Ideas - What if your favourite food became extinct?

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

It is possible. Flavours have been lost to the past, as culinary physicist Lenore Newman explains. She points to the extinction of the passenger pigeon — a species numbering in the billions throughout North America — as an example. In 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati zoo — and in place of the pigeon, came the industrialized farming of chicken. Newman says we're now transitioning to lab-raised food — a technology capable of pushing a global history of scarcity into one of abundance, all the while easing land usage. She calls it the "food singularity."

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairro.ca.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayy. So welcome, everybody. Thanks to all of you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come and eat delicious food. It's a tough life, but somebody's got to do it. Welcome to taste extinctions. What happens when the flavors with which we are so familiar, start to disappear.

Are there ways of saving our flavors, our favorite foods, as our world warms, as our climate changes, as we extract maybe too much from our environment? This is Professor Daniel Bender, director of the Culinaria Research Center

at the University of Toronto Scarborough, kicking off a pretty extraordinary meal. This is a meal to talk and eat and think with. We begin with a dish of passenger pigeon. As you can imagine, this moment is the culmination of a lot of work done in the kitchen. Where a small but mighty crew spent two days preparing a meal designed to take us back in time to about a century. go. So today we're doing a menu that plays on a sort of a variation on 19th century recipes for passenger pigeon, which obviously is now an extinct bird. So the closest that we have is squab,

which is in fact pigeon, but sort of a fatter and cultivated varietal as opposed to the wild flying passenger pigeons have passed. My name is Dr. Kelsey Kilgore. I am the administrator for the Culinary Research Center and the lab coordinator for our teaching kitchen lab. So we're doing squab, roasted chicken, and then I've sort of done an experimental tofu and mushroom packet as a way of seeing what those flavors might look like in both the sort of recreation of past potential flavors with the squab, and then understanding how that taste profile shifts when we move into chicken, which happened after passenger pigeons went extinct. Have you cooked swab before?

I have cooked squab before, but it has been a very long time. So I'm just going to go pull the squab out. Watch the oven. It's going to be a blast of heat. So I'm just putting my probe thermometer in. Wow, they're beautiful. They look like little chickens. They do look like little chickens, but you can see a different fat profile.

It's quite a sight, Lenard. It is, and the pork on top is a key part. The larding is critical for any of this type. of bird and it was for passenger pigeon as well. This is all inspired by the work of Lenore Newman, physicist, culinary geographer, and guest of honor, who was also with us in the kitchen watching it all unfold. They were quite a dry bird and it's a bit like trying to cook a turkey where you're always trying to figure out how do I make it not be dry. And so all the historic recipes for passenger pigeon, you're always working around that constraint. So wrapping them in bacon, like doing them in gravy, putting butter all over them, anything like that.

All right. Thanks, everyone, for coming out. And today, I want to start with a bird. Her name was Martha, and she was the last passenger pigeon. She lived for four lonely years in the Cincinnati Zoo as the last. last of her kind. And we actually have a word for that. She is called an endling. Completing her day-long arc from the past through the present, into the future, Lenore Newman delivered a talk about taste extinction, how certain flavors are disappearing as the climate crisis deepens. As she looks ahead to the next 100 years of global food supply,

she starts with the endling, Martha, the last passenger pigeon. When she died in the afternoon of September 1st, 1914, surrounded by her keepers, a terrible milestone was reached. For the first time in human history, we watched an entire species die. Something about that really gets under my skin and rattled around in the back of my mind for years, like a feathered ghost, and I ended up right. a book that began with Martha. And I came to realize the end of the passenger pigeon species really wasn't about Martha at all.

