Rubik’s Food

Rising temperatures, extreme weather and shifting seasons are just a few of the threats to global food security. Add a growing population, and the future of food supplies can seem alarmingly fragile. The intractability of the problem is reflected in the inclusion of Zero Hunger as one of the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations in 2015. It aims for everyone to have year-round access to safe, nutritious and plentiful food, including the more than 2.3 billion people — around 29 per cent of the global population — who, in 2023, still did not.

It’s a conundrum, but researchers in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences (ALES) have made significant progress on the puzzle of feeding and leading the world in the future of food production. From battling crop diseases and pests safely to printing plant-based meats, ALES researchers are figuring out how.

Pathogen Protection

Canola is grown widely in Canada, with more than 18 million tonnes of the seed crop produced each year. But since the early 2000s, Canadian canola crop yields have been threatened by clubroot, a disease that affects canola and other members of the brassica family — like cabbage, broccoli, turnips and radishes. The disease is caused by a microorganism in the soil that attacks the roots of a plant, forming club-like growths that impede the plant’s ability to absorb water and nutrients. Clubroot’s life cycle is like a cipher of Earthly life, at times behaving like a plant, at times an animal and finally a fungus, releasing spores into the soil from the affected roots.

“It’s a devastating disease because once it’s in the soil, it survives as these long-lived spores that can persist for years,” says Stephen Strelkov, ’93 BSc, professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food & Nutritional Science. “It has an impact on the quantity and the quality of what’s harvested.”

Strelkov is part of a multi-year research project funded by agricultural company BASF to help battle new strains of the clubroot pathogen. He hopes to identify sources of disease resistance that can be bred into canola seeds, protecting future crops.

“When this pathogen attacks, what’s it releasing into the host to overcome the host’s responses?” he wants to know. “Because the plant will try to mount a defence to avoid getting sick. We’re trying to understand that mechanism.”

Changing weather patterns have complicated disease management efforts. Higher soil temperatures and moisture can increase the severity and prevalence of clubroot, Strelkov explains. “If conditions are too dry, disease development curtails,” he says. But the spores persist, ready to activate when conditions are right.

Insights into the right conditions for clubroot have come a long way since the disease first appeared in Canadian canola in the early 2000s. At first, its presence represented a death knell for brassica crops. Now it’s a much more manageable condition.

“It was really scary those first few years, but we’ve been able to get more tools and a better understanding to manage it. So even if the pathogen is present, the grower can still produce a good crop,” Strelkov says.

As researchers have gained understanding, they’ve identified varieties of canola with varying levels of resistance to clubroot. By breeding strains with higher resistance, they’ve been able to develop more resilient crops.

Pesky Pests

It’s not just diseases like clubroot that threaten canola. A variety of pests love to munch the seed crop, too, and their numbers are growing, thanks to rising temperatures and shifting seasons. Every year, up to 40 per cent of crops around the world are lost to pests. Warmer winters mean more bugs are able to survive, and warmer summers mean they’re able to reproduce faster.

“Insects really respond to environmental temperature as well as moisture,” says Boyd Mori, ’09 BSc(Spec), ’14 PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food & Nutritional Science. He explains that accelerated growth timelines coupled with rising insect populations spell calamity for crops.

Mori says that when pests reproduce faster, they get to their destructive life stage faster, allowing less time in each growth cycle to interfere with their herbivory before it happens. “Whether it’s the larval or the adult stage that is damaging, they get to that stage faster and cause more damage.”

He works with crop commissions including Alberta Grains, Alberta Pulse Growers and the Alberta Canola Producers Commission to study pests present across the province. They look at insects like flea beetles, cabbage seedpod weevils and diamondback moths, which threaten yields across the Prairies.

To combat pests, Mori also studies beneficial insects. “These include natural enemies of insect pests — like predators and parasitoid wasps,” he says. These enemies are a natural pesticide that targets only the pest that is harming a given crop.

Sometimes, though, pest numbers warrant applying insecticide, Mori says. Having an understanding of the systems at work allows crop scientists and farmers to be judicious.

In addition to chemical insecticides having potentially harmful effects on unintended target bugs, Mori is also concerned about insecticide resistance, wherein once-effective insecticides become less useful over time. Overuse of pesticides with the same method of action, he explains, leads insect populations to develop resistance. And because the development process for new insecticides is costly and lengthy, there are a limited number of options. It can make future pest management efforts more difficult.

“It’s worrying because we don’t have that many active ingredients,” Mori explains, adding that so far, efforts to avoid resistance have been successful. “So we’re making sure we’re using these products well.”

Future-Proof Food

ALES researchers are also looking beyond traditional fields to future-proof food supplies, with products that can be sustainably produced in a lab. Pauline Chan, ’22 BSc(FoodSci), a master’s student in Food Science and Bioresource Technology, is currently studying the development of plant-based food inks for use in 3D printing.

“Recently, there’s been this trend of using plant proteins as an alternative to animal proteins,” she explains. “And 3D food printing is one of the ways that we can recreate, say, meat-like fibres, for a more realistic meat analog.” Plant proteins are more sustainable than animal proteins, partly due to their smaller environmental footprint. Chan studies fava beans because they’re a common crop on the Canadian Prairies — one with untapped potential to feed people.

“Most of the time, they’ve just been directed to animal feed, not a lot to human consumption, so I’m looking into what else we can use them for,” she says.

Chan is one of many ALES researchers exploring the potential of 3D printing in food production. Others have looked into the use of 3D printing technology to improve the texture of foods for people living with dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), and the faculty recently welcomed a professor, Ning Xiang, specializing in cellular agriculture, such as lab-grown meats.

Thanks to these researchers, the flavours of the future might be quite appetizing. Although Chan’s research is still in its early stages, she hopes it will one day lead to higher-quality meat alternatives with a higher nutritional value and better texture.

Chan is trying to improve the plant-based inks. In doing so, she hopes to create a more realistic meat alternative. “When you bite into a steak, there’s that juiciness aspect, right?” she says. “So by treating my protein, I might be able to improve the water-holding capacity so that when you add it to a plant-based meat, it can hold that moisture and can create that juiciness.”

Although that juicy steak might not be served up for a few years, the work of researchers like Chan is shaping the future of food — so there’s enough for everyone.