Ideas What if your favourite food became extinct?
Mar 9, 2026
Lenore Newman, culinary geographer and director of the Food and Agricultural Institute, explores taste extinction and the rise of lab-grown foods. She traces how the passenger pigeon disappeared and was replaced by industrial proteins. She explains the idea of an agricultural singularity and discusses cellular agriculture, precision fermentation, fungal proteins, and the cultural questions around synthetic seafood.
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Chicken Replaced The Pigeon In The Market
- The passenger pigeon collapse created a protein gap that agricultural innovation later filled with chicken.
- Chicken production scaled via indoor rearing and vitamin D feeding innovations, enabling mass poultry replacement of wild fowl.
Mrs Steele's Vitamin D Breakthrough
- Newman tells of Mrs. Wilmer Steele, a 1920s New Jersey farmer who discovered feeding chickens vitamin D enabled indoor year-round rearing.
- Steele scaled to 10,000 birds and helped found the mass poultry industry that made chicken ubiquitous and cheap.
Malthus Was Spectacularly Wrong About Food
- Malthus predicted persistent scarcity because population grows exponentially while agriculture grows linearly, but history proved otherwise.
- Agricultural technology allowed food output to expand exponentially, overturning Malthus's core claim.