A Portion of Duckweed?
Will we all be eating duckweed soon? Flemish researchers think we should be. They have found that duckweed - also known as water lentils - provides an excellent meat substitute.
We are eating more and more meat substitutes these days. A lot of research is also being carried out on ways to get the proteins we normally obtain from meat from other food sources. The LemnaPro agriculture project run by the research centre Inagro, VIVES university college, Ghent University and Flanders' FOOD is also looking at some of these uses for duckweed.
Water lentils
Duckweed is a fast-growing plant that floats on water - meaning that it does not need farmland to grow. Moreover, it is packed with protein and contains many vitamins and antioxidants.
People were already eating duckweed centuries ago. Researchers in the Netherlands found an Old Dutch book on spices from 1640 containing recipes that used "water lentils" - another name for duckweed. The same name is also used today in German (Wasserlinzen) and French (lentilles d'eau). Israeli company, GREENONYX, sells duckweed as "green caviar”.
Safe to grow and safe to eat
So it has a name ... but, of course, it also had to be scientifically proven that water lentils could be safely grown, eaten and digested. This was confirmed a few years ago, when the water lentil species Wolffia arrhiza and Wolffia globosa were officially approved by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
On the menu
Now it is approved. So why aren’t we seeing Flemish-grown water lentils in the shops yet? The reason is that the cultivation process in Flanders still needs to be optimised. So we’ll have to wait a little longer before we can tuck into all that green goodness.