(ETX Daily Up) – For ethical reasons, but also to meet the needs of new diets, experiments with laboratory-grown foods are logically making headlines. What if we imagined that this futuristic technique might also allow us to put an end to our doubts when we are not sure of the harmlessness of a food additive on our health? Take food coloring. Scientists have found the formula to extract plant pigments under a microscope.
Candy pink raspberry macaroons. A peach Bavarian topped with orange frosting. Layered cakes in the colors of the rainbow (or a unicorn, it’s up to you). Many of our sweet recipes wouldn’t look the same without one ingredient: food coloring. Only here, we tend to forget it, but these are not trivial products. These are additives.
Combined with preservatives, some might be the cause of cases of hyperactivity identified in children. In an article published at the end of last year in The Conversation, we also learned that these additives, used by the food industry to boost the color of sweets but also ham, would be likely to induce the development of colorectal cancers. You should know that these substances are generally made from a chemical product derived… from petroleum.
In the repertoire of synthetic dyes, there is the titanium dioxide that pastry chefs use to obtain (among other things) a beautiful white color or to reinforce the liveliness of a color. But, since last February, the European health policeman (EFSA) has decided to ban it in foodstuffs. E171 “can no longer be considered safe, in particular because the effects of genotoxicity, that is to say the ability to damage the genetic material of cells, cannot be excluded for consumers” had indicated the EFSA.
Des colorants “in vitro”, la solution ?
Turmeric to tint a recipe yellow, dry beet slices to obtain a natural red… There are many vegetable alternatives to synthetic food dyes. But it must be recognized that these tricks are not always effective; the intensity of the nuances fading, for example, with the heat of the cooking. A not always conclusive result which explains the reasons why many manufacturers do not use this type of solution. This is what reports to the specialized media Food Navigator Halim Jubran, the president of Phytolon, an Israeli food tech which uses genetics to generate the formation of dyes of a whole new kind.
At a time when in vitro experiments are causing a sensation with their model of cultured meat, the start-up is cultivating yeasts similar to those of a baker in the laboratory before operating a fermentation process and obtaining betalains, pigments plants whose color chart varies from dark yellow to intense purple. The technique sounds like science fiction, but in fact the process would be natural since the yeast cells would spontaneously reject color when cultured. For the time being, the boss of Phytolon says he is working on the production of two colors, purple and yellow, which he mixes to obtain various shades. Its products are expected to be available in the US market next year.
Stimulating the production of bacteria to extract colored components from them is not completely new. The Israeli company Lycored, which markets food supplements, cultivates a strain of blakeslea trispora in the laboratory to extract its beta-carotene, the natural pigment that tints carrots orange. For its part, the American juggernaut Impossible Foods, which supplies Burger King restaurants with vegetable substitutes for steaks and chicken nuggets, relies on the leghemoglobin contained in the roots of soybean plants to obtain a red color.