Making 'food out of thin air'
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
The article also notes that:
> Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed
If this invention can produce protein at a low enough cost -- which seems doubtful -- it might be interesting as a form of protein for animal feed. The trouble is that protein sources for animal feed are typically extremely cheap. For instance, "peanut cake" is a byproduct of peanut oil manufacture. It's what's left over after the oil is extracted, and it's ~35% protein, full of vitamins, and almost as cheap as dirt. I don't see how something made in a vat can compete with that.
I suppose the "homogenized bacterial carcasses" could also be purified and broken down into their constituent amino acids, which would be useful if somewhat more niche.
These seem to sell fine:
compressed curdled cow leakage that was left on a shelf to grow mold for up to a few years - cheese
wheat slurry foamed by bacterial activity then baked - bread
And see my sibling comment about bacterially-leavened bread.
I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source.
Mainly demonstrating you can literally sell rotten milk so long as you label it "traditional".
> I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source.
We never communicated across the globe by swiping our fingers across small sheets of transparent fused sand with glowing lights behind them, until one day we did.
We never survived having our heart removed and a different one put in its place, until one day we did.
We never saw the far side of the moon, until one day we did.
But, as it happens, we have already done this with algae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement)
Not all changes are progress, but all progress involves change.
Cheese is the coagulated protein of fermented milk, not rotten milk. If it was rotten nobody would be able to eat it without dying often.
Cheese is traditional, it's one of the main ways that diverse cultures around the world have harnessed the activity of bacteria to transform food and preserve it or alter its organoleptic qualities to make it more pleasant to eat.
Works great without the need for experimental tech of dubious long-term safety, too.
The difference is fundamentally if the result is one you like.
I ferment, you grew a culture, they let their food rot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
> Works great without the need for experimental tech of dubious long-term safety, too.
Several thousands of years ago, probably by some combination of accident and disaster (or possibly just a dare) that resulted in some humans sucking on a wild aurochs' teat, followed by an unknown duration (estimated to be a few thousand years) of this drink not being consumable by adults (adult lactose tolerance is a relatively recent mutation in humans) before someone in a relatively cool climate forgot to add salt to the cow stomach they were storing it in, the salt having been necessary for preservation in a hot climate but also prevented the necessary bacteria for cheese from growing. Not that any of them at the time knew any of that, because they had no means to see bacteria, let alone perform tests for lactose in the milk and lactase in the drinkers.
The cows now milk themselves thanks to tech having replaced the need for the milkmaids whose experience catching cowpox inspired the first smallpox vaccine ("vacca" being the latin for cow).
Basically everything invented before the industrial revolution was people guessing wildly, and if their guesses didn't kill them then people copied it.
That is the tradition that led to this: a tradition of FAFO and YOLO.
When milk is fermented to make cheese the fermentation is short (around half an hour) and the result is a lowering of the milk pH to at most around 4.0 to 4.5 (from 5.5 to 6.5 of fresh milk depending on species). It's really not a big change and you can't tell just by sight or smell as with rotten food. Sometimes you can't even taste the change in pH because it's so small. The purpose of the fermentation is to create ideal acidity conditions for the rennet enzymes to work.
When rennet is added it causes some of the proteins in milk to coagulate. That's when milk becomes cheese. That's when fluid milk turns into a solid and it's exactly the opposite of what happens to food when it rots. Hard cheese will not rot even if you leave it for years. It just turns rock-hard and it's still edible through grating.
I don't know how cheese was first crated. We can speculate but we'll never know. I guess everything we eat today took some FAFO and YOLO to try out for the first time. I bet lots of people died before they figured out what mushrooms are safe to eat or at least sat for days on the (paleolithic) loo cursing under their breath.
"""Below are some definitions of fermentation ranging from informal, general usages to more scientific definitions.[3]
1. Preservation methods for food via microorganisms (general use).
2. Any large-scale microbial process occurring with or without air (common definition used in industry, also known as industrial fermentation).
3. Any process that produces alcoholic beverages or acidic dairy products (general use).
4. Any energy-releasing metabolic process that takes place only under anaerobic conditions (somewhat scientific).
5. Any metabolic process that releases energy from a sugar or other organic molecule, does not require oxygen or an electron transport system, and uses an organic molecule as the final electron acceptor (most scientific)."""