It was about nature, humanity, and the food system. The story of the passenger pigeon is a story about us. And I want you to consider this bird for a moment. They weighed about half a kilo. They were about as much as 30 centimeters in length, so bigger than the pigeons you see around you today. The males were very striking patches of copper, blue, gray, purple, the females more subdued,

but they shared the gentle calling patterns of the males, calls no living person has ever heard. Yet their individual, attributes aren't what make them special at all. As a whole, they were the most plentiful bird species to live. Over five billion birds forming huge flocks of millions. They are thought to have made up 40% of North America's bird life at their peak, and they roosted to bear young, covering hundreds of acres at a time, including here in Ontario. And there is a lovely story about Toronto banning the shooting of shotguns directly up in the air to kill passenger pigeons for dinner because of the obvious reason and pellets fell on everyone.

And this law failed the first time a flock flew over because all the policemen went out and started shooting their revolvers at the birds. They were described as living winds, as clouds, as great forces that would be. block the sun for hours or days. And in 1810, Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology, studied the birds in Kentucky and described them as a living darkness, a loud, rushing wind, similar to a tornado. His competitor, John Otto Barham, described the birds blocking the sky as they passed overhead along the Ohio River in 1813 as a three-day dusk. He said the air was literally filled with pigeons. The light of noon day was obscured as if by an eclipse,

the continuous buzz of wings lulled me into repose. Beyond this grandeur, this living wind of birds, we can say something else about the passenger pigeon. They were probably pretty tasty. And they were like the go-to snack. And the indigenous people of North America, of course, did eat passenger pigeons. And from the history of the Iroquois Confederacy, we know that in pigeon years, when the great flock cycled through, groups came together to hunt, process the pigeons, and set treaties in marriages. They dried the pigeon. They smoked the pigeon.

They fermented them in pits to create grease, which they mixed with berries, to make peasant. Dominican. Indigenous groups, though, didn't dent the population, two critical reasons. They didn't kill young birds and they didn't chase them. They waited for them to come. Then settlers from Europe arrived. And some scholars have argued the passenger pigeon really facilitated early settlement of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard because it was a survival food. free protein that could be netted or batted out of the sky. They were shockingly easy to catch and kill. And this is because they were flocking.

That is how they defended themselves against predators. It is when you literally had a million birds sitting in a forest. It didn't really matter if the raccoons picked off a few edge birds. So they didn't develop ways to defend. And at first, settlers didn't really dent the population either. Alexander Wilson wrote that they were served at every roadside tavern, wagon loads of them poured into markets, it was the order of the day to eat pigeons, dinner, breakfast, and summer,

until the very name was sickening. So what happened? Because ultimately, this is a talk about technology. Three technologies doomed the pigeon, the public market, the railway, the telegraph. When a roost was cited, the telegraph conveyed the location to pigeon hunters. A set of cowboys of the sky who followed the pigeon around and were itinerant, and they could move quickly by railway. And they dispatched their halls back to the great markets of the east,

a bit like mining the sky. And this brings us to what knowledge we have about them. Colonel Thomas DeVoe recorded the rhythms of daily life in the markets of New York, gave us some of the only real accounts of what the food system looked like. He was born in 1811 in Lower Yonkers and traveled to New York where he apprenticed as a butcher. But he had a bit of a flare for politics. and the work suited him. He opened his own stand in Jefferson Market

and worked there for 40 years and rose in the market community until eventually he ran many of the markets on the East Coast. And his knowledge was encyclopedic. And these markets understand were infrastructure, critical infrastructure. Funded publicly, they were a one-stop shop for shoppers

who were all often culinary servants, as even the middle class had kitchen help in the prosperous east. They were grand edifice, looked a little like railway stations, and were practical. And you have to understand most homes didn't have refrigeration. So you would literally rent space to keep your butter in the market and send your servant when you wanted butter. And they would go, they would go into the sub-basement and cut off a slight, from your butter locker and then run it back to you. And it had freight elevators, which were a real innovation at the time. It had a separate fish hall with sloped floors so you could just hose it all down.

