What do chicken feathers taste like? Entrepreneurs propose turning waste into edible protein.
Chicken feathers open the door. The programme starts at the 2025 British Library food season, where a serious conversation about eating the future lands, oddly enough, on poultry waste. Sorawat Kittibhanthorn, originally from Thailand and trained at Central Saint Martins, treats feathers as part of a much bigger consumption problem. Chicken has changed the maths of waste. Since the 1960s, global chicken consumption has risen more than tenfold, and feathers are one of the bits left behind. The tone is curious rather than breathless. From there, the episode moves into climate change, food security, and ideas that may not stay niche for long. Rusty Rodriguez brings the harder edge. He describes a hotter, drier world where plant-fungi symbiosis could help protect food systems people tend to assume will keep working. Fertilizer is the next pressure point. The programme connects synthetic fertilizer to the Haber Bosch process, natural gas, and a reported two and a half percent of greenhouse gas emissions. That number gives the science some bite. If fertilizer manufacture can be decarbonized, the effects would reach farms and the climate at the same time. Gustav Forsberg looks to lightning, using its plasma and nitrogen-fixing chemistry as a model for getting usable nutrients to plants. Julia Glotz closes on a practical note: food businesses across the UK need to share experiments, failures, and lessons. Quiet work helps, but useful ideas need to travel.
