[HN Gopher] Making 'food out of thin air'
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Making 'food out of thin air'
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-08-14 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I wonder if the low knowledge of this is because only Finnish
| investors are allowed?
| gs17 wrote:
| 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-...
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| "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.
| krunck wrote:
| '"Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not
| mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer
| food product.'
|
| 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
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
|
| But, as it happens, we have already done this with algae: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement)
|
| Not all changes are progress, but all progress involves
| change.
| bagful wrote:
| "Rotting" has a connotation of uncontrolled decay;
| cheesemaking is a well controlled process that enhances
| the base material.
| antidiot wrote:
| > 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I don 't think that humans have ever consumed bulk
| bacteria as a food source._
|
| Spirulina, nostoc, fat choy. They're relatively niche
| though.
| kragen wrote:
| yogurt isn't niche
| throwup238 wrote:
| Yogurt is bulk animal fat, cultured with a tiny bit of
| bacteria. It's not bulk bacteria.
| kragen wrote:
| your comment is incorrect from beginning to end
|
| - 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
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's still not bulk bacteria.
| kragen wrote:
| now you've descended from being mistaken to talking
| nonsense. you can't simultaneously accept that 'the
| majority of the non-liquid mass of the yogurt at the end
| consists of living or dead bacteria' and also believe
| that 'it's still not bulk bacteria'; it's a logical
| contradiction
| throwup238 wrote:
| This is bulk bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spir
| ulina_%28dietary_supplemen...
|
| Do you see the difference? It's not mixed with anything.
| It's not culturing anything. It's just bacteria. In bulk.
| You can bloviate all you want, but that's what bulk
| bacteria means. How hard is that to grasp?
| tomcam wrote:
| > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk
| bacteria as a food source.
|
| I've been incarcerated in the USA and I think maybe that
| characterization is false :0
| goda90 wrote:
| 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.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Cheeses grow mold, too. In some cases it's intentional or
| even desirable.
|
| And see my sibling comment about bacterially-leavened
| bread.
| goda90 wrote:
| Well the mold is just an add-on to the cheese in those
| cases, not the cause of it becoming cheese.
| kragen wrote:
| 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
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Bacterially-leavened bread, fascinating!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread
| xedrac wrote:
| Yes, but cheese and bread taste amazing.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Yup, at the end of the day people will eat it if it's tasty
| and safe.
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Yeast is not bacteria, nor is mold.
| gs17 wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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)
| floam wrote:
| I'm not sure you could Stockholm a free population into
| desiring Vegemite, outside a prison or convict camp type
| setting.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It is Australian. So, just a few generations removed from
| the inmates and it is found desirable.
| solardev wrote:
| 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...
| tuatoru wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Isn't the newer science that there is no relation between
| dietary cholesterol and atherosclerosis, except in people who
| already have elevated cholesterol levels?
| DennisP wrote:
| But GP mentioned saturated fat, not dietary cholesterol.
| kragen wrote:
| i'd like to read more about this; do you have a doi?
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Agreed that branding would largely solve this. Look at the
| Quorn meat substitute, for instance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein
| ghxst wrote:
| I've never heard of this "peanut cake" but am very interested,
| does it taste horrible or what's the reasons that it's not sold
| for humans to eat?
| timschmidt wrote:
| It may be: https://pb2foods.com/
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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.
| frabert wrote:
| They're talking about animal feed
| tomcam wrote:
| > "Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not
| mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer
| food product.
|
| Also, meat tastes really, really good
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"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.
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| DennisP wrote:
| 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," Pitkanen 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _' Homogenized bacterial carcasses' (the article's words,
| not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a
| consumer food product._"
|
| Isn't that what Vegemite / Marmite is? I seem to recall that
| brewers' yeast was the main ingredient.
| lainga wrote:
| Isn't most food in industrialised countries made partly out of
| thin air (via the Haber-Bosch process)?
| goda90 wrote:
| If you're counting that then you might as well count
| photosynthesis as making from thin air as well.
| _Microft wrote:
| 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.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > which we obviously do not have
|
| 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.
| gs17 wrote:
| The wiki page on them is kind of funny to me:
|
| > 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.
| digging wrote:
| The myth of the 20000x farmer, debunked. Merely a 10x farmer.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| What if it's a large nuclear power plant?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Not. Economical.
|
| 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
| DennisP wrote:
| 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.
| DennisP wrote:
| Well if we can only recover 36% of the planet's land area, I
| guess that's not worth it then.
| guidoism wrote:
| Aren't plants literally making food out of thin air? They take a
| series of photons and pull the carbon out of the "thin air" to
| make food.
| DennisP wrote:
| Yes, but inefficiently. The idea is to do the same thing with
| much less land area, so we can stop using 40% of the planet's
| land to feed ourselves.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes- it's carbon fixation.
| obloid wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| But it basically is about that?
| partomniscient wrote:
| _> "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.
| worik wrote:
| > It's complicated. Not all calories are equal
|
| Yes
|
| And land is not fungible
|
| Where I live, amongst sheep farms, there is not much land
| suitable for cropping
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| fool's errand - everyone knows food is one of the 5 principal
| exceptions to Gamp's law of elemental transfiguration
| raptorraver wrote:
| 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.
| DennisP wrote:
| The problem is land area.
|
| > 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Bannning biofuels would go a long way to reducing
| agriculture's use of land.
|
| Trying to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis is one of
| those "what could possibly go wrong?" ideas.
| jollyllama wrote:
| And then there's the fact that killing all those countless
| bacteria just for food is pretty cruel. Not vegan!
| apeescape wrote:
| 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??"
| worik wrote:
| This a solution without a problem
|
| 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
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 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!
|
| Wish I had such confidence
| kragen wrote:
| 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 1/4 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._
| gmuslera wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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?
| kkfx wrote:
| 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.
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