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The New Botany Bay: Tasmania and the Second Founding of Food

December 4, 2025 |

“Land ho!”

The cry cracked across the waves like musket fire. The decks of the Elizabeth Starbuck were slick with oil and brine, the air heavy with salt and smoke. Somewhere south of the Roaring Forties, on a moonless night when the seas rose like black cathedrals, Captain Henry Ward Collier braced against the quarterdeck rail as the wind howled through the rigging like a dying beast. Fifty-foot seas. Barrels lashed tight. A ship heavy with oil and hope. Ahead lay the convict port of Hobart—capital of Van Diemen’s Land, 4000 leagues sou’west of Nantucket.

“Hands to the pumps!” Collier bellowed, one hand gripping the rail, the other signaling the helmsman. The men bent their backs until knuckles whitened and muscles stood like ropes beneath their sleeves. A rogue wave slammed the bow; the deck shuddered, the try-works hissed, and a barrel shifted in the hold with the sound of a distant thunderclap.  Tasmania—though raw, cold, convict-torn—was the one place where a whaler could find fresh water, dry timber, and a few hours’ sleep before the next long chase. Collier narrowed his eyes toward the unseen coast.

“Botany Bay behind us. Hobart ahead. Drive ‘er home.”

That was…the world as it was — a world of tallow and try-works, of flesh rendered for light, of oceans hunted for the fuel of cities. But if you step ashore in Hobart today and walk the same waterfront where Collier once traded barrels for biscuit, you’ll find a different kind of commerce unfolding. Instead of the hard arithmetic of extraction, Tasmania hums with a new kind of ingenuity — kitchens, fermenters, foragers, and chefs all rewriting the relationship between land, flavor, and biology. The old Van Diemen’s Land, and it’s northern Sydney-based cousin Botany Bay, belonged to convict chains and whale oil. The new one belongs to plants, precision, and pleasure.

Botany Bay, in its day, was the last stop before exile. Today the world heads down under for different reasons: not punishment, but adventure; not for detention, but reinvention. We have entered the new Botany Bay— the world of plants. A food future built not from carcass and scarcity, but from ingenuity, biology, and abundance. A new birth of freedom. Off with the shackles of only-meat-tastes-like-meat. And Tasmania is the perfect place to witness the transformation.

Because this year, the island is hosting something Captain Collier could never have imagined: an eight-day gourmet vegan tour—a pilgrimage through indigenous bush foods, mushroom tunnels, cheese-making workshops, and waterfront tastings that celebrate the second founding of the food system. It’s a regular thing, these days — unheard of even a decade ago.

In the morning, you can stand in the Cascade Female Factory, where convict women once labored under impossibly harsh conditions. By evening, you can sit at Aloft with a multi-course plant-based tasting menu that would make a Parisian chef blush. At Salamanca Market—once a provisioning ground for whalers—you can nibble plant-built worlds from oat-milk gelato to lupin-based pâtés. At Tunnel Hill Mushroom Farm, you can watch gourmet fungi emerge from a decommissioned railway tunnel like some culinary secret long hidden in the earth. Tasmania isn’t just a destination. It has become a mirror—reflecting the old world of extraction and the new world of design, side by side.

And it raises the question: How did vegan food evolve from substitutes to contenders? To answer that, we must look at the science steering the new Botany Bay.

The Science of the New Plant Frontier

The new Botany Bay is not a destination but a design space — a place where molecules are drafted into roles their ancestors never imagined. Far beyond lentils and tofu, the frontier now spans plant proteins, precision fermentation, 3D printing, structured fats, and AI-driven flavor engineering.

Plant protein engineering has advanced from simple extrusion to highly tuned alignment of pea, mung bean, chickpea, oat, and fava proteins. These are pushed into fibrous “muscle-like” structures that give modern plant meats their chew, pull, and tear. In the realm of eggs, mung bean proteins have become the unlikely star: JUST Egg built a global category on a legume that foams, binds, and scrambles like a hen’s offering — a quiet revolution hatched in stainless steel.

Seafood, long considered the trickiest category, is undergoing its own renaissance. Konjac-based shrimp, jackfruit tuna, and algae-oil salmon spreads are already common, while in Europe, companies like Revo Foods are 3D-printing salmon fillets layer by layer — a biomimetic architecture more reminiscent of aerospace engineering than aquaculture.

Dairy has leapt forward through precision fermentation, where microbes now produce casein and whey identical to the proteins found in cow’s milk. These become cream cheeses, ice creams, and yogurts that behave exactly like dairy because, at the molecular level, they are dairy — just without the cow. Fat—the great make-or-break of flavor—is being reimagined too. Lypid’s structured fats hold their form at high heat, delivering sear, sizzle, and succulence, while global flavor houses like Givaudan increasingly map aroma molecules with AI, recreating grilled, roasted, and umami notes with a level of precision that borders on cartography.

Even bakers are joining the design revolution. Chickpea aquafaba now whips into meringues and macarons that once depended on eggs, the foam held aloft not by chicken biology but by the hidden chemistry of legumes. The message is simple: if it was once made through extraction, it can now be built through design.

