Solar Foods closes Series A financing for its first commercial factory
solarfoods.fi
solarfoods.fi
Except for anyone who has ever grown a plant.
(This is potentially quite impressive, of course, but I do think that characterising it as "this is the first time anyone has made food with CO2 and the sun" is quite funny.)
It's early days, but being able to produce food via industrial process is far more amenable to scaling and more predictable than agriculture under the open sky. I imagine it would also be possible to shorten supply chains buy producing the basic feedstock closer to where you produce the consumer food product. That's good for the environment and for food security.
One could picture a future earth where most of the open space is preserved for the wild, and us humans live in and around our cities. Wouldn't that be a nice change from the way we're currently destroying our only home.
I'm curious what your vision of "the wild" is and why humans are excluded from it?
Not to say you can't have some humans living there, but most of the space could be returned to nature, sans human civilization.
It would be nice. Will depend on whether the new industrial process is cheaper than spreading out into the wild. Also these economics are a function of how long-term our thinking is. E.g. fossil fuels are cheap in the short term, but expensive in the long term.
If you just a bit of too much or too little of something you will create a nutritionally deficient human.
All of these "artifical foods" are garbage, these "scientists" don't understand that real food is such a complicated blend of so many different things that you cannot just recreate it from some base building blocks like proteins, vitamins etc..
It also seems like you're confusing this company with companies like Soylent that are trying to create a nutritionally complete smoothie. You're correct that we probably don't understand nutrition well enough yet to make a single food that would lead to optimum nutrient levels, but in my opinion it doesn't really matter. Almost all humans are somewhat nutritionally deficient; eating a food designed to have optimum nutrient levels will probably make you less deficient than average and you can always supplement a Soylent diet with other foods.
Hence why we can estimate Daily Recommended Intake; for example this nutritional profile https://www.completefoods.co/diy/nutrient-profiles/51e4e6ca7... which would give you the mix of vitamins and minerals and carbs and fats you need.
From there, you can mix up your ingredients sourced from https://www.completefoods.co/diy/ingredients or buy it from a company https://soylent.com/products/powder-original (not affiliated but I have bought some at one point.)
Now, you can tell me it's "not real food". It's a No True Scotsman fallacy, but if anything, sure. I agree. It's not a burger. But it is edible and it will sustain you for possibly weeks to months. A few people on the internet said they've done it.
I've eaten Soylent. It's ok. Can't say I'd want to eat it every day of my life but I have had moments where I was busy or not interested in cooking -- and then, for those cases, I imagine a carefully engineered Soylent will give you a more balanced diet than the Taco Bell I got in a hurry because I was hungry and didn't have time / want to cook.
Now if you think scientists who spent a decade or more of their life studying nutrition either for a civilian or military purpose are morons, then fine, have that opinion.
But I think processed food is a nicer option to have than no food, if I needed to feed my family and had very little money. Soylent clocks in at $1.82/meal. Now I won't deny you might be able to make beans and rice for cheaper than that, but Soylent looks like a nice, balanced, cost-effective option compared to spending $20 at a restaurant.
You cannot do that because you incorrectly think that there is all there is to food: there are many things that we eat all the time which we are not aware of that end up being important to our diet.
It's arrogant to think you can "sum" ingredients and actually get all the nutrients that you need.
There's no magic here that could in theory prevent replacing part or all of a diet with differently derived foods.
This protein by itself would potentially just be a small part of a healthy diet, but it's the start of something bigger.
At best, it would become an alternative to existing protein powders made from milk or plant crops, assuming the amino acid profile is good and it doesn’t cause allergies/reactions in some people.
My hope is that this would let us disconnect nutrition from crop-failure-due-to-weather (well, normal weather like drought or unseasonal rains) and (maybe) become post-scarcity with respect to nutrition. Just as solar, wind and batteries allow us to create reliable electricity sustainably and reduces energy prices, I hope this technology allows us to reduce the risk of famine and reduce the base cost of a (healthy) calorie.
Plus in theory this could be used to support space colonies, which I think would be a nice addition to humanity's skillset.
Another competitor in this space is the California-based company Air Protein.
I wonder how tolerant it is of unreliable power; it could be an interesting way to soak up the 'spare' power often produced by large renewable deployments.
Storing hydrogen as food is fantastic, since food can be stored much less expensively than gaseous or liquid hydrogen and for much longer periods of time.
What next? Sugars? Oils? Fats?
Basically every plant is making "protein out of thin air". Most of the carbon in plants is from atmospheric CO2. And if you use electric lighting, it's "CO2 and electricity".
This is just marketing, plain and simple.
Yes, we could use foods produced using proteins from companies like Solar Foods - but it's not necessary if we don't use 90% of our soybean production to feed animals.
However, I agree that something like you described would also be great. I'm unsure if it's necessary though, because going down that road will require a lot capital and human resources. Could we use that for something more needed?
0: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Edit: Added source.
Just switching animal proteins is a big change. And chickens are omnivores. Feeding them invertebrates instead of feed corn would be a more natural diet for them, and you can use food no longer fit for humans as the feedstock for those invertebrates without switching humans to cricket flour.
I know of a guy who uses cows, pigs, and chickens to control pathogen load on his farm. The lifecycle of flies on cow manure are very predictable, and with some discipline you can use it as feedstock for the chickens. We know how to do this outside, I doubt they know how to do it in a feed lot (although, making it work in a feedlot would necessarily result in better sanitation for the cows/pigs, since you'd have to isolate their waste chronologically).
Part of pathogen control is sending your inputs through as many diverse digestive tracts as you can. Or using a ton of chemicals. Mammal->insect->chicken->human is pretty good for eliminating parasites, though maybe not salmonella.
[ETA] Most of what I said about chicken feed is also true of pigs, although their footprint is somewhere between the two extremes.
Edit: Yup, insect farms typically use grains as the feed. Grains which you could eat directly (after baking or cooking, of course) which would be more calorically efficient. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/americas-...
I know from a couple days at a food bank that cows can eat pretty bad apples, but there are badness levels that would be much safer for grubs or larvae to eat.
Feed corn takes a lot of water though, and I don't know how much longer we'll have that.
Black soldier fly larvae can be fed almost any organic matter, including waste. The use of grain as feed for insect farms (which can largely be attributed to grain subsidies) doesn't imply it's the end-all energy input.
If a fruit tree survives browsing by deer, for instance, it is much better protected from some very common diseases that overwinter on the ground under the tree.
Because of this, Mark Shepard and a few other people (especially that guy who wants to use cows in Africa to control erosion) think we should have about a quarter as many animals on our farms, but that every farm should have them. The animals are there to work first, produce calories second.
It's not a yes/no question, it's a matter of degrees. We should be eating less meat, and sourcing it from more places, and less worried about Grade-A cuts (fewer steaks, more stews)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241...
(This can, of course, be expressed as a dimensionless number since both numerator and denominator are in units of energy.)
Also, how does this efficiency compare in absolute, quantitative terms to competing solutions like Calysta FeedKind?
But a feature to bring the <title> from the site upon URL submission would be useful.
Who writes these press releases? "single-cell protein" really?!?
There is a path for the ammonia to be directly source from the air as well via plasma nitrogen fixation. [2]