And an outdoor area for vegetables. And it also had a public bathhouse and laundry works. And you remember, most homes didn't have laundry or plumbing either. So the market was, as markets have been throughout history, a gathering place. And what we know from this world that DeVos left us, he left a book called The Market Assistant, where he documented daily life in these markets with lively details, including some of the only descriptions of what passenger pigeons actually tasted like. And he said that the variety, quality, and quantity of wildflower and birds in the public, Public markets of New York was not surpassed in any city of the world. He was not kidding.

He described a zoo or an edible Noah's Ark. At any one time in New York, you could send your servants to pick up a swan, dozens of types of ducks, wild turkeys, partridges, grouse, pheasant, quail, snipe, plovers, gulls, sandpipers, larks, cranes. I don't even know how you eat a crane, but I mean, it's all leg. But that's not even the full list. So pigeons had this special place. They were prepared in style.

They were the bird of choice of the gilded age. By 1893, the last bird was sold at Fulton Market in New York at a premium, auctioned off. And then they vanished from the place of Manhattan's millennium. elite and they were missed. By the mid-1890s, passenger pigeons were extinct in the wild, and a surprised public began developing theories as to how they could disappear. Farmers overwhelmingly expected the wandering birds would come back, but of course they didn't. People spoke of pigeon pie fondly, yet the sky stayed empty. The last known wild bird was killed in 1900, leaving three small flocks, dwindled to two, consolidated in the Cincinnati Zoo, and then to Martha.

This is so good. Shall we do it a little bit of time? Yeah, oh, no. Oh, I'll try not to for a minute, so you can actually get some recording. But just writ large, a big picture. Just what are we? What are we reliving here as an experience? Think of it as a requiem.

Kind of a, you know, a fugue for lost food. And we live in a fascinating time where both a dystopia and a utopia are possible. And we're living through one of the largest natural extinctions, certainly in the time of humanity, the largest. And it's akin to burning a library. Wow. And when I think about chefs and what they do, they need that biodiversity.

It is at the absolute core of culinary experience. And culinary experience is a part of our soul. It's who we are. It's who our cultures are, our families are. and the loss of these species cuts out pieces of our culture. And we're also reaching a point at which technology can ensure that all of humanity can be fed reasonably and cheaply while preserving nature.

And these two sides are engaged in a struggle that we're living through in real time. Yeah. A requiem. There's an emotion attached to that. Yes, there should be. What is that for you as someone who's interested in extinct food? There is a permanence to it. And, you know, we're a culture that denies death and pushes it to the side.

But of course, it's always with us. But there is something about extinction that is so horrible that for a lot of scientific history, Many scientists simply didn't believe it was possible. They literally believed that if, say, all the pandas disappeared, God would pop up more pandas. The idea that you could take part of creation and destroy it was monstrous. And yet, we started to realize it was right.

And why the passenger pigeon is key is not only did we watch the species go extinct and know it was happening, That was the first time we ever did that. We tapped a resource, exhausted it, and we're left with a hole in our protein portfolio. This is a scarcity narrative, but what happened next is really strange. Who here has eaten a bird in the last week, including the chicken? Yeah. The other side of the culinary coin.

Currently, global bird consumption is over 10 billion birds annually. And I'd like to introduce our little friend, Gales, Gales. The most plentiful bird in existence now, the chicken. There are 19 billion chickens on earth at any one time. We eat 140 million of them each day at least. We actually have no idea how many we eat, but somewhere more than that. This is 20 times the number of ducks we eat, which is the only other bird that's even slightly comparable. In the food system, the chicken conquered all, but they were a minor part of the food system until the start of the 20th century.

