A vegan cheese that tastes like the real thing? Lab project working on just that

Cheese-lovers who have tried vegan cheese often bemoan that it won't melt, stretch or brown, and it usually lacks that characteristic tangy, savoury flavour that makes cheese quite simply delicious.

Well, listen up, because plans are afoot to make a new kind of cheese. It will taste and feel just like the real deal, its producers say.

But it is made in a lab. And without any cows.

In east London's Hackney Wick, start-up Better Dairy is recreating the protein in milk that makes cheese, well, cheesey.

"Casein is the thing that gives cheese its melt, its stretch, its gooey-ness," says CEO Jevan Nagarajah. "And so with just casein you are 90% of the way towards traditional cheese."

Much like a brewer adds yeast to make beer, these scientists are using yeast to brew casein.

The process is called precision fermentation, and it could hold the key to tackling climate damage caused by the dairy industry.

Better Dairy simply re-writes the yeast's genetic code to tell it what to make, adds sugar and oxygen, then ferments it in vats to produce casein.

The result is molecularly identical to the real milk protein, but vegan. And that resemblance makes it perfectly safe to eat, they say.

Precision fermentation is used to make things like insulin, vanilla flavouring and supplements in baby formula.

US-based Perfect Day is already selling its cultivated dairy on the market across the pond, having passed regulation there.

It says it can cut emissions by up to 97% and fresh water use by 99%, compared with traditional dairy. And because it can be grown in a lab, it doesn't need any pasture land.

Dairy cows and fields to grow their feed take up the equivalent of 20% of the United Kingdom's land. Much of that space is desperately needed for things like tree-planting, building homes and restoring nature - the UK has some of the worst biodiversity on Earth.

Every day, the UK's roughly 1.9 million cows each release up to 500 litres of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Hence the government's advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), say Britons need to cut their meat and dairy intake by a fifth in order to meet our climate targets.

The CCC's Dr Niki Rust says increasing demands on land mean "tough decisions need to be made on what we want from our land and where we're willing to have trade-offs".

Without consuming slightly less meat and dairy, which would also be healthier, "we'll need to make harsher emissions cuts elsewhere," she warns.

How does it taste?

But eating less dairy may sound too much like a sacrifice for some of us. Consumers who have tried vegan cheese often complain it lacks the tangy taste, crumbly texture and deep savouriness of the real thing.

But Mr Nagarajah believes his product will mean people no longer have to choose between enjoyment and ethics, and can instead get "the best of both worlds".

"We want to produce products that taste as great as traditional dairy, without using any animals as part of the production process," he adds.

"There's a whole host of people that are becoming vegan and vegetarian because of sustainability goals. And I entirely applaud them."

But not enough people are making that shift, he says.

"If we can offer a cheese that tastes like a cheese," more people are more likely to cut down on real