Image by We Animals Media is of a snake rescued from research in a university
I recently did a post on social media where I mentioned a number of subjects which I have observed over the years to be less popular with page followers than others. I can’t remember having posted that type of observation before but many engaged with the post and the responses were interesting and helpful. Some also made it clear that The Elephant will likely lose followers as a result of this blog but so be it. I am nothing if not sincere and I’m not doing this to be popular.
I found myself reflecting on the fact that my writing centres mainly on these areas of exploitation that affect the majority of us, namely consumption, clothing, testing and entertainment and decided that this was a conscious choice on my part. Not only are these areas…
The plan would undo much of the Trump administration’s work that altered the ways habitats of plants and animals on the verge of extinction are kept from total collapse.
A critically endangered North Atlantic right whale takes a dive for plankton in Cape Cod Bay off the coast of Provincetown, Mass. (Jamie Cotten for The Washington Post)
The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to reverse policies implemented under President Donald Trump that weakened the Endangered Species Act, a half-century-old law credited with the recovery of the bald eagle, humpback whale, grizzly bear and dozens of other species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service under President Biden aremoving to undomuch of the Trump administration’s…
It didn’t take long to identify a likely cause. Florida’s community of manatee conservationists has warned for years that water pollution chokes off the sea grass that makes up the bulk of the manatee diet. The problem was now so bad that the underwater pastures in one manatee hot spot were almost completely wiped out.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
An update last week from state wildlife officials captured the full magnitude of the devastation: At least 761 Florida manatees — more than 10 percent of the estimated manatee population — have perished so far this year, already surpassing the total manatee deaths recorded in 2020. The current manatee die-off could top 1,000 by year’s end, experts say, exceeding the recent high of 824 deaths in 2018 and threatening to upend the fragile recovery the species has made.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which works to protect endangered species. “I think it’s fair to call it a crisis. It’s not hyperbole when you see hundreds of manatees dying like this.”
Officials declared the deaths an “unusual mortality event,” which the federal government defines as a significant die-off of any marine mammal that “demands immediate response.” Scientists say pandemic-related reductions on monitoring activity may have prevented researchers from picking up on the problem sooner.
State wildlife commissioners and private groups are considering a suite of potential solutions that range from replanting vegetation to rounding up sickly creatures en masse and rehabilitating them. But the gradual destruction of the manatees’ habitat, combined with the long-term menace of climate change, means there’s no panacea.
Left unchecked, the fallout is all but certain to stretch beyond the manatee population, experts say. Manatees are often referred to as a “sentinel species,” meaning their health serves as an indicator for the welfare of other flora and fauna in the state. Manatee grazing makes sea grass beds more productive, which in turn attracts a greater diversity of organisms to their habitats. If their numbers decline, other plant and animal populations will suffer, too.
“They’re kind of like the gardeners of the aquatic ecosystem,” said Patrick Rose, a biologist and executive director of Florida’s Save the Manatee Club. “And they’re just so defenseless.”
Until recently, the West Indian manatee found on the East Coast represented a ecological success story. They faced extinction in the 1970s, when only a few hundred remained. But decades of intensive conservation efforts have helped them rebound to more than 7,000.
Citing the improving numbers, the Trump administration in 2017 downgraded the species from “endangered” to “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The move was decried by conservationists and some Florida officials, who said the Interior Department ignored ongoing threats such as habitat loss and rising injuries from boats. They say this year’s die-off all but confirms their fears that the reclassification was premature.
Water quality degradation emerged as a top concern long before manatee deaths reached their current levels.
Runoff from farming, pesticide sprays, sewage treatment, leaky septic systems and other human sources causes an excess of micronutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus to build up in the water. Massive algae blooms form. Eventually, they grow so large that they deplete the water of oxygen and block out the sunlight sea grass needs to thrive. What’s left are murky wastelands with little for the manatees to eat.
Experts said there wasn’t an easy explanation for why manatee mortality spiked so dramatically this year. Rather, they said, it appears to be an accumulation of environmental ills, with the diminishing supply of sea grass playing a major role, in addition to such other factors as boat strikes and cold stress.
“I think this is a point on a long, linear trajectory,” said Lopez, of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The situation is particularly dire in the Indian River Lagoon, a 150-mile waterway along Florida’s Atlantic Coast that ranks among the most biodiverse estuaries in the country. Researchers estimate that more than a quarter of the manatee population flocks there during cold months, many drawn in by warm water discharge from a power plant in Titusville, Fla.
