Bill Nye Saves the World season 3 recap and review
Photo Credit: Netflix
03.04 Recipes from the Future
Danny Trejo actor/restaurateur asks Bill what the future of food will look like. Will he still be able to make his delicious Trejo Tacos?
Bill talks about the evolution of food, how we adapted due to scarcity or overabundance and how we may have to adapt again in the future. Maybe eat more crickets, for example. The population is growing, the climate is changing messing with where we can grow food, and the food we are growing isn’t getting to everyone who needs it. We need to reduce our food-print.
Case Study, what is the future of farming?
Karlie Kloss visits Researchers at Chiba University in Japan who are working on a way to grow more food using less space. They grow tomatoes without soil, in a bunker meant to withstand natural disasters. Here they research how different spectrums of light affect crops.
Dr. Toyoki Kozai, the director Japan Plant Factory Association, is the father of vertical farming. People have bad feelings about growing food under artificial light, but it is safe and efficient. The 808 plant factory uses vertical farming, grows plants in foam without soil under artificial lights, and uses 90% less water than conventional farms. LED lights grow plants at twice the speed. The factory runs completely on solar energy.
MAD SCIENTISTS! with Robert C. Baker (Michael Ian Black) inventor of the chicken nugget. He wrote 290 papers on food science and published a recipe for what to do with your leftover chicken bits. Then McDonald’s came along and made millions off of his idea. But he’s a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame, so that’s cool.
Panel of Experts: Aly Moore, founder of Bugible, Marine Biologist Dominque Barnes at New Wave Foods, and Dr. Uma Valeti CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats. It’s a special cooking panel! Dominique makes algae shrimp.
Aly is making mealworm lentil salad and ceviche with scorpions on top and Chapulines (Mexican grasshopper) inside. Uma grows meat directly from animal cells and makes duck sliders. Margaret Cho, who was on the original Bill Nye the Science Guy, helps Bill eat it all.
Crickets might be the super food of the future, especially since they are a complete protein and high in B12. Cricket (Josh Robert Thompson) doesn’t want to be eaten through and offers some other choices.
Lemon ants contain calcium, sago grubs are rich in unsaturated fats and taste like bacon, mealworm farming cuts land use and CO2 emissions one half to two-thirds compared with other livestock. Grasshoppers are full of iron and micronutrients – and are racist apparently and deserve to be eaten.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: Natasha Agramonte is a research entomologist at the University of Florida and studies how insecticide resistance affects mosquito behavior. She’s trying to control insect populations to keep humans safe from insect-borne illnesses.
I think it’s incredible that all the Science Twitter guests have been women so far and that women are well represented on the panel of experts. Bill and Bill Nye Saves the World really seem to encourage diversity in the scientific community, which just makes him even cooler.