to give you different kinds of nutrients, or different kinds of vitamin production. All of these things can be the result of precision fermentation, because we have that understanding of what the microbes are doing, what they’re eating, and what they’re producing.
There’s a lot of research that’s going into this right now to work out those molecular details, those metabolomics details, and the position is to scale it up and then put it through its paces. Let’s get that cost engineering analysis. Let’s scale it up; see what’s it going to cost, where the weak points are, where we need to improve. So that you can then feed into developing a business case around it, selling your product, and working on consumer acceptance to get stuff out in the real world.
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:51)
Going back to simplification: what we’re talking about is that we have been farming as a species now for 25,000 years with macro-level cattle and products. Where we are moving now is micro-scale relationships with nature that allow us to produce our food and other forms of materials and supplies.
Brendan Niemira (36:14)
Right. So in conventional agriculture, let’s be generous—there are 50 species of animals that we use in animal agriculture, and these animals are used to take things that we can’t eat and turn them into things that we can eat or things that we want to eat. You’ve got cows, you’ve got chickens, you’ve got hogs, you’ve got goats, sheep, and so on. But it’s a relatively short list.
If you’re going from conventional vertebrate animals to insects, there are thousands and thousands of species of insects, only a small handful of which have really been looked at for optimization. Each one is capable of metabolizing different sorts of things, they live in different kinds of communities. And when you then go to the microbial world, you’ve got millions of kinds of organisms that you can use, and if you look at the different kinds of microbial community combinations, the numbers scale incredibly—like trillions of different kinds of combinations of microbial communities that you can create and cultivate and use in these bioreactor kind of environments, each of which eats different things and produces different things.
The goal is always to produce food and nutrients and food processing materials that are safe, healthy, wholesome, available, and sustainable. When you start to lift your eyes up to the skies and see all the possibilities out there, it really becomes—I don’t want to say magical, because I’m a scientist—but it becomes amazing to think about all the things that we could do if we were able to lean into the kind of science that would allow us to take advantage of all these different things.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:02)
It is magical in the sense that Arthur C. Clarke meant it: any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic until it becomes normalized.
Brendan Niemira (38:11)
Just imagine that you had some kind of a tank and you put in garbage and you get out gumdrops. Wow, that’s magic. Well, okay, obviously we’re oversimplifying, because there are all the various steps involved in that. But at IFT, what we’re trying to do is bring together all of the different food scientists and food technologists who have the knowledge that will allow us to do some of those things—to increase the food supply, make it safer, make it more wholesome, make it more available, and do it in a way that people can access and that they can have knowledge and confidence in using.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:50)
Another topic in the paper was cultivated meats, and this is something that we’ve had folks on the show talking about several times. In 2013, a burger grown in the lab cost about $300,000, and it’s under $40 today. We’re talking about meat that is coming out of a lab, not something processed to appear like meat. Where’s that technology realistically today? Because that number is 10 years old.
Brendan Niemira (39:16)
It’s getting better. I don’t recall exactly what the latest numbers on that are—whether it’s gone down to $20 or $15 or where it is—but this is one of the big areas of technology that people are looking at. Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted this back in 1955, but actually, I believe it was Winston Churchill who predicted this. I’m trying to remember the quote, but he said something like, someday we’re going to be able to raise chicken legs without having to raise a whole chicken.
Are we there yet? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but there’s been a lot of work that’s been done on this. Cellular agriculture, now, to create meat cells, whether they’re from pork or beef or chicken or fish, to grow these out so that they look, taste, perform, and smell like—I’m not saying like the real thing, because they are the real thing, and this is ultimately what it is, but like conventional, traditional things that everybody is used to.
Part of the work that’s gone into it has been to show that, yeah, you can do this—you can produce these, and they look like a burger, tastes like a burger. But can you do it in a way that’s going to allow you to make that available to people, so that it’s not just a very, very billionaire niche novelty product? That’s part of the challenge, but I think that’s part of the challenge with any kind of food technology innovation.