Manatees won’t tolerate water that’s lower than 68 degrees, so once they arrive, they tend to stay until the ocean warms again — even if food is in short supply. In previous years, the region was blanketed in tens of thousands of acres of sea grass, making it an ideal place to spend the winter, said Rose, of the Save the Manatee Club. Vast tracts of that vegetation have disappeared since 2011, when protracted algal blooms began to smother the estuary, according to state water regulators.
“Before, they could forage and stay warm in the water from the power plant,” Rose said. “But they kept losing more and more sea grass.”
Central Florida also experienced an unusually cold winter this year. That plus the lack of food created awful conditions for the animals, Rose said. “They came into this winter already malnourished,” he said. “They didn’t have the resources to go out and feed on those warmer days. That resulted in this more massive starvation.”
Researchers might have noticed the advanced state of manatee malnutrition earlier had conservation work not been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, according to Rose. Wildlife officials and conservation groups spent less time monitoring and tagging the animals, he said.
“A lot of that work didn’t happen,” Rose said. “The fact that it had gotten that bad was not detected.”
But the work is picking back up. The Manatee Rescue and Rehabilitation Partnership — a cooperative that includes Save the Manatee Club, state zoos and wildlife regulators — has helped nurse numerous manatees back to health this year. In May, a male who came in more than 200 pounds underweight was released in central Florida’s Salt Springs.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says it has rescued 90 manatees so far this year, nearly topping the number rescued in each of the two previous years. The agency, which conducts the majority of manatee health assessments along with private groups, says it’s working with federal officials to determine what caused the “unusual mortality event” and is exploring possible responses such as habitat rebuilding.
“Environmental conditions in portions of the Indian River Lagoon remain a concern. Preliminary information indicates that a reduction in food availability, sea grass, is the primary factor in this event,” the agency said in a statement late last month. “We will continue with a comprehensive investigation and share information as it becomes available.”
Conservationists are also working out ways to stave off another cold-weather catastrophe in the coming months. Replanting and nutrient filtration projects are underway. Rose and other advocates say they’re also calling on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to temporarily stop using sprays to remove plant buildup that restricts boater access so that manatees may have an alternative food source.
Another possibility involves finding a safe facility for large numbers of sick or injured manatees to convalesce. A manatee rescue committee is meeting in the coming weeks to weigh whether an old fish hatchery or other sites could do the trick, housing 100 or more manatees through the winter.
Rounding up the gentle giants would be a major undertaking — trapping them and transporting them poses dangers to both manatees and humans. But all options need to be on the table, Rose said.
“Next winter really has to be quite different. We have to be on top of this,” Rose said. “They’re dependent on us.”
Authorities in the southern African country estimate that the number of its mammoth mammals currently stands at slightly more than 100,000 – up from 84,000 in 2014, when the last census was conducted – for a carrying capacity of about 45,000.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
The surplus has prompted the government in recent weeks to mull the mass killing of elephants – something the country last did in 1988 – as a population-control option in order to protect other wildlife, as well as the country’s vegetation.
“We are overpopulated when it comes to elephants in this country,” Tinashe Farawo, spokesman of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Authority (ZimParks) told Al Jazeera.
Authorities maintain the growing elephant population poses a risk to other animals by causing habitat destruction, and has also led to an increase in the instances of dangerous human-wildlife interaction, with dozens of deaths reported in recent years.
“We have vultures that breed in trees. The vultures are no longer breeding in Hwange (National Park); they have moved to other places because elephants have the habit of knocking down trees,” Farawo said.
He noted that the plan is still in its “formative stages” and a final decision has yet to be made, but stressed that culling is permitted by Zimbabwe laws.
But the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG), an environmental and human rights watchdog in Zimbabwe documenting poaching, opposed the plan.
“Culling will eventually lead to extinction of these elephants,” spokesperson Simiso Mlevu told Al Jazeera.
“This is just the beginning,” he said. “Very soon we will be forced to travel to other countries just to see an elephant.”
Earlier this year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the African forest elephant as “critically endangered” and the African savanna elephant as “endangered”, citing a surge in poaching and loss of habitat for the declining numbers.
According to the Swiss-based group’s latest assessments, the number of African forest elephants dropped by more than 86 percent over a period of 31 years. Meanwhile, the population of African savanna elephants fell by at least 60 percent over the past half a century.
