One day, in 1676, he described his amazement, gazing at magnified plaque he’d scraped from his teeth: “I…saw, with great wonder…many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.” These graceful animalcules were, he wrote: “so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against another, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse sand.” The 19th-century British doctor Joseph Lister invented antiseptic medicine after inferring that infection was caused by microbes. I will focus on the silver lining: 12 hours to research microbes! Here is what I learned: Microbes, which are about one hundred times too small for the human eye to see, were discovered by a Dutchman named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, whose hobby was peering at things through a homemade microscope.
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I will gloss over the myriad discomforts of a multicity transatlantic red-eye flight on Condor air without movie screens or Wi-Fi. Even Fy needs sugar to survive! But the Finnish microbe, discovered by one of the company’s founders in a nearby forest, apparently turns carbon dioxide-which we create by breathing and need to remove from the atmosphere-into food! It is a claim bold enough to inspire me to board a budget flight for Helsinki. And of another, named Solar Foods, in the Finnish suburb of Espoo, backed by 70 million euros of venture capital, that has patented a technology for making protein from a hydrogenotrophic bacterial microbe by feeding it air. I’ve read of a California company making meat from microbes. Fungal protein is just the tip of the (albeit melting) iceberg. I’m delighted to report that recently, my scrolling has veered ever so slightly away from doom.
Its production requires enormous quantities of the resources on which our burning planet is running short: topsoil, water, and fossil fuels. More vitally, plant-based meat is still made of plants. Raising animals to meet our protein needs is a catastrophe, but recent market data shows that we are already cooling on the novelty of plant burgers that bleed faux blood. Over half of the earth’s habitable land is already being farmed, and estimates predict that food production will need to increase another 70 percent by 2050 to feed our projected population of 10 billion. Agriculture is responsible for about a third of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. I am preoccupied with the future of food, likely owing to a predilection for what I believe is referred to as “doomscrolling.” As any climate doomscroller can tell you, our food system is a disaster. My meal concludes with a summery fig leaf ice cream churned from Nature’s Fynd cream cheese.
I follow it with a chocolate waffle cone filled with an airy hazelnut praline mousse whipped from powdered Fy.
The dish pairs impeccably with a Roussette du Bugey from the Jura. “But what’s most important for me is that it is delicious.” It is delicious, the fungal cream cheese possessing the richness and light acidity of mascarpone and the internal froth of Swiss meringue. “We have to create food that can feed the planet,” Ripert continues. “I really think it’s fantastic,” says chef Ripert, as my first course arrives-a tender puck of Yukon Gold potatoes and Niçoise and Castelvetrano olives, surrounded by a tomato sauce vierge, topped with a thick blanket of Nature’s Fynd cream cheese. Ripert is the first chef in New York City to be cooking with Nature’s Fynd, which is not seafood at all, but a protein fermented from an extremophilic fungal microbe ( Fusarium strain flavolapis or “yellow stone,” nicknamed Fy) discovered by NASA-funded scientists in an acidic hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. Tonight, however, I’m not going for the delicate skate wing or sea trout. I have a reservation down the block at Le Bernardin, that temple of pristine French seafood helmed by Eric Ripert. On the corner of 51st and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, the aroma of charcoal-burnished lamb hangs enticingly in the winter air above Midtown’s halal carts.
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