In the wild, they don't even flock. They just hang out in trees. So how did they come to dominate protein production? They have a long history. We've raised chickens in small numbers for several thousands. years. Their friendly birds, easy to manage. The Chinese were keeping chickens by 5,000 BC, mostly for eggs. The Egyptians in particular loved chicken eggs. They introduced the real first piece of chicken technology, hatching chambers. Batches of eggs were placed in warm sand and the air was

kept humid and the eggs were turned five times a day. This technology remained a trade secret for hundreds of years. The art of hatching chickens, however, was lost after Roman times. In the middle ages, they were once again just kept in farmyards, a few to control pests, have a few eggs, and they stayed that way, right until the extinction of the passenger pigeon created a giant hole in the market. A 1920s, New Jersey farmwife, Mrs. Wilmer Steele, It's very hard to even find her first name. Doesn't pay to be female in the historic culinary record. She is from Delaware.

She made the first technological breakthrough in chicken mining since the Egyptians. And she discovered that if you fed chickens, vitamin D, much like humans, they can stay inside and not die. They could be raised indoors, including through dark, cold winters. And soon she was raising 10,000 birds at a time. And don't feel too bad for her, she became very wealthy because of her chicken habit. And a new system developed, new breeds were created, feed companies started, mass protein developed. And from all this, an empire of chickens to the point, you can buy one for a couple of dollars at Costco. and we don't often think of the technology required to make that happen.

And the average broiler chicken today that you buy at Costco is five times heavier than the broiler chicken from the 1950s. Now there's a dark side to this. They live short, unpleasant lives, but for better or for worse, technology killed one bird and replaced it with another. And that is the story of agricultural long march of gaming natural scarcity with technology. It's like a race. And this leads us somewhere. Really interesting. We're going to go to the year 1798.

We're one of the most consequential moments of science is about to happen. The publication of an essay on the principle of population. By political economist and cleric Thomas Robert. Malthus. Thomas Malthus was an 18th century English pastor and economist. His ideas about population growth, the inevitability of poverty, and the divine purposes of disaster and disease strike a rather grim tone. But his work was highly influential and shaped some of the most powerful and regrettable movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. His central argument was that population growth, leads to disaster because it outpaces the resources needed to sustain it.

In particular, he argued populations grow geometrically, what we would now call exponential, but agricultural output only increases arithmetically or linearly, as we would call it now, as we add new farmland. The result, inevitable famine, which he believed was a parable directly from God, that we would always know scarcity. However, Malthus was wrong, and he was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. And the story of the passenger pigeon and the chicken helps us understand why. And it is a warning to everyone in the environmental field to always consider innovation.

With the wisdom of 200 years of data, we know, food production also increases exponentially, thanks to agricultural technology and human ingenuity. We are very good at squeezing more food out of less inputs and less labor. In addition, and relevant to this discussion, but I'm not going to go down this road, human population growth is actually slowing, which means agriculture is starting to catch up in a quite stunning way. Returning to our example, it took an entire continent of wild forage to provide the market of a few tens of millions of people with passenger pigeons,

but now much less of the terrestrial commons is needed to produce chicken for everyone. But let's be clear, a lot happened thanks to Malthus and not what he intended. output increased, food got cheaper, and a loud minority really didn't want to believe this. And I will take us briefly to 1968 in the bestseller of the population bomb, which proclaimed that the battle to feed all of humanity is over. And that's Paul Eurek, who went to India and rather than eating a bunch of amazing foods and having a good time, saw a whole bunch of people that didn't look like him and had a panic attack and wrote a book that said,

there are too many people on this planet, we need to do something about it. As recently as 2013 at a conference at the University of Vermont, Erlich assessed our chances avoiding starvation at only 10%. But in the time, since he wrote that book, food production globally has doubled and then doubled again. So Erlich is also probably wrong. But it is really important we understand why and why people keep talking like this.

The idea of scarcity is a powerful one that is rooted deeply in our tradition and our power structures as farmers. I am going to make a bold prediction, which academic shouldn't do, but hey, I'm going to be a public intellectual for a moment. Food production is going to continue to evolve thanks to technological innovations, and will produce more food with less labor, less land, less water, and less material. In fact, will radically exceed the demand for food, creating a potential abundance of cheap, healthy food for all. But let me be crystal clear. This scenario comes with its own problems. The shift will totally change the impact of agriculture on the planet.

it is what my team is calling the agricultural singularity. And to be a little trite, a little tongue in cheek, if the battle to feed humanity is over, we won. Maybe not that simple, as we still have capitalism, supply chains, climate change, all weaving into the story with the specter of fascism, hanging over at all. There's no guarantee productivity games will lead, to better livelihoods for farmers or cheaper prices for consumers.