Zimbabwe has the continent’s second-largest elephant population after Botswana, which boasts about a third of Africa’s 415,000 remaining elephants.
Other options
Besides culling, another option considered by Zimbabwean authorities is to move elephants from areas with a high population. But both are hampered by lack of funds, Farawo said.
“It’s an expensive process and right now we have no money,” he added. “In 2018, we moved 100 elephants and the exercise cost us $400,000.”
Farawo said ZimParks, a government body, requires at least $25m annually for its operations. But the body has not received any funding from Zimbabwe’s cash-strapped government since 2001.
Farawo said his organisation needed revenue to conserve elephants but its finances took a big hit in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic severely affected the country’s tourism industry.
In late April, Zimbabwe said it was planning to sell hunting licenses to kill 500 elephants to generate revenue. Trophy hunters are expected to pay between $10,000 and $70,000 depending on elephant size.
The 500-elephant hunting quota, which is separate from the culling plan, is allowed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), according to Farawo, who said that “elephants must pay for their upkeep”.
“The elephants also have to take care of themselves, so we must be allowed to trade in order for that to happen,” Farawo said.
“[This] means that money must be generated, revenue coming off the elephants. Right now, tourism is dead, so people aren’t coming to see the elephants.”
But Mlevu, of CNRG, said that culling would affect tourism – a position echoed by John Robertson, a prominent Zimbabwean economist.
“It inflicts serious damage on wildlife,” Robertson told Al Jazeera. “Losing wildlife also reduces the prospects of tourism, which the country heavily relies on.”
Audrey Delsink, wildlife director of Humane Society International/Africa, said killing elephants has “a traumatic effect on the remaining population”. She said it is for that reason that authorities in South Africa are using contraception as a population-control option.
Noting that 76 percent of elephant populations in Africa cross borders, Delsink told Al Jazeera: “Management actions taken at an incorrect scale can have massive consequences and ripple effects that extend far beyond the targeted zone, area or population.
“Therefore, Zimbabwean management choices could have devastating consequences for transient elephants. The situation in Zimbabwe appears to be not so much about elephant numbers per se, but rather about funding the management authority – the elephants are simply a means to this end.”
BOISE – The Idaho Fish and Game is seeking public feedback on a proposal to extend wolf hunting and trapping opportunities and enhanced methods of take. The proposed changes relate to Idaho legislative action that will take effect July 1, 2021.
Senate Bill 1211 recently passed into law and extends wolf hunting and trapping with foothold traps to year-round on private property with landowner permission. The law also expands the legal methods of take for wolves to include methods currently legal in Idaho for taking other wild canines, such as coyotes and foxes, but closed for taking other big game species.
While the recent law establishes a year-round foothold trapping season for wolves on private land and provides the ability to allow expanded methods of take, the expectation of the Legislature was for the Fish and Game Commission to set seasons for snaring and expanded methods of take through proclamation.
Fish and Game proposes no change to the wolf snaring seasons currently in place on public and private land, and it also proposes no change to the foothold trapping seasons on public land.
The proposal allows expanded methods of take on private land year-round, provided landowner permission. The proposal also allows expanded methods of take for hunting on public land from Nov. 15 through March 31 in areas with a history of chronic livestock depredation, or where elk herds are below management objectives, including units 4, 4A, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10A, 12, 14, 15, 16, 16A, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20A, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 32A, 33, 34, 35, 36, 36A, 36B, 37, 39, 43, 44, 49, 50,62, 64, 65, 67.
Wolf hunting and methods of take would remain unchanged from currently established seasons on public land between April 1 through Nov. 14 in those same units. Wolf hunting seasons and methods of take on public land in all other units (those without a history of chronic livestock depredation or that are currently meeting biological management objectives for elk) will also remain unchanged.
Authorities are looking for information to help solve the case, which could bring a $100,000 fine or 1 year in jail
Sea otters are photographed at Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing, Calif., on Thursday, July 23, 2020. The protected slough is a 7-mile long tidal salt marsh offering visitors a view of birds, sea otters, and sea lions. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group)
An endangered California sea otter has been found dead in an illegal fishing trap, prompting an investigation by state and federal wildlife authorities.
The southern sea otter, a male, was discovered by a beachgoer on Zmudowski State Beach near Moss Landing in northern Monterey County on April 18.
