Algae, Which You Know From Pond Scum, Could Be the Food of the Future

These tiny plants are nutritious, semi-delicious, and good for the planet

Credit: Toby Hudson (Wikimedia Commons)

“We live in a world where both the number of hungry and the number of obese people is rising,” Evan Fraser tells OneZero. As the research chair on global food security at the University of Guelph, Fraser spends a lot of time thinking about how and what we’ll eat in the future given this present dilemma, and he thinks one solution might already be growing naturally in ponds and lakes.

The United Nations estimates that more than 113 million people across the world experienced acute hunger and malnutrition in 2018, even as 1.3 billion tons of food, a third of the total produced for human consumption, is wasted every year. This problem will likely only get worse: Crop yields are expected to decrease progressively because erosion is depleting our soil, and rising temperatures and extreme weather are turning fertile lands into desert. Meanwhile, the demand for resource-intensive foods like vegetable oils and meat is expected to keep rising as the world population grows.

We need food that’s nutritious and can be grown sustainably on a large scale. Enter algae: These aquatic plants, which lie at the bottom of the food chain, are rich in protein, vitamins…