But one thing we can count on, and measure, which as a scientist I like, because no one can argue with a good measurement, is we are going to produce more food on less land. This leads to the singularity part of the argument. We've reached a point at which technology is advanced, so quickly we'll start to see total land area needed to feed humanity shrink, something we call Peak Farmland. And Peak Farmland is a singularity point in the history of humanity. Lenore Newman, Culinary Geographer, physicist, and Director of the Food and Agricultural Institute

at the University of Fraser Valley in British Columbia. I'll have everyone know that I'm absolutely not going to use the cliche food for thought. But when I attended a lunch with Lenore that was designed to recapture flavors that are now extinct, I soon realize it was a feast for the mind. This is Ideas from CBC Radio 1. I'm Nala Ayyed. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be six. 500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairot.com. Looking for stories about indigenous peoples from across the country? We know where you can find them. Sego, Candice Merkel, Newarkon, Wicholden. Hi, my name is Brett Forrester, and I'm from the Chippewaz of Kedal and Stony Point First Nation. Zanez-Aat-O-Lavran, and I'm Tau-Tan Nation and Takuvers Klingat First Nations.

Creative, engaging, informative. BBC Indigenous, grounded in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. Visit cbc.ca.ca. slash Indigenous. Thank you. That's very sweet. Oh, that's perfect. Thank you very much. Oh, my God. It's much food. This is actually a great segue to what I wanted to ask you. I know you have mentioned this term. agricultural singularity. Can you just give us

the nutshell definition of that? Yes. So it's an easy concept that's almost impossible to measure is for the last 10,000 years or so, we have impacted more and more of the Earth's surface to provide food.

And we've done it very well. To the point that 40% of the Earth's surface is used for food production. Sort of right. Either grazing or crops. And we have now hit the point where technology is advancing faster than the need for land. So globally, we believe that number is now shrinking. The 40%? Yes. And the next 100 years will be dominated by rewilding of farmland because we

literally won't need the food because the global population. is rapidly coming to a maximum. So we're entering an era of agricultural singularity as we speak. As we speak. A lot of people argue we're already there. And I would say if we're not already there, it's close. Now, unfortunately, we're still deforesting in some of the most important ecosystems, mainly the tropics. But that's being balanced by rewilding in the north.

Oh, that's fine. This is wonderful. It's like balsam soup. I love it. Oh, wow. And so, yeah, this is a singular point in human history that changes everything eventually. And it's a little like when I was in California, it was the age where we were trying to figure out what to do with the Internet. Everyone knew it was useful, but they couldn't figure out how, because the pipe was doing. too small. To move a picture

of a cat over the internet, which is how I measure success of the internet, we would take half a day because you're on a copper wire. And the agricultural equivalent of that copper wire? Is the fact that we continually had to

expand our footprint to meet demand. And so we were constantly opening new terrain and stealing it. And having to repurpose it and exhaust it. And we're now in a period we could imagine restoring

massive areas of the planet. Now this is good and bad. I mean, it is obviously good for the environment, for the future of humanity, the possibility that finally hunger will be a thing of the past. But, of course, it has massive implications for rural life.

And the idea of, well, what does it mean to be a farmer in this world? And that is something that would be very interesting. So I guess the natural question that comes up is if we are producing more food than ever in less land or in far fewer blocks of land, then why are there people who are still hungry? Pull up politics.