[3] Microbiology An Introduction (10 ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pearson Benjamin Cummings. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-321-58202-7 — apparently, but I can't confirm because the thing was removed form archive.org
Also, compare this:
> and the result is a lowering of the milk pH
with this:
"""Once the heart stops, the blood can no longer supply oxygen or remove carbon dioxide from the tissues. The resulting decrease in pH and other chemical changes cause cells to lose their structural integrity, bringing about the release of cellular enzymes capable of initiating the breakdown of surrounding cells and tissues.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decomposition
So yeah, I'm sticking with my claim: in conventional usage, the same chemo-biological mechanisms get different names depending on if you like the result or not.
Spirulina, nostoc, fat choy. They're relatively niche though.
- yogurt is not animal fat; it's milk, with or without the fat, but the crucial part for yogurtmaking is the lactose and protein, because that's what the bacteria eat
- 'animal fat' is ambiguous but usually refers to adipose tissue cut from the body of an animal, which yogurt essentially never contains
- while initially you inoculate the yogurt with a tiny quantity of bacteria, they multiply exponentially, doubling about 20 times, or a factor of a million. most of the bacteria die before yogurtmaking is complete, but the majority of the non-liquid mass of the yogurt at the end consists of living or dead bacteria
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/27713/how-much-o....
I’ve been incarcerated in the USA and I think maybe that characterization is false :0
People will respond to anything you can market effectively and sell for cheap. You're not targeting their analytical brain, just their primitive taste buds that can be easily manipulated.
Doesn’t sound all that different to fermented vat-grown single-cell mycelium protein, which is commercially successful in the UK under the “Quorn” brand name.
Weird. Wonder if I just got a bad batch or something...
Perhaps, but people do have diverse senses of smell, so it's entirely possible you can smell an odour that I can't. Or that you'll find it bad and I won't.
(Weird fact about me: to me, wet dog smell is pleasant and indistinguishable from scrambled eggs).
For animal feed, perhaps. For human consumption, at a minimum, it'd be nice to have a variety of alternatives, such as for people who can't eat peanuts.
They seem to be aware of safety issues:
> “There were many boxes that had to be ticked,” Pitkänen told me. “Growth, safety, nutrition. All bacteria have mechanisms they use to hide and fight, a kind of chemical warfare. You need to find one that’s a pacifist.”
> ...they found their bacterium in the pewter blue shallows of the Baltic.
Current market price is around $350/ton, though, which makes it one of the cheapest protein sources around...
Edited to add: There's also soybean oil cake, sunflower oil cake, and others. Sunflower cake might be interesting as a low cost food/protein supplement in humans.
All the cool stuff happening in food these days is more chemistry than cooking.
Meh, our bodies can't even eat fatty meat / saturated fat in bulk quantities because it reduces liver LDL receptor expression that keeps ApoB in our arteries which lays down plaque and is independently causal for heart disease, and yet that fact that we've known for half a century doesn't stop Americans from speedrunning atherosclerosis.
Novel foods that our bodies have no evolutionary experience with have an advantage over familiar foods.
Isn't that what Vegemite / Marmite is? I seem to recall that brewers' yeast was the main ingredient.
Also, meat tastes really, really good
It's complicated. Not all calories are equal, this obviates the fact that those calories may be the main sources of specific proteins, vitamins and minerals etc. that are essential to human health and not easily obtained elsewhere.
I get what they're trying to promote but its not a completely valid standpoint to take, and I say this as a vegan.
Plus its not something easy to transition from for the majority of people because so many complex systems are involved that are resistant to change for a variety of reasons. Including profit motive and general resistance to change. (e.g. Just think about the amount of time it took the wine industry to move away from using cork even though it was proven new bottle sealing methods were superior.)
I still applaud the general idea, and they mention vitamin's, advantages of fermentation etc. later - but this paragraph really irked me.
Yes
And land is not fungible
Where I live, amongst sheep farms, there is not much land suitable for cropping
But the modern practice is using something consumable by human so the economic is different?
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-foot...
I have experience growing up human cells, fungi, and bacteria in bioreactors and it doesn’t scale like a chicken house or field of corn. Maybe the Finnish bacteria is better than meat but I have my doubts it gets to where it needs to be.
> Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed.
> We need more forests...they are home to many billions of plants, animals, bacteria and fungi whose complex metabolic interactions make up the biosphere with its crucial role in stabilizing the climate.
The article also mentions that photosynthesis is "surprisingly inefficient," which is why there's room to drastically reduce the area we need to feed our livestock.
Trying to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis is one of those "what could possibly go wrong?" ideas.
> It's been stated that the land efficiency for Solar Foods methods is about 20,000 times greater than for conventional farming.[8] Michael Le Page for the New Scientist took a more sceptical view, noting that the x20,000 improvement only applies to the factories themselves. If land use for Solar panels is taken into account, then land efficiency only improves by about x10.
Also, the false assumption is that the solar panels would be consuming usable arable land, although of course the deconstruction of the criticism that reduces from 20,000 times to 10 times isn't listed.
There's plenty of desert out there. There's also plenty of roofs and parking lots
Still a great trade going from 40% to 4%. But if we do manage some kind of really cheap nuclear, that'd be even better.
a quibble with this quote from the article
> Only a fraction of agricultural land (16%) is used to grow the crops that we eat directly,
as i understand it, part of their denominator is pastureland which is not really suitable for plowing. but it is surely true that by increasing that fraction by a factor of ¼ to 20% we could satisfy everyone's caloric needs with an entirely vegan diet
eating bacteria and other microorganisms is nothing new; yogurt, kefir, and natto are mostly bacteria, and of course microbial carcasses play key roles in not only the beer, bread, and kombucha mentioned in the article, but such foods as also wine, bread, most cheeses, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, soy sauce, many sausages, and tofu of strong odor
unfortunately, i have to agree with adept's comment that processing the homogenized bacterial carcasses through slaughtered livestock may be a way to reduce potential human health risks (as well as unfounded health concerns). we're currently experiencing a global obesity pandemic, causing a significant fraction of global mortality, which seems to be due to ultra-processed food. we're likely to see growing support for the bioreactionary position attributed to desantis in the article:
> Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.
And besides having the elements, how they are arranged is important too, as with the vitamin B12 example, or being in a way that can be assimilated correctly. Its not an one-size-fits-all protein or whatever that solves nutrition. Could prevent a calories deficit, and give some proteins/aminoacids, but that is not the whole story.
of course, the humans mostly aren't cannibals, but their food composition is similar to that of their bodies
the next element is calcium, 1.3%, which is mostly in bones, which are not food (the humans don't eat the bones when they eat meat) and which have a very long half-life. the recommended daily intake of calcium is about 1 gram per day, under 0.1% of the food. then we have phosphorus (not phosphor!) at 0.6%; sulfur at 0.3%; potassium, sodium, and chlorine at about 0.2% each; and magnesium at 0.05%. your entire cobalamin content is measured in milligrams, and cobalt is about 4% of cobalamin, so your entire body content of cobalt is down in the micrograms
so about 97% of your food is made of air, and the other 3% is made of rocks and soil
you are entirely correct that it's a very important 3%
fluorine isn't required at all, not even for plants. chromium isn't known to be, but might be. nickel might be too. boron is essential to plants but probably not animals. thanks for the reminders about zinc, copper, and iodine! and i didn't realize it, but you're right, manganese and molybdenum are essential to humans!
Aside a small interests to cut out all small and medium scale food productions, because industry of this kind demand a certain scale and if that's the future of food that's means few giants can subjugate a wide mass of people for mere strategic role in the society: being the sole who can feed people.
Essentially so far both nightmares and dreams, in practice we can do something but only for very few in survival mode consuming an immense amount of resources.
Yeah, but a lot of us wish we did. So maybe branding plant-based diets that way could be a compelling sales tactic with the nerd demographic.
There is no food shortage in the world. Famine is an economic and political problem, not a food shortage
This is worse than just a unneeded conceit, as it pushes further the meme that food is made not grown
Highly processed food is being recognised now as a major cause of obesity related illnesses, we need less of it not more of it
He knows exactly what all the land dedicated to human production would equate to in terms of biodiversity, environmental resilience, topsoil loss, carbon capture, all of it figured out!
Wish I had such confidence