Mitch, you start in the lab, and you begin with saying, well, is this even possible? And once you’ve demonstrated that it’s possible, then you start to develop that out, and you say, well, how do we lean into some of the engineering stuff to make it realistic, and realism falls in—what people will be willing to buy, from a cultural acceptability standpoint, from their expectation of what food is, how much it’s going to cost, how available it’s going to be, and what are the inputs necessary to create it? That’ll dictate a lot of the overall feel and the overall landscape in which these new products are going to operate.
Mitch Ratcliffe (41:36)
It’s a data problem to a very great degree, and one of the areas the paper goes into in depth is how AI-driven supply chain modeling and various forms of traceability can perform as climate adaptation tools. Where are those technologies actually deployed today at commercial scale that you might be aware of? And do you have any evidence that they’re actually reducing emissions, reducing the overall impact of our food system on the planet?
Brendan Niemira (42:00)
A lot of the AI tools—I can tell you what the AI tools are doing now, and probably by the time this show airs, they might have changed.
Mitch Ratcliffe (42:09)
Obsolescence is an hourly thing today.
Brendan Niemira (42:12)
AI tools are moving so fast. But AI is one of those areas where, if you want to know how much something costs, or how much water you’re using to produce it, or how much of an impact you’re having—being able to go into the data and ask sophisticated questions of complicated datasets is one of the things that AI is very, very good at. It does it quickly, so you can get to: what are the trends, what are the key points, what are the key pain points, where do we need to lean in and do more research and do better, so that we can get a better outcome on the back side.
Mitch Ratcliffe (42:48)
So we’re just beginning in that process, along with the leaps that we’re taking in various forms of fermentation and cellular agriculture. Can you paint a picture of where you think the food system should be in 10 years in order for us to start to transition through the climate era?
Brendan Niemira (43:06)
The food system should be more holistic. That, I think, is one of the things that will make a big difference in terms of our overall ability to respond to issues of sustainability. It encompasses everything that falls under that. Right now there are disparate areas of science and disparate areas of scientific inquiry that are a little bit isolated.
I like to make the joke: if you’ve got an apple on the tree and you’ve got a bacteria on that apple, it’s a plant pathology problem. But as soon as the apple falls from the tree—well, now it’s a food microbiology problem. You need to get the plant pathologist and the food microbiologist talking to each other so they have an understanding of the continuum. I think if we’re going to respond to these large, complicated problems, then we need to have a greater connection between different areas and different scientific disciplines, so that we can adopt and create that holistic approach.
Mitch Ratcliffe (44:04)
Well, IFT is doing a lot of work to articulate that. You mentioned ift.org earlier. How do people follow your work? What do you recommend they do to keep track and keep at the cutting edge, so they understand these things as they evolve?
Brendan Niemira (44:19)
Well, you can join IFT. That’s an easy one. If you go to ift.org, there’s membership information right there. We’re a great group of folks, very active and very involved in all kinds of different areas of food science and food technology. We make a big effort to publicize what we’re trying to do, the science that’s done, the research that we connect. When we have all the different areas—people working within the field of food science come to the meeting and they connect with us—academia, industry, and government members of IFT—when we connect them all together, we publish, like the white papers we’re talking about right now. We do press releases, we do commentary on different things, we engage in media responses, all kinds of stuff. Some of this is kind of hot-button issue of the day, and other times we comment on larger scientific issues—big landscape issues that are going to affect us now and tomorrow, and over the next 20 years.
Mitch Ratcliffe (45:24)
Well, Brendan, thanks. This has been an eye-opening conversation, really interesting.
Brendan Niemira (45:27)
Well, Mitch, I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I really appreciate your having me on the show.
Mitch Ratcliffe (45:34)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, the Chicago-based scientific society that has connected food scientists across academia, government, and industry since 1939. You can learn more about IFT’s work and read that new white paper we discussed, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, at ift.org.
