I wonder how long it will be before we can synthesize food directly from electricity and basic elements? I suspect it's coming relatively soon for fats.
Imagine a ball of fat plus a glass of water for lunch. Yummy!!! :)
Imagine a ball of fat plus a glass of water for lunch. Yummy!!! :)
They supposedly create "proteins...produced from CO2, water, and electricity." According to their numbers, yield per unit of water is 10x soy and at least 500x beef.
Plus protein are only 1 type of body input - what about carbs, fat, minerals, vitamins etc.
Plus protein are only 1 type of body input - what about carbs, fat, minerals, vitamins etc.
It's important that they also use some vitamins and nutrients, but it's not clear what they mean, and there is a lot of room for cheating here.
With CO2, water and electricity you can produce carbohydrates and fat, but you can't produce proteins because proteins have Nitrogen, so the question is what is their source of Nitrogen?
You can get Nitrogen from the N2 in the air, but it's very difficult to transform the N2 of the air into a form that can be used by living things. Only some bacteria and archaea can do that. But yeast, fungus, animals and plants can't do that. (Some plants (and animals?) host some bacteria to get usable Nitrogen in exchange of food and protection.)
We can transform N2 from the air into ammonia (or something similar) in an industrial plant, it uses a lot of electricity. It's one of the biggest invention of the XX century. Without artificial ammonia the global agricultura production would fall to less than the half of the current level.
So ignoring the source of the Nitrogen in a system to produce proteins is very misleading.