There's enough food on earth right now to feed everyone. It's just very poorly distributed. A lot of it is wasted. One of the examples I sometimes use is if I go in, in winter, if I go into Whole Foods, I can buy a mango, a fresh mango for about 20 bucks. Like an expensive piece of fruit, I'm not actually going to do it, but it's there if I was rich. That mango was grown on a farm in Haiti where they maybe had one or two mango trees. They picked a ripe mango, put it on a bicycle, drove it to amalgamation center, put it on a truck, drove it to a dock, put it on a boat. Maybe 90% of the fruit is ruined on the way.

Right. You know, the chain is still very long. And, of course, we are still, and increasingly in the throes of war. And these aren't agricultural problems. They're political problems. So the good news. group of people who study maps who feel we've peaked and we're falling and that we are literally now shrinking our agricultural footprint because we don't need to produce as much food. So it is likely

although we aren't 100% sure we've passed this singularity point. And from now on, there will be less farming in terms of area and more wilderness. That's the utopian vision. Now, there are some problems, as there always are. Livestock is a problem. It is 14% of global greenhouse emissions at a minimum, and dairy alone is about 4%. And that's a big problem for a food we probably could get along without, and that large portions of the world's population doesn't eat. So the question that comes up is how do we produce more animal protein and still shrink footprint? And that is a very good question. Well, we could eat plants. I am mostly plant-based. I like plants. They're fine. The world agrees about 50% of the protein portfolio or the total amount of proteins that humanity

eats, 50% comes from plants. Most people forget about that. Beans, peas, legumes, etc. lentils all go into that slice of the pie. However, people still want beef. And you might ask why, well, they trigger umami taste receptors. Our brain loves it when they fire off, has fat. our brain recognizes it as a nutrient survival rule and much to the annoyance of nutritionists everywhere, it is also part of a culture war, but what if protein production didn't require animals? And I want to chat a little bit about one of the tiny drivers of the singularity. And I like using this one as it's very early stage. So we're going to talk a bit about cellular agriculture, or the creation of protein, animal protein without animals.

Two ways that this is done. Either you're growing tissue in a nutrient bath, often on a scaffold, or you're taking yeast and you doing precision fermentation, yeast or bacteria, where you train the yeast to instead of producing alcohol, which, let's be honest, that's a nice product, but you train it to produce other things like fats and proteins. That one is actually in the market, and it's a big part of our world. Precision fermentation produces all of our insulin, for example. It produces all of our vegetable rennet for the most part. So when you eat cheese, you're probably eating a precision fermentation product.

You just don't think about it. And it takes me to salmon in a lap. That's right, salmon, growing in a lab. I ate this in San Francisco. And kind of broke my brain a bit. I mean, it was meat, but it wasn't. It challenges our very understanding of biological kingdoms in how was it fish and yet not fish. But it is animal flesh.

And the fish that the cells come from is still swimming around in Puget Sound. And I know what you're thinking. We were having a nice talk about birds and land. Suddenly we got like Frankenfish. What happened? But I truly believe these new tools in the protein portfolio are as important as the ship from hunting to farming or from passenger pigeon to chicken,

which was also seen as a bit of an atrocity at the time because people at the time didn't want bland chickens that were kept in the dark because they didn't taste like anything. They wanted it to taste like funk, like a pigeon. We don't want it to taste like funk anymore. You know, when I look at this, and I think of what can be done and how this scales,

I see this taking over much the way chicken displaced passenger pigeon, but not right away. It's going to be about a hundred-year bet, but it's going to be very profound. There's an old rule in Silicon Valley that we overestimate the five-year change technology will bring, i.e. fish in a vat. We underestimate the 20-year, 50-year, 100-year change. And if you doubt me, go talk to a blacksmith or an ice harvester or a whaler and ask them how it all worked out.

So you may ask why salmon. I actually have a research project in my group that is in partnership with our local indigenous groups to look at whether they could move into cellular salmon production, partly because salmon is so endangered. And they would love to be able to provide more salmon at scale. And, you know, this is a very interesting point. And it raises fascinating issues, such as who owns the cells that are in my vat salmon? Our local indigenous groups, the Stolo, would say it's them. Or that no one owns it, but they had better have a say in it.

