The restaurateur spoke about the culinary prospects of mold meat

“I think classic meat will become an elite product”

American scientists have grown a cutlet from mold. The experiment cost more than one thousand dollars, so only the experimenters and millionaires themselves will be able to taste the resulting product. However, if you put the production of “mold” cutlets on stream (for example, for burgers), their cost will be significantly lower than meat cutlets. And in general, as MK experts predict, the time is not far off when classic beef and pork dishes will become a delicacy, and the world’s population will switch to surrogates.

Researchers have created a meat substitute from the so-called koji mold (another name for the fungus Aspergillus flavus; it is widely used by the Japanese to make miso soup and soy sauce). By editing genes in the source material, scientists achieved the taste and color of the meat. One of the participants in the experiment was Vayu Hill-Maini, a chef and bioengineer at the Berkeley National Laboratory (USA).

– Such research is not carried out in a vacuum. All this is happening on the basis of futurological forecasts, which indicate that sooner or later traditional natural meat will become an elite product, says Gleb Marach, co-founder of the Joi Team restaurant group.

This is influenced by several factors at once. For example, environmental factors – classical meat production, even at its current volume, has negative consequences for the environment. In addition, there are certain considerations from an animal protection point of view. Plus, the world’s population is growing quite quickly, and at some point livestock farming simply cannot cope with demand, and meat prices will soar. Therefore, all these developments are not just experiments, but our objective and not very distant future.

But the appearance on the market and distribution of such analogues of traditional products will occur according to the opposite scenario, the expert continues. First, people, guided by one or another consideration of animal protection, ecology, interest in new technologies, etc., will try, taste and make this product fashionable. And only after five to ten years will mass popularity of such products be possible.

“I wouldn’t say that people are ready for this kind of “food of the future,” Marach believes. – On the one hand, we all know the experience of Beyond Meat, which several years ago brightly and actively entered the market with such a product as plant-based meat. But now they are not showing the best results, since the product itself has not yet approached natural meat in its properties.

– What unusual dishes are offered in Russian restaurants? Are they in demand among guests?

– Each person has a very subjective perception. For some, oysters or snails are an unusual dish, but for others, they are a familiar part of the diet. Or the same grasshoppers and something similar. There is a huge amount of strange, unusual food in Moscow and in the world. But such food is usually in demand only within the framework of interest in its unusualness. People eat to gain taste and enjoy the organoleptic properties of food. And they try all sorts of unusual things for the sake of interest and entertainment. Therefore, I would not talk about the wide distribution of unusual dishes.