Investigators from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and California Department of Fish and Wildlife say the nylon mesh trap — which was used to catch bait fish or crayfish — appears to have washed up on the beach with the dead otter in it. It might originally have been placed somewhere else, they added.
“You commonly see traps like this in rivers and lakes,” said Lt. Brian Bailie, with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “People use them to catch crayfish. You don’t see them oceanside ever. They aren’t legal to use in the ocean.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory is conducting a thorough investigation of the dead animal, which was a juvenile, or sub-adult. Southern sea otters are protected as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. It is illegal to harm or kill them under that law, and also under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. Otters also protected by California state law.
The penalty for killing a sea otter is up to a $100,000 fine under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act and up to 1 year in jail.
“This is extremely serious,” said Rebecca Roca, an agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Sacramento. “Sea otters are beloved along the coast. It’s devastating when we find something like this. We are asking the public for any help they can give.”
Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact the California Department of Fish and Wildlife at the CalTIP line at 1-888-334-2258 (callers may remain anonymous) or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at 916-569-8444.
“Stuck in something like that, there was nothing it could do,” he said. “Otters have sharp teeth but I don’t think they are sharp enough to chew through nylon that tough. It’s really unfortunate. We need to find if these things are being used in other places. We don’t want to see this happen again.”
Sea otters play an important role along California’s coast. They eat sea urchins, for example, which otherwise can overpopulate the sea floor and consume kelp forests that provide food and shelter for fish and other ocean animals.
Historically there were about 16,000 sea otters from the Oregon-California border to Baja, Mexico. But they were hunted relentlessly in the late 1700s and early 1800s by Russian, British and American fur traders for their pelts, which are denser and softer than mink fur.
They were feared extinct until the 1930s, when about 50 were discovered in remote Big Sur coves. Protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1977, they began a slow comeback, and today their population is estimated at about 3,000. Over the last decade, however, the growth has stalled, in part because they have been unable to expand their range from the Monterey Bay area north up the San Mateo County coast due to an increasing number of attacks by great white sharks.
Federal laws have protected elephant seals, sea lions and other marine mammals that the sharks eat, growing their numbers. Scientists are studying possible proposals to one day move some otters inside San Francisco Bay to Tomales Bay in Marin County or other points north to help the population spread back across its historic range in Northern California.
Hunters make up less than 7 percent of our citizenry, yet their voices are heard above all othersPreston Moore
Jun. 4, 2021 4:00 pmA black bear ambles through a cornfield in 2016 near the Yellow River State Forest in Northeast Iowa. Chances are the bear was passing through from its home in a neighboring state. According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the state does not have a reproducing population of black bears. But black bear sightings are growing more common in Iowa. (Photo supplied by Brian Gibbs)
Iowa’s natural resources — its lands and our wildlife — belong to all of us as Iowans. Unfortunately, it’s only the voices pushing for consumptive uses that Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources and Natural Resource Commission pay any attention to.
Hunters make up less than 7 percent of our citizenry, yet their voices are heard above all others…
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens as he speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Dr. Anthony Fauci and members of the Biden administration are asking China to release medical records of lab workers and miners who fell ill prior to the coronavirus outbreak, as they may provide clues about the origins of the virus, according to reports.
“I have always felt that the overwhelming likelihood — given the experience we have had with SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, bird flu, the swine flu pandemic of…
Motif FoodWorks, a food technology startup in Boston, says it’s developing plant-based cheese that stretches and melts like the real thing.
Two years ago, Beyond Meat became the first plant-based food startup to go public.Its shares surged 163 percent on its first day and today it’s valued at $9 billion, with shares now worth about five times their original value.
Since then, analysts have wondered which major plant-based food company would go public next.Late last month, they found out: Oatly, the Swedish maker of oat-based milk, yogurt, and ice cream.
Oatly’s stockdidn’t quite skyrocket like Beyond’s, but by the end of the company’s first day of trading, it was valued at about $12 billion. Now, Oatly is valued at $14 billion, over 50 percent more than Beyond’s valuation of $9 billion. Though Beyond and other high-tech vegan meat producers get much more attention than companies that make plant-based milks, Oatly’s valuation says a lot about the state of the plant-based food industry — namely, that plant-based milk has reached a point of maturation in the market that’s even more advanced than plant-based meat.
