By Naama Barak, ISRAEL21c

With the world’s population expected to rise to a staggering 9.8 billion by 2050, the question arises how to feed everyone nutritious, healthy food without ruining the planet’s resources. A surprising solution might be found in a food that was eaten by the Aztecs hundreds of years ago: spirulina.

While nowadays better known in the form of dietary supplement pills and superfood powders, spirulina is in fact a biomass of blue-green algae. It was a daily food source in the Americas until the 16th century, when it lost popularity as lakes were drained for agriculture and urban development.

It’s also so nutritious – dried spirulina contains 5 percent water, 8% fat, 24% carbohydrates and around 60% protein – that it’s been suggested as dietary support for long-term space missions.

But how to incorporate it into everyday diets?

A team of graduate students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology found one very Israeli answer to that – a falafel enriched with spirulina.

It took the students – Meital Kazir, Yarden Abuhassira-Cohen, Hani Shkolnikov, Hila Tarazi and Ina Nephomnyshy – a year to conceive, develop and produce their “Algalafel.”

The hard work paid off, as the team recently won first prize in a competition held by EIT Food, a European initiative focused on the food sector.

The second prize in the two-day event hosted by the Technion went to a team from the German University of Hohenheim for “Algini,” a lentil-based product enriched with spirulina. Third place went to students from Finland’s University of Helsinki, who created “Spurtti,” a vegan oatmeal dessert enriched with spirulina.

EIT Food supports creative and economically sustainable initiatives that promote health, access to quality food and the environment. The project included three industrial partners: Israel’s Algatechnologies, which supplied the raw microalgae materials used by the competing teams, Germany’s Doehler and Finland’s Fazer.