For now the wines are easily distinguishable from the real thing, with the brand’s Moscato described by one reviewer as exhibiting a ‘plastic aroma and taste ’ and reeking ‘with artificiality’. Their whiskey is a diferent story, however, with the Washington Post describing how it had touches of liquorice and apple and tasted better than Pappy Van Winkle ’s Twenty-Year-Old Family Reserve, one of the world’s most-prized bourbons.
Besides the huge savings in labour, time, energy, land and water, synthetic biology will underpin a historic relocation of food production. Synthetic meat, which needs no sunlight, would appear to be a perfect candidate for vertical, urban farming, while the obvious savings with land come to fundamentally alter our relationship with nature.
This could have a number of benefits including the rewilding of vast wildernesses lost to deforestation and the Industrial Revolution – certainly of major use as carbon sinks in trying to mitigate climate change. Meanwhile, the end of global food distribution, at least in its present form, would avert colossal amounts of waste. At present the average ingredient in an American meal travels 1,550 miles before consumption, while 70 per cent of a food’s final retail price comes from transportation, storage and handling. In a society emphasising energy abundance through eficiency as much as extreme supply, the idea that 127 calories of fuel would be used to fly a calorie of iceberg lettuce from the US to the UK, as is presently the case, will be rightly viewed as absurd.
Indeed, just like gene editing it’s possible that DIY cultures will accompany the rise of hyper-local production with our ever-expanding leisure time given over to home-brewing ribeye steaks and Gruyère cheese as much as beer or cider.
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