Most of the climate fight in food is happening in the middle of the supply chain, where the public has almost no visibility, and the policy debate keeps looking somewhere else. Brendan described a three-legged stool for food safety—exclusion, containment, and eradication—noting that as the planet warms, exclusion gets harder. That’s because pathogens can travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to. That single observation reframes food safety as climate adaptation work. And it lands at exactly the moment when federal research capacity at agencies like the USDA Agricultural Research Service is being thinned out. Roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, and the people best positioned to redesign safety and efficiency at the processing, packaging, and distribution layers of our food system are being asked to do more with less.
The first idea worth elevating from our conversation is the distinction that IFT keeps insisting on between food processing and food formulation. In other words, the question of what we should do to the ingredients, instead of what’s included in the ingredient list, is critical to the sustainability and health outcomes of what we eat. Brendan is right that the thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach we see in federal decisions these days may drive engagement, but it confuses policy.
The MAHA Commission’s framing treats processing intensity as the problem, and that collapses a category that includes both deep-fried snack cakes and shelf-stable beans, both ultra-formulated soda and pasteurized milk, into grossly simplified yes-no, us-versus-them choices. That’s not what we need right now.
The climate consequences matter. Many of the technologies that extend shelf life, cut food waste, and reduce cold-chain energy demand involve processing. If we regulate processing, treating it as a proxy for harm, we hobble some of the most useful tools we have for cutting the system’s environmental footprint and improving its safety. IFT’s response—to define nutritional quality by what the food does in the body, not by how it was made—is scientifically defensible. It is also, as Brendan acknowledged in his own way, complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes the companies whose products would be reclassified under any new rule.
The second idea I want to dig into for a moment is microbial agriculture as a structural shift in what farming means. Farming in 50 years will be as unrecognizable to us as today’s agricultural system would be to a farmer plucked from 1890, when 43% of Americans worked on farms. Humans had domesticated perhaps 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, and Brendan’s point is that precision fermentation, built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics, opens up access to trillions of possible microbial community combinations. Precision fermentation can take side streams and waste streams from existing food processing and convert them into all sorts of things—dairy proteins, food ingredients, even in water treatment systems.
That’s a circular bioeconomy story, and one that all of you who’ve been listening for years are aware of. It aligns with the case made by my recent guest, Jasper Steinhausen, that sustainability should be a profitability lever, not just a cost center. We have the opportunity to invent entire new industries here, folks.
The third idea is one that we return to most often, and that’s holism—thinking in systems. The climate problem doesn’t respect the disciplinary boundaries that scientists observe every day. The IFT white paper’s call for AI-enabled supply chain modeling sits right at the center of this argument. That’s not because AI is magic, but because the food system data we rely on is fragmented across many actors who don’t currently talk to each other, and pulling that data into a coherent picture is the kind of work that modern LLMs are actually good at.
The critical issue here is that federal research cuts don’t just slow individual programs—they erode the connective tissue between disciplines, and the connective tissue is where climate adaptation has to happen. Innovation is the product of diverse solutions being combined in new ways, and the most unexpected connections often yield the greatest impact. So we need more cross-disciplinary discussion, not less.
The food system is being asked to feed 8 billion people under conditions that it wasn’t designed for, with less federal science capacity, a public conversation that mistakes processing for poison, and a set of emerging technologies that are scientifically ready but culturally challenging—as our discussion about insect protein showed.
So here’s the headline to remember from my conversation with Brendan Niemira: IFT is making the case that food science is climate science, and we’re going to be watching how that argument lands as the MAHA debate continues, and as the 2026 dietary guidelines evolve. Hopefully they won’t mutate too much.
If this episode gave you something to chew on, please share it with someone in your world to make new connections possible. And would you consider leaving a review of Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or any of the other purveyors of podcast goodness where you can listen to the show? You folks are the amplifiers that help spread more ideas to create less waste. And our archive of more than 550 episodes is there anytime you want to dig deeper.
Thanks, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: IFT’s Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science appeared first on Earth911.
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