"Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product. It's not the sort of thing that humans have evolved to eat in bulk quantities, and unless the stuff is extremely well characterized, I'd be wary of small-molecule toxins and inflammatory agents, like lipopolysaccharides.
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.
Kinda funny that you got the kingdoms backwards there. Cheese is cultured by bacteria, not mold(a fungus). Bread is leavened by yeast(a fungus) not bacteria.
rennin is the cause of it becoming cheese, except for acid-curdled cheeses like paneer. bacteria and mold don't have much to do with it, traditionally, although nowadays you can buy vegan rennin made by genetically engineered bacteria instead of extracted from the stomachs of slaughtered calves
The two of those are about as old as human civilization, and can be made with stone age tech. Besides, the primaries are milk and wheat -- and you can make bread and cheese wholly without yeast and mold. (Tortillas, ricotta, etc.)
I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source.
> The two of those are about as old as human civilization, and can be made with stone age tech.
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.
> Mainly demonstrating you can literally sell rotten milk so long as you label it "traditional".
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.
> 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.
The difference is in the chemical process not in the words we say. When you leave some veg in the fridge for too long and it turns black and mushy and eventually liquefies, that's rot.
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.
2, 4, and 5 from this list of uses of "fermentation" also describe the microbial action involved in decomposition:
"""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.
- 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
Do you see the difference? It's not mixed with anything. It's not culturing anything. It's just bacteria biomass. In bulk. Nothing else. You can bloviate all you want, but that's what bulk bacteria means. How hard is that to grasp?
the tablets in the first photo do in fact have other things mixed with the bacteria, as you would be aware if you had ever made tablets. yogurt looks pretty much the same under a microscope except that the morphology of streptococcus is more rounded than the brick-like spirulina cells
It doesn't even have to be safe. Why are we so worried about bacteria soup when millions drink carbonated chemical syrups every day known to cause a variety of diseases?
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.
People already consume spirulina and Vegemite. I assume there are other microorganisms consumed in bulk. Just seems a matter of getting something edible, cheap, and can claim some minor lifestyle win (healthy, nutritionally complete, low effort preparation, etc)
Trivium: vegemite was originally slated to be called "parwill" after an earlier product called marmite ("ma might, but pa will"). But the company didn't like this Boaty McBoatface winner of the naming competition and used vegemite instead.
Just give them a big island full of venomous everything and soon they'll magically develop Vegemite all on their own. I guess when death is always just around the corner, you eat what you can...
> “Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product.”
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.
That stuff always smells like stinky socks to me. I take it out of the box and immediately want to vomit... do others not notice that? I wonder if I have some strange genetic aversion to it.
No? Interesting. I think they actually taste pretty good and the texture's decent (as a vegetarian I eat a lot of fake meats), but the smell is so terribly off-putting I couldn't get myself to keep eating them.
Weird. Wonder if I just got a bad batch or something...
> 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 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.
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.
I think fishmeal is mostly smaller fish. And as the article mentions, it'd be great if we could replace the enormous land area we devote to growing grains for animal feed. It doesn't sound like they've solved that completely, you probably need carbs and fiber...but it's a good start.
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.
Most of their actual products making it to market in some way have been in pop-up stores in Singapore, so they're definitely not targeting something as low-end as animal feed.
It's dry, full of fiber, and resembles roofing tiles -- but the main problem is that it's too often contaminated with excessive amounts of aflatoxin.
See: https://www.feedipedia.org/node/699
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.
Not sure it is fully identical, but you can purchase peanut powder in stores. It is effectively powdered peanut butter. Tastes fine, but it seems like it would be tough to make a meal out of it. More a supplemental protein source you can mix into other foods. I last bought some years ago, but a tub of the stuff was very affordable.
I think it's just a branding thing. If you can give it a household name that sticks you'll be fine. Sodium bicarbonate vs baking soda, MSG vs seaweed salt, textured dairy protein solution vs milk. Impossible burger vs pea-protein patty.
All the cool stuff happening in food these days is more chemistry than cooking.