And I agree. And, I mean, I know a lot of you will encounter this issue with plants, with animals, and with genetics. And these technologies really are transformative. And the weird thing is it's so easy to describe. Let's say I want to build a cow in the lab. I take some stem cells. I differentiate them into muscle and fat cells. I grow them in a nutrient bath.

I 3D print them or grow them on a scaffold. I make a burger. Now I have a burger. And when the first of these burgers was made by Mark Post as a bit of a publicity stunt, it cost 100,000 euros to do, I could probably do this now in the lab for about $20. And here's the thing. Can we make a cow cheaper? No.

Cows are getting more expensive as climate change makes it harder to raise livestock. and my burger is getting cheaper. Eventually those numbers cross and all of a sudden I'm going to the cafeteria for my burger probably going to grow in a lab. It just will. There'll still be a market for high end,

but it'll probably grow in the lab. The other thing is for the first time in agricultural history, we're not bound by animals that are easy in that the reason, I mean, there's so many animals on earth. We only tap a few because they're hard. So it's hard to domesticate an animal. We pick chicken because it's easy. We couldn't keep passenger pigeons because you need a million of them to have a flock. Chickens, they're happy. All of a sudden, you wanted a giraffe steak. We could do that. There's a company in Australia called Vow that's doing kangaroo. They're doing a few other tricky things.

the weirdest things I have eaten in my career, I ate a gummy bear made with Macedon DNA. And then I sat and thought about it for days, for just days. I'm like, what crazy world do I live in? And yeah, you can just dial that DNA up in the catalog and order it and make yourself a nice little bit of Macedon and go all cave person. So early days will be interesting to see how it goes, and it may not be the technology that wins. I also recently had a chicken that was actually a mushroom. It was just a genetically altered fungus to taste like chicken. And so once again, the idea of kingdoms is just out the window, and I'm eating, and I'm like, what crazy world is this? Why is food suddenly so complex?

It tasted exactly like chicken. So to be honest, the cellular agriculture people might get out competed by crazy fungus. And that's where we're at. And if you think, well, how much could they really do? Enough is actually producing 10,000 metric tons of mushroom chicken a year, mostly sold in California. They want to scale out until they're producing a cow's worth of protein every two minutes. They measure in cow equivalents. And, you know, if they could do that, they could scale to the

point they're producing five million cows a year, which is actually about 20% of what we would need to replace production. And because it's mycelium, you can evolve it really quickly. So once again, Malthus is losing. Now, this does all depend on that population curve doing what it is naturally doing, which is curving off toward an asymptote. And the nice thing, and to go into physics very briefly, there's a thing called the Jevens paradox, where the more electricity you produce, the more unique, so everyone just builds more gizmos.

Food does not have a Jevins paradox because you only need so much of it. At a certain point, producing more is pointless because everyone's had enough to eat. You've got your surplus. And, you know, right now it looks really bleak here in North America, but there's other parts of the world where this future is emerging. I'm sometimes criticized for sounding overly positive in a very scary world. But to be honest, if we do this right, and if the gains from these technologies are shared, and the cost savings are passed along to consumers, we could see a food system that is much more just and equitable 50 years from now.

And also, I probably won't be alive. So if I'm wrong, well, take it up with someone else because it won't be me. And I do believe these are also part of our climate solutions. They're disruptive, they're transformational. The future protein is a, an open question. The answer or answers will have fundamental implications for life on Earth and our culture and agriculture will continue to reshape the surface of the planet itself. So what would Thomas Malthus say if he was sitting here right now and you told him that we were

on the verge of making more food than ever in far less land than what he would have known? Thomas Malthus owes billions of people a very heartfelt apology for the damage he caused and the things that were done in his name. Everything from the revoking of Elizabethan era poor laws to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. So many things. Now, I mean, Malthus changed the world. He really did. He inspired a lot of the work of Darwin.

