01/07/2017 Click - Short Edition

in East Sussex last summer, died because of misadventure.

Relatives of some of the victims have been asking why no lifeguards

But the coroner said they might still have drowned even if there had

Coming up in ten minutes' time, Newswatch, but first on BBC News,

This is salad, grown the old-fashioned way.

You know, in shipping containers, under LED lights, without soil,

in an optimised water and nutrient mix.

As Farmer Spock called it, good old hydroponics.

In all seriousness, it's been suggested that the type of intense

farming going on here at Local Roots in Los Angeles could help solve

the world's food problems in years to come.

Transport costs can be reduced by growing plants wherever

they are needed, even in areas of famine where the land and climate

You get higher volumes and many more crop cycles

Lettuce can be grown in 30 days instead of up to 90 outdoors,

and a new crop can be grown immediately.

All in all, one of these containers yields the same as five acres

It's very similar to the strawberry farm that we saw in Paris

in the spring and in Miyagi in Japan in 2015, where the land had been

using artificial intelligence to make some quite unusual tweaks.

But before we talk about the vegetables of the future,

we are off to San Francisco where Kat Hawkins has been looking

I've come to this lab in the heart of Silicon Valley to visit

They claim to have invented the food of the future -

a completely meatless meat made entirely of plants.

It's actually remarkably important to get that state of mind

perspective but actually it's also useful for interpreting

The aim is to reverse engineer the flavour and texture of meat

And as someone who very much enjoys their meat tasting like meat,

I wanted to find out how they're doing it.

What is it about the flavour of meat that makes it so damn delicious?

Why is it so agreeable, what is it that triggers your mind

There is a lot that goes into that and it turns out that flavour

is about 75 or 80% aroma and about 20 or 25% taste.

Impossible Foods found that the key ingredient that gives

meat its characteristic irony taste is heme,

a molecule found in most living things and especially

So this is your magic ingredient, right?

And it provides the explosion of flavour you get that makes

the difference between white meat chicken with a beefburger.

The company has recently flipped the switch on its meatless

meat-packing factory as it ramps up production.

They will eventually make 4 million burgers a month,

and the next aim is to move into chicken,

But it's one thing being a scientist who's enthralled by food tech

and another to be a chef, using the ingredients produced

I think we eat way too much meat in general.

So I think this is a way to be as close as possible to how meat

The Impossible burger is now the only one Rocco has on his menu

It seems like at this stage it might be a novelty for Silicon Valley

diners with money to spend but of course, as always,

It tastes like mushrooms, but I know there's no

But it doesn't taste quite like meat to me.

Yes, it's a little bit leaner, as a meat.

But it looks like it - it's got that kind of umami flavour

It tasted good as I was eating it but afterwards it left a slightly

strange taste in my mouth - very strong, very irony.

Still, it's healthier than meat, and has zero cholesterol so maybe

What comes across talking to Rocco, though, is how important

it is for his customers that the flavour is close to meat

But what if you could serve actual animal flesh without a single

That is what several companies, including this small tech start-up

in the heart of Silicon Valley, are working on.

They plan to grow actual fish from stem cells.

It might sound like an unnerving prospect but they believe

Fish consumption is demanding, fish demand is rising,

52% of all fisheries are fully exploited.

25% above that are in collapse, they are overextended.

So we only have 23% of the world's fisheries left that we can use

So if we still want to eat fish at the rate that we're eating it,

Finless Foods takes a small sample of cells from real fish

One cell can theoretically become one tonne of fish meat but they're

We'll be on the market in three years with products that

are new versions of fish that people haven't had before and in five

or six years we'll have steaks and filets

at the supermarket, just like what's inside of the fish that you'd

And they're not the only company working on what some have

Just this week, Hampton Creek claimed they will hit the stores

And around the corner at Memphis Meats, they've already

produced fried chicken and meatballs from stem cells.

But at $18,000 for a pound of beef, there's a long way to go.

Scaling up will mean finding a new medium to help grow

Currently, the blood of calf foetuses is used,

which is extensive and of course, if you don't want to hurt

With the population due to increase to 9.7 billion by 2050,

many people feel current approaches to food production

Cultured meat promises to reduce environmental impacts and meat looks

set to be the latest thing to be given the Silicon Valley overhaul.

Much like we expect from our phones, from our cars, that it will be

better, cheaper, faster, safer, year by year,

we should expect the same thing from our food.

But once you start thinking about food, a cow, as a pure piece

of technology, and you apply those same technological insights we use

elsewhere in our lives, you can start really thinking

about what food should be, what food could be.

I think I'll stick to the salad for the moment.

Which is lucky, because I'm surrounded by the stuff.

The thing that really hits you inside one of these containers

It's just lovely, all this concentrated fresh lettuce.

And you don't even get this, I don't think, in an open-air field.

But in here - wow, it's lovely.

I'm inside what is called a food computer, where every aspect

of the plant's growth cycle - the temperature, nutrient mix,

humidity and light is monitored and controlled.

This kind of computer-controlled hydroponics is allowing food

scientists to not just replicate but improve

So every plant that we grow has a finely-tuned growing algorithm

to optimise its growth, its yield and its flavour profiles

Not only does each variety get its own unique growing

conditions but artificial intelligence and computer vision

are monitoring the plants, looking out for and treating any

Local Roots hopes to place between 20 and 50 of its so-called

'terrafarms' right next to supermarkets' local distribution

It means the veg won't have to travel so far and it will be

I've always needed a dressing on my salad because I thought it

tasted quite bland without it, but this is really full of flavour.

I could even eat an entire bowl of this without any dressing.

But some researchers don't like the idea of individual

companies doing research by themselves.

Putting life in a box is incredibly complex.

It requires biology as much as chemistry, as much as plant

And so right now it's being tackled by a lot of start-ups and it's hard

for those start-ups to have such a multidisciplinary approach.

This is why all of our work is open sourced -

the hardware, software - so we can get people thinking

on the issues and we can ask them for advice.

And we are not stymied by intellectual property.

At MIT's media lab, the Open Agricultural Initiative,

or OpenAg, wants to create a worldwide collection

One of the things that we've invented here we call the personal

food computer and it's like a hacker kit for plants.

What we've done is distributed all the plans, all the materials,

So not only might food computers improve on nature

but they could also teach us more about how to get the best out

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