Crops like chickpeas, beans, lentils and quinoa can help make European food systems more environmentally friendly and sustainable.
go through Michael Allen
On the organic dairy farm of Marianne Mulhall in southeast Ireland, winter wheat crops look better than usual. By spring, it is usually a little yellow and withered, which is a sign of insufficient nitrogen.
This year’s wheat – sown on fields grown last summer with beans and peas – is still green and bright with little sign of nitrogen loss.
Mulhall explained that wheat looks good because beans, beans, and beans, capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and add it to the soil. This means farmers can grow other crops after them without the need for additional expensive nitrogen input.
“This is good for farmers,” said Mulhall, Teagasc consultant at the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Agency.
Alternative Source
Mulhall is trying new ways to grow crops, as part of a EU-funded trial to diversify sources of nutrient proteins.
This is especially important, according to the food science expert Professor Emanuele Zannini, because the current methods of producing animal protein are unsustainable and the growing global population will further increase the demand for protein.
“We need to find alternative proteins to relieve the environmental burden,” said Zannini, who is based in Cork, Ireland.
Food systems emit about one-third of global artificial greenhouse gas emissions, most of which are related to meat and dairy production, according to Edgar-Food, a global database developed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.
Analysis from the data shows that the yield of CO2 per 100 grams of protein is nearly 7 times more than that of legumes. Milk and beef production are 10 and 60 times more carbon-intensive, respectively.
One way to reduce these emissions is to eat more plant-based proteins, Zannini said, and he led a four-year EU-funded program called Smart Protin, which ended in June 2024.
Sustainable Pulse
The Smart Protein Team brings together food experts and scientists from nine EU countries and around the world to explore the production of plant-based foods for three crops: chickpeas, lentils and fawa beans.
“In Europe, especially in the Mediterranean, there is a tradition, especially in Europe,” Zannini said. However, as Europe becomes more prosperous, people are starting to eat more meat.
The initiative is designed to encourage European farmers to grow more of these beans to meet rising demand from consumers who are reducing meat and looking for alternatives to climate-friendly food.
The research team also looked at quinoa, a South American cereal that has been grown in a few European countries.
“Quano is a super cereal from a nutritional point of view,” Zannini said. “The seeds of this plant contain seeds of all the essential amino acids – the basis of protein – our bodies cannot produce and are rich in minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.”
The power of diversity
The research team worked with farmers in Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to test how these crops grew in different environments. One challenge for farmers is climate change.
“We are dealing with weather that is no longer predictable,” Zannini said.
The researchers tried different crop varieties, including some “rebirth of the European geriatric strains”.
They found that certain varieties can grow under a variety of conditions and are able to cope with variable weather. Zannini attributes this robustness to their genetic makeup, which is more diverse than in some more intense modern crops.
“With intensive breeding, you force some traits, such as high yields, weed tolerant and high protein content, but you may miss the traits that may make a difference when the plants face extreme weather conditions,” he said.
Such crops can help farmers less susceptible to changing weather patterns. For example, the researchers found that the conditions in Ireland are very suitable for growing Fawa beans, with yields twice as high as those in Southern Europe.
“Farmers in Ireland can diversify crop rotations and make their operations more resilient,” Zannini said.
On her farm, Mulhall is passionate about trying different kinds of peas and beans and exploring how future crops can be used for food. This can also bring financial benefits to farmers, she said, because food crops are often better at prices than feed crops.
New food options
One challenge is to incorporate more plant-based proteins and alternative proteins into a modern diet. Smart protein researchers have tried a range of new food options, through the combination of plant proteins with fungi and yeast, as well as the fermentation of waste grains, doughs and bread from fermented breweries, pasta factories and bakeries.
Mixing protein from different sources allows them to create complex foods with more interesting flavor and texture curves than they get from just one plant. There are also nutritional benefits.
According to Zannini, the resulting plant-based yogurt, cheese and crab meat have had a particularly successful outcome. The team also produced Mincemeat, hamburgers and baby formulas. Now, research is continuing to further test and develop some of these foods.
Extended
For Dr. Paul Vos, a nutrition and health scientist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, the competition is expanding alternative protein sources for food, including plant proteins, for food.
VOS leads another EU-funded program called “Giant Leap” to explore how best to incorporate alternative proteins into popular foods and make them mainstream part of the European diet.
“Our approach is to focus on products and sources of protein that can be consumed at a large scale,” he said.
About 60% of protein consumed in the EU comes from animal sources and 40% comes from plants. The VOS-led team hopes to see this midpoint of 50:50 in 2050 and 2030.
The goal is to find the perfect balanced diet for health and environment. This is a way researchers can better understand by objectively evaluating and modeling data on all factors: nutrition, health, safety, and sustainability.
The research team brings together food experts, producers and scholars from Europe and beyond to investigate eating habits in 27 EU countries to determine how best to achieve dietary transitions across Europe.
“The aim is to achieve the greatest change in diet by replacing alternatives to traditional animal protein products, such as meat or dairy products, to replace the best balance of health and environmental benefits,” Vos said.
The alternatives could be plant-based foods that are already available or new products developed by the giant leap team.
“With the smallest change in consumer diets, our goal is to have the greatest impact on environmental and health indicators,” he said.
VOS acknowledges that plant sources already used for food are readily available, which is clearly the fastest way to drive dietary changes. With that in mind, the team is focusing on Fava Bean, oats, quinoa, lentils, canola and chickpeas.
Like the Smart Protein Team, they also use smart processing technology to combine multiple protein sources that are efficient, safe and designed to preserve nutrients and optimize nutritional value. In this way, they are able to create more complex, delicious proteins and nutritious foods.
Consumers buy
Researchers are also trying to understand what consumers think to reduce barriers to meat and dairy alternatives based on alternative protein sources. VOS suggests that instead of demonizing products like meat, focus more on improving alternatives.
In 2023, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich conducted an online survey of 916 participants who spoke German in Switzerland. It found that people are more likely to accept products produced by familiar foods such as potatoes or peas than farmed meat or seaweed.
Another key issue is price. Giant researchers compared 10,000 products in Europe and found that some meat substitutes are more than twice the price of meat. Meanwhile, the price of milk alternatives is 58% more expensive than milk.
VOS says the findings highlight a key challenge.
“To produce products at an affordable price, you need to scale and reach scale, you need to accept the acceptance of the consumer.”
To support a wide range of consumer absorption, the huge leap researchers aim to find the perfect balance of protein quality, nutritional value, food safety, taste and environmental certificates to create new foods that are suitable for a healthy diet in the future. A diet that is beneficial to people is beneficial to the earth.
The research in this article is funded by the EU’s Horizon Program. The views of respondents do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.
More information
This article was originally published in the European Journal of Research and Innovation.
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