Reuse of Agro-Industrial Waste as Fermentation Substrate for Food Production

Meeting the growing demand for food is one of the greatest challenges to be overcome by humanity in the coming decades. Our food production system is completely dependent on agriculture and livestock, whose expansion is horizontally limited and cause huge environmental impacts. Moreover, it generates large volumes of wastes both in the field and during food processing that need to be valorized so a more sustainable world can be built. Fermentation uses the ability of microorganisms to transform such organic matter-rich wastes/byproducts into new foods and ingredients. In this chapter the use of fermentation as a circular and an environmentally sustainable tool to produce more food in quantity and quality (texture, aroma, flavors) and food ingredients that will help society to reduce the impacts of feeding its population. From the characterization of main food producing and processing wastes to recent technological advances, the challenges for traditional, biomass and precision biomass to meet sustainable goals of food production is discussed in this chapter.