What’s common between spongy khaman dhoklas, fluffy idlis, or a glass of refreshing kanji? It’s those tiny-yet-mighty friends, microorganisms, that make food tastier and healthier through fermentation. Indian cuisine is no stranger to the magic of fermentation, which for thousands of years has played a major role in ensuring that our food remains safe, nutritious, and delicious. Fermentation, a branch of biotechnology, has also been a crucial tool to grow more food from side streams - things we generally throw away during food processing. Be it growing mushrooms using wheat straws or producing yeast proteins using molasses, advances in biotechnology are helping us leverage the power of this age-old process of fermentation to develop innovative food ingredients and end-products like smart proteins.

Smart proteins, or alternative proteins, are protein-rich foods derived from plants, cultivated animal cells, or fermentation that can be sustainable substitutes for animal-based proteins. Economic and cultural barriers to accessing animal proteins, coupled with the climate and public health inefficiencies of meeting the growing demand for meat, posit the need for India to........

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