They looked, smelled and tasted like your average fish balls, but the salmon snacks served on crackers in the 快猫短视频 test kitchen were made with a large share of ground-up bones. Don鈥檛 be surprised if your next chicken nugget or fish stick is stuffed with edible bones too.
A Finland-based startup called SuperGround has developed a method of pulverising fish or chicken bones into a nutritious paste that can be added to meat products. Two large seafood processing companies 鈥� Kalavapriikki and Royal Greenland 鈥� started testing paste made this way in some of their products in late 2023.
鈥淚t鈥檚 always better to eat everything you can eat,鈥� says , the founder of SuperGround. Consuming bones along with meat uses more of the animal, making it a more efficient way to produce food. And yet, he points out, huge amounts of bones go to waste.
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Many cultures use bones to make broth or eat softened bones as part of their meals, but in Europe and North America deboned meat is the norm, and Vekkeli says few people spend hours making their own broth. Instead, lots of these 鈥渉ard parts鈥� end up in landfills: the world鈥檚 leave behind so many bones that their remains serve as a potential marker of the Anthropocene 鈥� the age of humans.
鈥淚 have dreamt of using bones,鈥� says at Cornell University in New York. Many large bones are used as a source of collagen for gelatin, and smaller ones are put in animal feed and fertiliser, but he says this is less efficient than eating them directly. Regenstein adds that bones contain calcium and other nutrients not found in muscle. 鈥淔eeding them to humans is the best way to do it,鈥� he says. 鈥淚鈥檓 pro bone.鈥�
SuperGround attempts to make bones more palatable by grinding them up, briefly exposing them to high heat and pressure, then grinding them further into a paste of miniscule particles.
The resulting bone 鈥渕ass鈥� can be incorporated into other meat products, increasing the amount of food produced from the same number of animals by as much as 40 per cent, according to Vekkeli. Getting more meat from fewer animals would, in theory, lower environmental impacts and save money. Vekkeli says the process also uses less energy than the hours of boiling needed to make broth and leaves key nutrients intact.
But will consumers eat ground bones? In an unpublished study SuperGround conducted with more than 100 people at the University of Turku in Finland, participants reported no preference between fish balls with or without the paste, though they slightly preferred chicken nuggets containing bone paste (described as 鈥渕eatier鈥�). When 快猫短视频 sampled the same fish balls used in this test, which contained 15 per cent salmon heads and bones, the snacks had a spongy consistency and a fishy flavour, but indeed were largely indistinguishable from regular fish balls.
Vekkeli acknowledges that eating less meat would have far greater environmental benefits than simply eating more of the bones, but says gradual steps that change what the average person eats are also necessary. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a lot easier to use a machine than to change how people act,鈥� he says.
