NASA grants $125K to create a prototype of a universal food synthesizer | Hacker News Reader

NASA grants $125K to create a prototype of a universal food synthesizer

qz.com

96 pointsxadxad39 comments

I feel like hunger is much more likely to be solved with innovative economic thinking than with innovative engineering. We should be able to grow enough food for everyone as it is. That's not really the issue. The issue is getting the economics worked out so that we do grow enough food, and so that we can distribute it to everyone who needs it without breaking all of the economies.

You are right on track with this comment, but I'd go one step further to say that we already do grow enough food. We just don't distribute it equitably, at all. The fact that hunger, malnutrition, and starvation still plague humanity, is a choice that we have made. The most powerful among us have effectively decided that not everyone deserves food.

Yes, this! People keep trying to solve a problem they don't understand, that doesn't really exist. We have enough food in the World to feed our population. Countries like North Korea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo have starvation problems not from a lack of food in this World but from monsters running their government that won't allow their people the freedom to live their lives.

In spite of a growing population, farm land in the USA is declining. "In 1990, there were almost 987 million acres in farms in the U.S., that number was reduced to just under 943 million acres by 2000, and then reduced to 914 million acres in 2012." http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/landuse.html

Politics aside, there's an appalling amount of food waste in developed countries. It's certainly not as simple as "send all the not-pretty produce to Africa" or "ship all the no-longer-perfectly-fresh bread to North Korea," but there is a huge potential target for reducing what we throw away and getting it to people who need it.

The major problem, of course, is interfering with people's lifestyles, if only in marginal ways... we as first-world countries just don't handle having our convenience messed with very well.

there is a huge potential target for reducing what we throw away

Yes

and getting it to people who need it.

Not so sure about this one. Fostering dependence and quite simply the costs of airlifting tons of produce and bread to North Korea on the regular come to mind.

If we reduce the food waste it will only mean reduced food production, those in need would not get any of the former waste production.

You just touched all of my buttons wrt food and economics here.

First of all, just because food isn't used doesn't mean it is wasted. I don't like to go to the store all the time so I buy more food than I may end up using -- but I still consider it worth it.

Second there is not an limited amount of food in the world and there is no reason we have to cut down on our use in order to feed hungry Africans -- we can, as GP correctly pointed out -- feed the entire world.

At this point the only reason there is hunger anywhere in the world is bad governments and failed states -- Haiti is hell on earth (and has been before the recent earthquake), but it borders the Dominican republic, which is much better (if still far from the western world), NK is the worst place on earth with street urchins scavenging for single kernels of rice in animal dung, SK, which it borders, is a pretty good place to live and has basically no starvation.

It is one country today, but the same difference (albit to a lesser degree) could be seen between East and West Germany.

Finally, take the recent hunger situation in Africa -- people had to walk miles through the desert, leaving their dead and dying children behind in the sand because they couldn't carry them. They had to walk until they came out of Somalia and entered Kenya where they would receive held and food -- because the warlords of Somalia didn't allow the food aid into the country as they believed it was a western emperialist attempt to make Islam look bad.

a great amount of that waste is time sensitive foods but there are those moments when I been surprised by the date on canned or similar food and wonder, how did I forget that?

I do not think a lifestyle change is required on the Western world's part, this all about politics. Even when disasters strike not all aid is accepted and it is either purely political or with religious overtones.

So, the obvious question presents itself:

What is to be done with the countries that through corruption, incompetence, or malice prevent food aid from reaching their citizens? What exactly is the developed man's burden, here?

This is a tricky point.

If the developed world did not screw over the developing world in international trade agreements and prices...

the problem is that social solutions are much harder to implement than technological ones , and rarely do succeed.

But i've seen better solutions to this problem .one example is letting bacteria grow basic food elements at 10x less cost, like pronutria claims.another example is making high quality chicken substitute from soybean,which,depending on proces could be much cheaper than chicken.

>We should be able to grow enough food for everyone as it is.

We already grow more than enough food, and have for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste

To be fair, technology has allowed crop yields to grow considerably which has been credited with decreasing world hunger. Lower food prices is clearly a good thing, even though I agree more buying power for the world's poor would be better.

The actual purpose of this project is to provide years-long space travelers with food. This makes sense. The bit about solving world hunger looks to be a side aspiration of the creator.

The problem is that there economics is pretty simple, so there isn't much that can be invented here: you want the people who are currently starving to produce more stuff that others want to buy so that they can buy food for themselves and their family.

Economic innovations won't help with that, but engineering ones might.

Or just remove the trade barriers with Africa and start buying from them like we do with the Chinese.

As others have pointed out, this probably won't be all that useful in solving the worlds hunger problems.

I'd think the actual motivation for this (and especially for NASA to be involved) is having a durable, easy to transport yet not completely monotonous supply of food for long space flights.

This is probably rather long term thinking, so "solving world hunger" is the typical feel good, not completely untrue yet slightly bullshit line you'd use to sell this as a good investment to the more short sighted "why are we spending money on X if there is still hunger/poverty/illness" crowd.

I wonder whether the economy involved in manufacturing these cartridges, and the printers themselves, wouldn't all but guarantee this costs more than the worlds' poor could ever afford. The article suggests they could buy the cartridges at a local store ... this assumes, first, the existence of a 'local grocery store' and, second, that they have enough money to buy the carts (and, of course, the 0th assumption that there are enough carts to stock the shelves with.)

If they could do that then, presumably, they could already afford whatever else was in the store to begin with, and it would end up being cheaper for the poor who can afford them to just boil the food carts up into soup. I guarantee a synthetic food cartridge is not going to be cheaper than, say, a sack of flour or rice and beans or what have you. And if you're requiring a crowd of people to queue up at the public replicator for their three square meals a day, you've got a recipe for political disaster on your hands.

