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Comment by slededit | Hacker News Reader

> There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.

There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.

The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.

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Could you cite studies and give examples?

What specifically are you looking for? That synthetic foods exist? Google provides many results on the subject. You probably have already eaten some synthetic ingredients.

For a real world example sugar was first synthesized in 1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis

Carbohydrate synthesis is also a well studied field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis

Many vitamin additives today are artifical. And of course artificial flavoring has vast commercial adoption. In the case of McDonald's french fries this was used to dramatically reduce the amount of saturated fat while maintaining the beef flavor - they are no longer deep fried in beef talow.

We can't yet recreate the texture of a pepper, but we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life. Organic chemistry is a rich field of study.

You didn't referenced anything approaching wholesome food.

Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned.

> we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life

That is a low bar - being capable at any cost to synthesis a smoothie with 'the necessities of life' including growth? good health? You didnt even reference that.

“Wholesome” is not a scientific term.

The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.

It is a plain language term, pseudoscience most often alludes to science by misrepresenting scientific terms. In this context "wholesome" plainly refers to foods which provide broad but not necessarily complete nutrition, so they can be eaten perfectly safely in bulk like potatoes and rice (note the objective of this thread).

Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.

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