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The U.S. military wants troops on the front lines to be able to make their own food using science. Jay Price of member station WUNC reports on the Pentagon's futuristic quest for alternative proteins.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: That thing Napoleon supposedly said about armies marching on their stomachs, it still resonates. But in an age when combat might mean hunkering down for days without a way to sneak food shipments past swarms of enemy attack drones, it's a problem. One potential solution may be the kind of equipment found in a couple of labs at North Carolina State University.
ROHAN SHIRWAIKER: The tanks that you see are what we call bioreactors.
PRICE: Rohan Shirwaiker is director of the university's Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, which researches alternative proteins. He's standing outside a glass-walled lab, gesturing inside at several gleaming, stainless steel tanks about as tall as a person. They look like smaller versions of the tanks. You might see at a brew pub, but surrounded by a lot more pipes, valves and wires.
SHIRWAIKER: The whole environment inside is very favorable to these microbes to either grow themselves to create that biomass to go in food or generate those proteins or enzymes or those other ingredients that you would then use in making food products.
PRICE: Microbes grown in such tanks can be engineered for attributes like high levels of protein and other nutrients, and for taste, or programmed to act like tiny factories producing molecules of useful substances like fats. The Army recently put out a call for proposals for ways to make such proteins. A long-term goal is to foster the development of portable equipment small enough for units on the front lines to create their own food. Nicole Favreau Farhadi is a research chemist for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, the lab that put out the proteins proposal.
NICOLE FAVREAU FARHADI: Basically, we would be able to produce food where and when it's needed. It would be nutrient-dense. And no military in the history has ever had that capability.
PRICE: Farhadi is careful, though, to characterize the idea of food production in combat zones as a long-term goal. The more immediate plan is to use the technology to increase the nutrition density of MREs, the packaged meals that soldiers eat in the field. It's essential, Farhadi says, for MREs to get lighter.
FARHADI: War fighters carry anywhere from 60 to 100 pounds of gear. And every pound that we can remove translates directly to speed, endurance, reduced injury rates. And the conventional, traditional protein sources are very heavy.
PRICE: And smaller, less frequent food shipments would be harder for enemies to target.
FARHADI: Every calorie that has to travel from the continental United States could be delayed. It could be destroyed.
PRICE: Alternative proteins could also provide new options for meatless and plant-based field rations, things that troops have increasingly asked for. And while growing nutritious, good-tasting food in tanks may sound unlikely, it's already being done. Examples include some of the meat substitutes you can find in supermarkets like Quorn, spelled Q-U-O-R-N, which is made from a micro fungus usually found in soil. Insulin, the diabetes drug, also has been made in this way for decades, as has rennet, a key ingredient in cheese. Adam Leman is a scientist with the Good Food Institute, a think tank focused on accelerating the use of plant-based and -cultivated proteins.
ADAM LEMAN: The technology is ready. The infrastructure is small but growing to actually be able to provide these ingredients. So I think these will demonstrate that they're good sources of protein for folks, that they can meet the military specs and that they can be used widely.
PRICE: And maybe one day even be made by the troops themselves.
For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Raleigh, North Carolina. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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