Now you could couple this with some kind of government sponsored food program, so it's "free" I suppose, But what about regions without any real infrastructure, or stable governance, or even hostile governments?

I'm not dismissing the idea of the printer per se, but I don't see how it solves world hunger. If NASA wants to revolutionize the quality of life in poverty-stricken areas of the world, they should focus on improving global sanitation, water quality, waste disposal, etc.

If anyone is interested by the edible insects concept touched upon here, check out our company Tiny Farms (http://www.tiny-farms.com). We're one of a handful of US companies doing real work in this area.

Alongside our research, tooling and outreach work, we've actually managed to feed Dave McClure a waxworm-filled Baklava: http://www.tiny-farms.com/2013/04/tiny-farms-in-zagat/

I suppose maybe one day we will see people eating insects as a regular part of their diet.

But personally insects on food makes me vomit, not salivate.

I tried to re-frame it as eating arthropods instead of eating insects. We already eat crabs and lobsters, which are just very large wet bugs.

The author questions the tastiness of algae - I wonder whether he knows what Maki rolls are made out of. Ever tried Japanese or Korean seaweed soup? Easily one of the tastiest soups because of all the Umami flavor in Seaweed.

Printer ink, being hugely marked-up and inefficiently wasteful, is not a good analogy for the stated goal:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/04/printer_ink_seven_ti...

On the solving world hunger meme, check out 'Permaculture', which could be reasonably summarized as applying the same type of systematic thinking we deploy in the computer world to natural systems for the production of food, energy and other resources. This movement is fairly old (late 60s/early 70s) but is experiencing a renaissance at present. Coupled with the greater geographic reach of the internet and the cheaper price of off-grid power supplies today, it is really something many hackers might enjoy taking a look at. After all, vast expanses of natural land you can live on and still derive income (eg. with a long-haul wireless link) are undervalued by the rest of the population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Oh, and injecting 'nutrients' is not realistic in the range we require. For a somewhat loaded example, a typical mushroom has hundreds of organic compounds that we have no idea about, but are rapidly discovering have great benefit to us. Fungi and animalia have recently been confirmed in mainstream science to be the same evolutionary lineage; as such they possess millions of years of evolution producing great anti-bacterial and anti-cancerous properties; they can even eat radiation!

In 30 Years:

   Son: Mum, my Food toner is empty!
   Mum: I'm sorry we can't afford a new one, share with your sister!
   Imperator: Let's invent chips for food-toners that force stupid consumers to buy new ones before their toner is actually empty!
   Ministers: Yes, Oh Lord! Can we also throw out a new toner model every quarter that is incompatible to the last one.
   Imperator: I agree my followers! Keep the technology the same, renovating our fabrics is out of question.
   Ministers: Oh great Imperator this is a great idea, we order it to be done by this month.
   Dad: Oh world, why did our Grandads trust the Sci-Fi paroles of the United Companies Associations and didn't see the slavery it brought us coming..
   Grandpa: Dear son, it looked so promising and fascinating when the foundations of this technology were born. We were simply confirmed in our dreams by reality, this feeling was too strong to become aware of it's implications.

I don't want to sound too skeptic, because I actually hope that they invent the universal replicator, tricorder, warp-drive, universal-translator, deflectors, AI, Isolinear-Chips, etc. but we all know it is very important when an invention is born and who is belongs to. Remember E=mc²

That looks like a perfect match for this guy's idea for efficient nutrient production, presented at Google's Solve For X: https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/efficient-nutrition-prod...

He thinks he can provide the protein requirements of the world's population from an area the size of Rhode Island, cheaper and healthier than agriculture.

Food sustainability is my passion area. Although the technologist in me thinks this is an awesome endeavor, the sustainability advocate in me thinks this is a step in the wrong direction. Agriculture is an area that I think needs to stay relatively low-tech. However, the cultural boundaries preventing that are pretty massive.

Modern agriculture is very, very far from 'low-tech.'

I'd like to see a 3-d printed compost-able seed planter that holds the exact seed, the exact depth, printed with spacing (or attached to a string?) with printed fertilizer and all that. Shove this stake into the ground for a perfect "whatever" planting environment.

Doesn't help with floods / droughts / windstorms / frosts but at least it would remove some planting variables.

A line from the first paragraph says it all:

  Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six
  month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of
  his universal food synthesizer

"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"

Was just about to write the same thing.

Someone has to ask: Is there any chance of turning feces into food with this thing? Obviously it can't supply all our needs, there's a reason we got rid of it. But for actually helping people with low resources eat, it might cut down on trips to that "corner grocery store".

Sweet, but ending hunger is incompatible with profit, and this will therefore die a sad little death as it gets legislated into oblivion, if it gets anywhere near gaining traction (which it won't, you just know Monsanto and friends will run a massive PR campaign about how synthesised food is terrorism, GMO is freedom, etc.).

The materials for this still need to be grown. They just have very long shelf lives.

  "ending hunger is incompatible with profit"

Really? I wouldn't think so.

You don't just "end" something and walk away. You still need to maintain and service the issue. There is profit in that.

Ending hunger is quite likely to lead to a nice profit as dead people don't buy anything.

The only reason we haven't ended hunger yet is that the poor people are too poor and have too horrible governments to be able to produce things we value enough to buy from them.

This isn't the view taken by the worlds agribusinesses - they want enhanced shareholder value, NOW, not in 30 years time, not in a century. It's utterly irrational, but the current global stratagem seems to be:

1) Ruin the planet 2) Profit 3) ???

Soylent green here we come... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

See also: http://www.soylent.me/ TLDR: Guy is living off a drink he formulated that provides all his nutritional needs. He's three months in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com