The vanilla drink is the color of new butter and tastes almost as good
creamy and sweet, like a liquid pudding. Next I try a pair of golden cookies,
lightly touched with sugar they’re soft, chewy and filling. Last is a mustard
yellow dipping sauce, tangy, that coats a handful of pretzels with a pleasant
honeyed zing. Every reporting trip should be this tasty.
Each of the experimental food items I’m trying at a laboratory in South San
Francisco has a nutritional profile that puts its supermarket counterpart to
shame. The vanilla drink has 20% fewer calories and 75% less saturated fat than
regular milk, while the dipping sauce has 74% fewer calories and 85% less
overall fat than your average honey mustard dip. These are diet foods that taste
sinfully good.
But the most unexpected thing about these foods is their secret ingredient:
all-natural algae. That’s right, the next generation of diet foods to reach your
plate could be made from those single-celled organisms that float on stagnant
ponds, courtesy of the South San Francisco biofuel startup Solazyme. “If you
asked me as a food scientist if we could have reduced calories like this, I
would have said no way,” says Leslie Norris, the Solazyme chemist who concocted
the delicious treats. “But we’ve done it.”
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