Who’s Buying the New Botany Bay?

Contrary to early stereotypes, the plant-based tide is not driven primarily by vegans but by flexitarians — the millions of consumers who are reducing meat without abandoning it. While Millennials lead the shift, balancing conscience with cost and curiosity, Gen Z has turned food choice into identity: sustainability isn’t a virtue signal; it’s the default expectation. Older consumers join the movement from a different angle, nudged not by climate charts but by cholesterol reports.

Geographically, North America still drives the most revenue, but Europe — especially the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands — is shaping daily adoption, aisle by aisle. Asia-Pacific is racing ahead in innovation investment, with Singapore and China treating alternative proteins as national strategy rather than dietary curiosity. By 2024, nearly half the world’s consumers self-identified as “plant-curious,” seeking reduced-meat options even if not fully ready to change tribes.

Momentum: The Scaling of a Designed Food System

Retailers no longer treat plant-based foods as specialty items. Walmart, Costco, Kroger, Tesco, and Carrefour have carved out dedicated aisles and long-term supply agreements, signaling permanence rather than trend. Fast-food chains — the true laboratories of global taste — have quietly become key accelerators. Burger King’s plant-based Impossible Whopper is now available in more than 70 countries, McDonald’s continues expanding its McPlant trials, and KFC China regularly partners with local startups for plant-based nuggets.

The numbers tell the same story. Global plant-based food sales surpassed $30 billion in 2023, growing roughly 12% year over year. Plant-based milks now make up about 15% of U.S. retail milk sales — a share unthinkable a decade ago. Investment into alternative proteins has held above $1 billion annually since 2021, even amid broader venture contraction. Institutions are integrating plant-based options as standard fare: airlines like Delta, universities, hospitals, and public procurement programs all signal a shift from curiosity to infrastructure.

The Remaining Seas to Cross

No voyage is free of weather, and the new Botany Bay has its storms. Price parity remains the stiffest headwind — plant-based meats still cost 20–50% more than their animal counterparts, a premium that slows adoption in the global middle class. Taste, too, can create doldrums; early novelty wears thin if flavor does not rise to meet the promise of the technology. Sodium levels, additives, and “processing stigma” linger like old superstitions on a sailor’s tongue.

And then there are the shoals of regulation — the recurring battles over whether oat-based products may call themselves “milk,” or whether a mycelium steak deserves the dignity of the word “meat.” These disputes may seem semantic, but labels are the navigational charts of the supermarket, and unclear waters delay the voyage. Yet the course holds. Costs fall as fermenters scale. New fats and fibers come online. Mycelium whole-cuts multiply. And every year, more consumers step aboard.

The New Age of Design

The old Botany Bay stands unchanged — stone, seawind, the faint echo of chains. But Tasmania today signals a different world rising, one where the logic of extraction gives way to the mathematics of design. 

The new Tasmania s not a penal colony, we’ve left “Botany Bay” for the new botany, a new birth of freedom in the simplest, most universal act we perform: eating. A world where food is not something we dig out of the earth or carve from an animal, but something we design — deliberately, intelligently, joyfully.

After the Storm

The vegan travelers gathered for their farewell dinner on the Hobart waterfront, asthe lights from the Brooke Street Pier shimmered across the harbor. Near the gangway, one of the guests paused beside a heavy iron bollard—rusted, pitted, and older than any building in sight. A guide noticed the curiosity and stepped closer.

“That one,” the guide said, tapping the iron with a knuckle, “held the mooring ropes of the whalers and the convict ships. Nineteenth century. Some of them sailed straight from Botany Bay. Others came down from New Zealand grounds, battered to pieces, just praying to reach Van Diemen’s Land before the barrels shifted or the mast gave way.”

The guest brushed a hand across the cold metal.

And for a moment—just a flicker—the centuries folded. A wave slammed a hull. A rope strained in the wind. The deck of the Elizabeth Starbuck heaved beneath oil-slicked boots. Captain Collier’s voice tore across the storm: “Lash those barrels! Drive her home!” Barrels groaned. Men bent to the pumps. The sea pitched like a living thing.

Then the vision dissolved into warmth and laughter from the dining deck above. The guest turned to see the others taking their seats beneath soft lantern light. Steam curled from bowls of mushroom stew; plates of mycelium steaks glistened beside precision-fermented cheeses; a musician tuned a guitar for a bush ballad that would carry the night. The old world, the guide had said, survived only by chasing giants through violent seas.

The new world needs no chase at all.

Further Currents in the Plant-Designed World

For readers who wish to explore the wider frontier of plant-built foods, materials, and technologies, here are a few recent sightings from the Digest’s Conning Tower.

Designing Flavor, Not Extracting It

A quiet revolution in taste and ingredients.

The Age of Mycelium & Plant Materials

Where mushrooms become architecture and fashion becomes biology.

Plants Remaking Industry

From bottles to batteries, the designed world expands.

Category: Top Stories

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