> It's not the sort of thing that humans have evolved to eat in bulk quantities
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 the newer science that there is no relation between dietary cholesterol and atherosclerosis, except in people who already have elevated cholesterol levels?
>"This means 40% of the planet’s total habitable land is dedicated to animal products, despite the fact that meat, dairy and farmed fish combined provide just 17% of humanity’s calories."
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.
In the same vein, humans don't eat calories, like we don't eat vitamins, minerals, protein, etc: we eat food. Even today when there is more popular knowledge (though to be fair, mainly confusion) about the nutrient content of food, most people will gravitate to what they are used to eating culturally, and what tastes good. Which, incidentally, is how we end up eating a lot of stuff that's really not good for us at all.
We already went through this with synthetic meat. It’s really hard to beat the efficiency and self replication of plants and animals. Keeping everything sterile and exchanging gases and nutrients is not an easy task in a lab.
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.
We already produce food out of thin air using plants. It’s called photosynthesis. If you don’t want to eat those plants yourself you can feed them to ruminants and they’ll turn them to meat and fertilizer for you to grow more food out of thin air. It’s more nutritious and tastes much better than these weird inventions.
> 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.
Yep, and also takes up a lot of area, requires a lot of water, and produces CO2 (the ruminants, that is). In other words, it's not sustainable after a certain point. But you probably knew this already and wanted to give a provocative take in the vein of: "eww, mommmm, that thing is yucky I don't want it where are my nuggets??"
> 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
There probably aren't enough roofs and parking lots to run civilization plus produce enough calories to feed us. Deserts are nice but then you're talking about a lot of long-distance transmission, which gets expensive; most likely if we end up with a lot of fallow farmland closer to consumers, we'll use that.
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.
This is pretty interesting. It looks like solein has about 1.5x the protein content of whey protein and a much lower cost. It seems like they could compete in the supplement or meal replacement markets pretty easily.
By the title I was expecting to read about some process to synthesize carbohydrates by capturing CO2 and water out of the air.
Which I guess is basically what plants do.
a quibble with the title: all food is made out of thin air. what plants get from soil is basically just phosphorus, potassium, iron, chromium, boron, and sulfur, which are essential but only present in trace quantities in the resulting food, totaling less than 1%. the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen that make up the vast bulk of plants all come from the air more or less directly
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.
In the Pohl's Heechee saga there were CHON food machines that essentially were food synthesized from those main 4 elements and traces of others. But not all the other elements come from thin air, some come from soil, and your nutrition may be lacking something essential, even if they doesn't contributes a lot on total weight.
yeah, that's basically what these companies are building. i guess i left calcium, magnesium, chlorine, selenium, and sodium out of my list of essential trace elements; any others?
Phosphor, potassium,calcium, sodium, magnesium and sulphur are needed in not so trace quantities. Iron, zinc, copper, iodine, selenium, manganese, fluoride, chromium and molybdenum require less amounts, but are still important for a lot of processes. Cobalt is part of the vitamin B12, so not optional neither. And probably several more that I'm not counting here.
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.
yeah, so, what i was saying is that food in general almost entirely air. checking out the corrected fullmetal alchemist recipe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body#... we see 65% oxygen, 18.5% carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, 2.6% nitrogen, adding up to 95.6%. those all get into food from air more or less directly
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!
Allow me to translate: from space exploration and submarines ops to climate changes issues we desperately try to create food in artificial environments we can create a bit in all climates, nearly everywhere and possibly in simple buildings, we have substantially failed so far, but enthusiasts articles keep piling up in the hope research keep up and evolve...
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.
Mostly it's because it's pretty early on, only running the factory for a few months, and not at Generally Recognized As Safe status in most places. They recently launched products in Singapore through a partnership with a Japanese company: https://solarfoods.com/new-solein-powered-products-launched-...
This seems misleading? In that case you could as well argue that our food was made from pure energy (photons from the sun) which might make it sound like we had Star Trek replicators - which we obviously do not have.
Check out this guy. He's got the entire environmental equation figured out.
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!
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.