Summary Minute, March 5th 2026
Since the first Quaker Earthcare Gathering in 2022, and the concurrent publication of George Monbiot’s extensive review of agricultural adaptations to help make our global food supply chains sustainable (Regenesis), a small working group of Quakers has been following and learning about the exponential developments in novel food technologies. We have been glad to participate in the first and second Annual Conferences organised by Imperial College London and the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein where we feel our Quaker voices have been heard.
In parallel, we have been witnessing the climate adaptations made by our Rwandan and Chadian friends and colleagues working at the community grassroots level. We are closely involved with:
These relationships are showing us the need for regenerative and permaculture forms of agriculture, to preserve and repair the soil structure and microbiology in situ, while also creating the conditions for more sustainable microclimates. This requires the thoughtful use of “agricultural by-products” which are essential as the raw materials of compost.
We learned recently that the Rwandan government is asking about the decline in soil health, productivity, and nutritional value of crops since the systematic introduction of industrial fertilisers on hitherto fertile soils. When soil health is optimised, yields exceed those produced with artificial inputs both in terms of volume and nutrition.
We have also seen how very hard it is to remediate chronic malnutrition through a subsistence, plant-based diet alone. Valiant efforts to increase protein availability in villages through chicken or fish farming initiatives, for example, repeatedly fail: fish feed outprices market values of the fish produced and there are multiple biohazards involved (fish attract vermin which are followed by predators – which you don’t want to attract to your village!).
While a dynamic and well-managed permaculture cooperative can reach sustainability for the 100 families involved within 5 years and can offer expertise to refugees in camps on the Chadian Sudanese border, it cannot address the sheer scale of need among displaced refugee populations numbering in the millions.
Taken together, these are the reasons why the Quaker Future Foods Group is led by the question, “How can novel food technologies be made available at village and cooperative levels to supplement soil-based climate adaptations with a climate resilient way to produce simple proteins?”
Precision fermentation is the area which speaks to our concern, with the wish to see simple, single-cell protein-rich powders/pastes, bioidentical milk, edible oils and/or unstructured cultivated meat cells produced by villages for their own local scale circular economy where they would integrate readily into traditional one-pot cooking. Therefore, we are keen to support a research programme looking at ways of downscaling the bioengineering to achieve an installation on the scale of a community bakery or micro-brewery. We are aware that the technology involved is highly complex and we also trust in technological progress which has time and again turned the once unthinkable into an everyday norm. Market forces inevitably prevail and, as Quakers, we bring a vision which is not profit-driven but instead focuses on strengthening locally coherent, self-sustaining circular economies (in the U.K. also). We see a need for research into the development of a simplified, robust, and replicable means of production which can be accessible to the majority world population who are living beneath the poverty line while also being disproportionately impacted by climate collapses. We are open to discussing how we can contribute to such research. This could be in the form of supporting a research student who is qualified and motivated to make our vision into reality. Or collaborating with an entrepreneur with honed skills and ideas who has fallen foul of the “valley of death” between start-up and market. Or a skilled and innovative graduate who has yet to find their place in the novel foods employment ecosystem. We are open to hearing from such a person who shares our leading towards simplicity, sustainability, and equity.
Masters Project Imperial College London
Ruth Jones, Quaker Future Foods Working Group