Hope for Black Farmers, Healthier Plant Burgers, and the Return of the Automat

All Tomorrow’s Kitchens, a weekly series from Future Human, rounds up advances in food and agricultural science, tech, business, and culture bringing all humans closer to a food-secure future.

A new bill could return stolen land to Black farmers

After the Civil War, the federal government promised land to newly freed Black people. This promise didn’t quite come true: Land was often either given to Black people then taken away, or never granted at all. For those that did obtain land, racist policy and white supremacy in the following years made it hard for them to hold on to it. The 20th century saw an immense drop in the number of Black farmers in the United States — down 98% since the 1910s — and only now are lawmakers trying to rectify the injustice.

A new Senate bill called the Justice for Black Farmers Act, proposes to create an $8 billion annual fund within the U.S. Department of Agriculture that would be dedicated to buying farmland and granting it to Black farmers, together with other initiatives meant to provide financial and educational support, writes Tom Philpott in Mother Jones. Lawrence Lucas, president emeritus of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, told Philpott: “This is the Black Farmers Civil Rights Act of 2020, and it’s long overdue.”

Climate change is bringing back deadly mycotoxins

For over 2,000 years, farmers have dealt with mycotoxins, toxic chemicals spurted out by fungi that grow in grains, corn, and nuts. These toxins can have devastating impacts on animals that happen to eat infected grain. Avoiding them means maintaining a relatively dry environment in which the fungi can’t thrive — something farmers had a decent handle on, until recently. In The Counter, Emma Penrod reports a steep increase in toxins common to the U.S. since 2012, which experts chalk up to weird weather due to climate change. Shifts in the climate have allowed mycotoxins to thrive in areas that they hadn’t previously colonized before, and farmers are caught off guard. Better regulation and testing, especially in less developed countries, is crucial going forward — as is making mycotoxin-resistant seed varieties readily available to farmers.

A healthier plant-based burger

One of the biggest letdowns of plant-based meat is that it’s not exactly healthy. As I wrote in April 2019, plant-based meat patties are tasty because they’re packed with vegetable fats to carry flavor and moisture (fat pleases the palate, no matter where it comes from). An Impossible Foods rep told me at the time that since the aim of the patties is to mimic meat, they end up with roughly the same amount of fat and calories, even though they’re derived from plants. But it appears there’s plenty of room for improvement: Beyond Meat, a major rival of Impossible Foods (and potential partner on McDonald’s new McPlant line), announced this week that it was launching two new versions of its plant-based burger. The new patties have 35% and 55% less saturated fat than 80/20 beef, and both have fewer calories (and added B vitamins, to boot). To find out whether cutting all that fat will affect taste, we’ll have to wait for the nationwide launch in “early 2021,” according to a company statement.

Seafood gets the genetic engineering treatment

Scientists are already using genetic technology to adapt cows, corn, and potatoes for the consequences of climate change. Seafood like fish, shrimp, and oysters may be next, writes Erik Stokstad in Science. Though aquaculture has been relatively low-tech compared to agriculture, some companies are now using genetic technology to prepare seafood for changing temperatures and the diseases expected to come with global warming — a worthy investment, given that an estimated three billion people rely on seafood as a primary protein source.

Among the genetic tools farmers are excited about is one known as “genomic selection,” which vastly simplifies the process of finding fish with beneficial traits — nice fillets, big bodies, fast growth, and so on — singling them out among the thousands of other individuals in a farm, and using them for breeding new generations. “This trait improves the bottom line,” writes Stokstad, “allowing growers to produce more frequent and bigger hauls.”

The return of the automat

The Covid-19 pandemic has ushered in the return of the automat — restaurants that eschew cashiers or waiters for coin-operated cubbies that served up food with zero human interaction. (Humans, of course, prepared the food, but they were never seen by the diners). These pandemic-friendly restaurants, which debuted in the U.S. in 1902, lasted through the 1918 flu epidemic, and faded out in the 1970s. They have made a comeback in recent years, with table-mounted iPads replacing order-taking waiters.

A New York-based restaurant called the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is the latest to join the trend, though it takes the zero-human requirement to a whole other level: As the industry publication Restaurant Business reports, the restaurant’s kitchens will be operated using technology from Miso Robotics, the firm that produced the “burger-grilling, french-frying robot” known as Flippy. New Yorkers will likely not be the only ones dining solo: Brooklyn Dumping Shop, which has partnered with a franchise developer called Fransmart, has an eye on expanding to 1,000 locations across North America.