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According to a report recently published by the Plant-Based Foods Association and the Good Food Institute, two organizations that advocate for plant-based foods, plant-based milk alone accounts for 35 percent of the total plant-based foods market, worth $2.5 billion to plant-based meat’s $1.4 billion. Plant-based milks don’t just dominate the plant-based food sector, they also take up a sizable portion of retail milk sales — 15 percent overall, and 45 percentin natural food stores.
Plant-based milk is the largest segment of the overall plant-based food industry.
Oatly’s sudden rise since it came on the US market in 2016 has helped drive this growth. Almond milk sits at the top of the plant-based milk category, but oat milk recently pushed soy milk out of second place, thanks to Oatly and big brands like Silk (owned by Danone) and Chobani following Oatly’s lead with a range of oat-based dairy products.
In fact, Starbucks, which started using Oatly products last year in select US stores and rolled it out nationwide earlier this year, says its share of orders that use plant-based milk jumped from 17 to 25 percent after it introduced Oatly.
These shifts from traditional to plant-based dairy are important in the fight against climate change, as traditional dairy is an especially resource-intensive sector. According to a 2018 University of Oxford study, any way you slice it, cow’s milk uses much more land and water and emits far more greenhouse gases than any plant-based milk. For example, almond milk gets a bad rap for being water-intensive, but cow’s milk requires about 70 percent more water to produce, emits more than twice as much Co2, and requires more than 15 times as much land. Compared to almond milk, oat milk uses much less water but a little more land.
On top of the environmental impact of traditional dairy, most dairy cows, at least in the US, are raised in factory farms.
Yet despite the popularity of plant-based milks, they haven’t quite made a dent in taking the cow out of dairy, their raison d’être. Some farmers do say plant-based milk is affecting their bottom line, and a late 2020 report that was funded by the United States Department of Agriculture found that “increased sales of plant-based alternatives are negatively affecting households’ purchases of cow’s milk” but that it’s “not a primary driver.”
There are a lot of factors that affect dairy production and consumption, and adoption of alternatives is just one of them. But in order for plant-based startups to become a primary driver in displacing conventional dairy, stealing market share fromthe milk shelves of the supermarket isn’t enough. Oatly and its competitors need to figure out how to make a great alternative for another dairy product: cheese.
Milk sales are plummeting, but there are more cows than ever
Many dairy farmers are indeed hurting, but plant-based milks aren’t the biggest culprit — it’s Big Dairy, which has been consolidating and squeezing out small farmers, one of several factors that caused 11,000 dairy farms to shutter between 2014 and 2019. The pandemic only hastened this trend, as major dairy customers — schools and restaurants — closed down, resulting in farmers across the country dumping millions of gallons of milk. Seven percent of US dairies closed in 2020.
This can be explained, in part, by Americans’ love for cheese; per capita cheese consumption has risen 25 percent since the early 2000s, which is one factor that has kept milk production high, since it takes nearly 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. (Butter consumption is rising even faster, and it takes more than 21 pounds of milk to make one pound of butter.)
There are plant-based cheese alternatives on the market, and they generally fall into two categories. The first are the pricey, fermented wheels or tubs of spreadable cheese, often made of nuts, seasonings, and cultures (and sometimes oils, gums, and starches),which have managed to impress the taste buds of omnivorous food critics. Bigger brands like Miyoko’s Creamery, Kite Hill, and Treeline Cheese dominate this first category, but there are dozens of smaller, artisanal outfits like the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Rebel Cheese in Austin.
The second category consists of the bags of shredded or sliced mozzarella or cheddar, often made with oil and potato starch or cornstarch, which don’t melt and stretch (or taste) the way cheese from cow’s milk does. The problem is best summed up by the joke about how a vegan’s house burned down and the only thing that didn’t melt was their cheese.
But Americans eat a lot of shredded and sliced cheese, and the vegan versions haven’t improved much since I last heard that joke some years ago (though if you’re curious, I suggest giving Violife, Field Roast, and Follow Your Heart products a try). And even though the plant-based food industry has grown rapidly in the past few years, its startups loaded with billions in investment, no company has come close to making a “breakthrough” shredded or sliced cheese product akin to the Beyond or Impossible burger — or a carton of Oatly — that can bring in curious omnivores.
Not yet, anyway.
The future of animal-free cheese
The absence of great shredded and sliced plant-based cheese could be a problem of demand or innovation, or both.