However, the degree to work. which he was incorrect, created horrors because he had a lot of power and a lot of say. And he was saying something a lot of people wanted to be true, because the elite need the world to be one of scarcity, because it doesn't matter if you're rich in a world of abundance. There's no benefit to it. I think he would be amazed to find out, and I mean, as a religious man, he might be surprised to find that human ingenuity was a force that surpassed that of scarcity. You were saying earlier that scarcity is a political tool that is in wide use today. What's the answer? What's the retort?

it is hard to know in today's world why people have so much and yet they're still so fearful. And we, I mean, I'm going to go way off out of my usual comfort zone and say, and part of this is in my personal life, I am doing a lot of elder care and end of life care right now. We're a society that denies death, both by pushing it aside. so that we don't see it, to also embracing philosophies that outright deny end of life, you know, in a spiritual sense. And in a world where death is accepted and every day, and you can come to a point of enough.

And that point of having enough really underpins the happy. societies. And when I look at, you know, my family is from the Nordic countries. We're from Finland. And when I go there, what always strikes me is that no one is extremely rich, but no one is poor. I think there's a great moral failure in creating a banquet and not feeling you should invite everyone, because that's the power of it. It's in that sharing. It's a perilous time, but I do like to stay hopeful. Yeah. So human history has been marked by scarcity. What happens when suddenly things change entirely into an era of abundance? It could be very nice. And we can look back through history to see what that looked like. Farming was a long game. And if we looked to hunter-gather societies, they actually lived really good lives. I mean, you know, they could use.

some antibiotics and some things like that. But if you look at hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they were working much less than we are to provide a good, stable life, they had good stable food societies, they tended to be much less hierarchical, they tended to be more matriarchal, and very deeply embedded in community

and much less warlike. You really only see the rise, of these patriarchal hierarchical structures, when suddenly you were farming and you had to physically protect what you were growing. And I think as we move toward having enough, we will start to see dominance of philosophies of enough. And, you know, I think today often,

I look at the strife around the world, but when I'm in the field in say a Buddhist country I see a lot of very happy people with much less than I have and I'm like hang on they seem to be doing quite nicely and they're drinking their tea they got their family they got their farm there's a sense of enough and I could see us moving toward that just what would be what what are the things that it would look like Less work. Yeah. More time for reflection and thought and culture and ritual. More time for long meals.

And I mean, one of my favorite places on Earth is the Mediterranean basin in those blue zones where people live these long lives and very happy lives where at the end of the day, it's not another meeting. It's let's have some wine. And, you know, I always, whenever I do it, it's such like, ah, This would never fly in Toronto that I quit at three and had wine. And I'm like, why not? Why not? Canada's rich.

They can afford to do without me for two hours. I think that mindset can emerge out of these technological changes. And oddly enough, Elon Musk, who I probably disagree with on almost everything, has recently said, money will be meaningless in 20 years. He might be right. Lenore Newman in Taste Extinction, a meal and a lecture at the University of Toronto Scarborough's Culinaria Research Center and at University College on the UFT's St. George campus.

Lenore Newman is the director of the Food and Agricultural Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in BC. thanks to Daniel Bender and Kelsey Kilgore and the rest of the crew at Culinaria Research Center, University of Toronto, Scarborough. This episode was produced by Sean Foley and Greg Kelly. Field recording and technical production by Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Were they about to say something, or can we ask, Can I go one more?

I'm going to eat a bite of this. Yeah, please go ahead. You got it at least. Is it interesting? Is it interesting? Good? That's really tree. Oh, wow.

Now it's really balsome. No, it's kind of good, but also a bit surprising. You know, it is so interesting. We get used to certain flavors. And balsam, it's not on the flavor palette of the every day. Right. And boy, really, your brain's, It's like, what the heck?

Smells like a forest here. What's going on? For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.