Meat gets much more attention for its ecological and animal welfare harms than cheese, to the point where nearly a quarter of Americans say they are trying to cut back. But you don’t hear much about people trying to reduce their cheese intake, even though globally, the dairy sector emits more greenhouse gases than all meat sectors (except beef), and most dairy cows, at least in the US, are factory-farmed.
On the innovation side, it’s simply much harder to replicate stretchy, melty cheese made from cow’s milk than the soft, spreadable varieties.
“Achieving the stretchy quality and texture consumers expect from harder cheeses upon melting has proven challenging to date, which is why soft plant-based cheese may be more prominent,” Dr. Priera Panescu, a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute, told me over email.
Ryan Pandya, the CEO and co-founder of Perfect Day — a food technology startup based in Berkeley, California — shared a similar sentiment with Wired, explaining, “The melty, stretchy thing is absolutely the most challenging holy grail thing to do. Because there’s only one protein known to man that does this, and it’s casein.”
Through precision fermentation, which is used to make specific proteins, enzymes, or vitamins, Perfect Day has developed a microflora (fungi) that converts sugar into whey, another protein in milk, for its ice cream products. The company says it’s also working on cheese but doesn’t have plans for the shredded or sliced varieties in the near future.
Real Vegan Cheese, a nonprofit, open-science research project — quite rare in a field of venture capital-backed startups — is going for the “holy grail” of cheese by adding the genes for casein to yeast and other microflora, and then adding plant-based fats and sugars. New Culture, based in San Francisco, is also working to replicate casein, using microbial fermentation, similar to Perfect Day’s approach, to make shredded cheese. The company plans to launch its first product in late 2023.
When asked about the lack of stretchy plant-based cheese, Panescu said that “academic researchers are working to address these challenges by using biological interventions, optimizing more flexible, well-assembled plant-based proteins, and applying mechanical texturization processes.”
One of those researchers is Alejandro Marangoni at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. According to Marangoni’s research, zein — a protein found in corn — is an overlooked tool in the search to make plant-based alternatives to animal products. Most companies making shredded and sliced plant-based cheese use starches and gums for the melt and stretch effects, but zein could be a better route. When hydrated and heated above a certain temperature, it forms a “flexible, bendable mass which may be pulled, stretched, and sculpted,” sharing “melting characteristics with cheddar cheese.”
Motif FoodWorks, a food tech startup based in Boston that has received investment from the major dairy company Fonterra, recently signed an exclusive licensing deal to use a unique food processing technology Marangoni developed using zein.
Motif’s CEO, Jonathan McIntyre, told me their newly acquired tech will enable them to make a stretchy, gooey vegan cheese that’s better than what’s currently on the market. “This technology doesn’t solve all problems in plant-based cheese,” he said, and that “there are other aspects, like mouthfeel and creaminess” that they’re using other tools to address.
McIntyre isn’t yet sure whether Motif will develop its own products, work with a dairy company to make a plant-based product, or partner with an existing plant-based cheese company to upgrade its own, but he does envision it being used on nachos and, of course, pizza. You can see it in action below or here.
Given all the hype around plant-based food, it may come as no surprise that there are dozens more startups racing to make convincing cheese alternatives — but Impossible Foods isn’t one of them. While it is developing Impossible Milk, a spokesperson told me the company won’t be selling Impossible Cheese anytime soon.
Then there’s Oatly, which recently told Bloomberg it’s making “good progress” on developing oat-based cheese products, though its CEO didn’t specify what kinds. Given the $1.4 billion the company raised from last month’s IPO, it seems like it should have the resources to raise the bar on plant-based cheese, and a devoted customer base who will likely be curious enough to give it a try.
Investigation finds thousands of illegal animal parts and products at markets across five countries.
Pangolin scales for sale in a market in Mong La in Myanmar [Courtesy of Chris R Shepherd/TRAFFIC]
4 Jun 2021
A new study by TRAFFIC, a group that monitors the illegal trade in wildlife, has found thousands of animal parts and products – from pangolin scales to ivory and bear bile – for sale in five countries in mainland Southeast Asia, underlining the region’s struggle to address wildlife crime and the need to intensify anti-trafficking efforts.
Image by We Animals Media is of a snake rescued from research in a university 
© Lynne Sladky/AP A group of manatees swim in a canal in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
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