PowerSwitch

OK guys - I can't help it, I'm with George Monbiot on this one.
This is the single best hope we have since renewable energy. Read this post, watch the videos, and just sit and PONDER what all this means for a day or so! I know I sound like an infomercial at the moment but I am convinced that IF the economic learning rates can continue to lower costs, this will be the biggest advance on how we source our food since Agriculture 12,000 to 10,000 thousand years ago!

This is a 3 minute primer. http://youtu.be/z8zuqR95fqA

“Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all” by George Monbiot.

“The developments I find most interesting use no agricultural feedstocks. The microbes they breed feed on hydrogen or methanol – which can be made with renewable electricity – combined with water, carbon dioxide and a very small amount of fertiliser. They produce a flour that contains roughly 60% protein, a much higher concentration than any major crop can achieve (soy beans contain 37%, chick peas, 20%). When they are bred to produce specific proteins and fats, they can create much better replacements than plant products ****for meat, fish, milk and eggs. And they have the potential to do two astonishing things.

The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... on-farming

Existing products: "Brave Robot" has sold millions of tubs of ice cream and cream cheese and packets of cake mix. "Perfect Day" and Israel's "Remilk" are fermenting up dairy proteins to make lactose and cholesterol free milk, yoghurt, and cheese. And now "C16 Biosciences" are brewing up a replacement for Palm Oil! As you know - Palm Oil is in everything.

We are only a few years off Precision Fermentation protein being cheaper than meat.

“What is it like to cook ravioli made with Solein? Watch how we made pasta dough with Solein instead of eggs, the ravioli filling with wild mushrooms and Solein cream cheese alternative and topped it off with porcini foam made with Solein dairy alternative!”

60 seconds - ravioli. https://youtu.be/6p8pEbt7kjE

Here are Bao buns - “What is it like to cook bao buns made with Solein? Watch how we steamed milky, fluffy bao buns made with Solein dairy alternative, and filled them with some crispy teriyaki-glazed Solein imitation meat alternative strips, Solein alternative mayonnaise dressing and crunchy, pickled and julienned veg wrapped in a shiso leaf. Our top chef Sebastian Borg describes it as a perfect balance of soft and crunchy, sweet and salty, sour and umami.” http://youtu.be/DsgpUxec5dY

It will replace all animal products - beef, lamb, pork, chicken and fish (with omega-3's) - in the next 10 to 15 years. It is safe from climate disaster droughts and floods. With grazing now uneconomic we can let nature regrow the 3 trillion trees we’ve cut down, return CO2 to under 350ppm and solve climate change.

Replacing fishing with PF lets our oceans recover. The return of the larger fish will help the water column turn over, trapping more heat and bringing up nutrients from the waters below - restoring the oceans and climate as well.

Tony Seba follows the cost curve as PF becomes 100,000 times cheaper over the last 20 years. We are nearly there. Only a few more years and it will be cheaper than meat! Or other products. One protein is 1000 times sweeter than sugar cane. We can make spider-silk for building materials this way. http://youtu.be/g6gZHbfK8Vo

The Chinese are working on another route - a chemical way to cook up sugary starches used for both food and cardboard etc. http://youtu.be/e2SsheLN1t8

I'm not sure how much fibre we'll grow this way - but imagine getting most of our macro's from thin air and a few fertiliser minerals? And letting 3 TRILLION trees regrow? I mean - at that kind of biomass scales of 3 trillion trees - what could we grow to get airline fuel from biomass?

I'll carry on with a natural product until we see what the disadvantages with synthetics are before I switch on a large scale. Also there will be a need for someone to eat some of the additional deer that will predate many of those trillions of trees before they grow.

Producing the feed is yet another burden on the renewable energy industry. Perhaps we will need another one of Monbiot's favourite power sources, a nuclear power station to grow all this artificial food.

Well, I'm not against nuclear power but I do think renewables are cheaper. And maybe some of the fertiliser minerals can come from 3d shellfish and seaweed farms? They're yet another way we can feed the world all the protein we want.

While having synthetic food is probably necessary for things like inter-stellar travel it is probably not a good idea to move away from natural foods just yet. Sounds a bit like Soylent Green to me.

Except in some ways it is better than 'normal food'. EG: The dairy alternatives have the exact same proteins as cow milk - but no lactose. They're selling milk to Asia! I mean, 'normal food' includes fermented products like wine, beer, cheese, yoghurt and yeast in bread which makes it rise. There's even an argument that civilisation itself arose from the need to make beer alcohol to get calories (and some fun!) out of otherwise indigestible pastoral leftovers.

Eclipse wrote: ↑28 Jan 2023, 22:21 Except in some ways it is better than 'normal food'. .......................

"Normal" food is usually a complex of macro and micro nutrients which is difficult and costly to replicate so synthetic foods are often missing many of the micro nutrients whose presence is often necessary for the other nutrients to be efficiently used. I'll stick to normal food until food science is not only fully understood but fully replicated in synthetic food.

See also "CHON food" That being an acronym for Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, the main elements contained in food. The idea pre-dates Soylent Green by many years.

Yes - I remember it from Frederick Phol's "Gateway" series. CHON - with the raw ingredients mined directly from asteroids etc to feed the earth.

This system with hydrogenotrophs sounds similar because they do need to be fed some minerals.

The thing that amazes me about all this is we've bypassed inefficient photosynthesis. This is a really weird thought. We’re all eating sunlight - either directly from plants which are 6% efficient at capturing sunlight - or by eating animals that have eaten the plants - which of course is vastly less efficient with that original sunlight. The UN shows if we use CO2 per kg as a measure of efficiency, Tofu is 2 kg emissions per 100 g protein, cows 35.5 kg emissions per 100g protein. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/sci ... ssues/food

But today’s solar panels are 22% efficient, which is nearly 4 times more efficient than photosynthesis. And remember - that 6% of sunlight grows the whole plant - and we cannot eat but a tiny fraction of that plant. Then we take that 22% solar and split water for hydrogen. So now we're down to about 16% efficiency with the sunlight as hydrogen. But then instead of feeding animals - the hydrogen goes straight to bacteria that produce protein more directly. Add a few minerals and a little water - and we get Solein - solar-protein - which is being scaled up over the next few years. https://www.solein.com/

Of course - we still need the solar panels and wind turbines to power all this - but even if you include them (at 22% efficiency) it's still 10 times more efficient than our best farmed crops with the area. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015025118

The main point is that 10% smaller area does not have to be on arable land. The solar power can be on our rooftops or floating on water reservoirs (reducing evaporation of precious fresh water) or in deserts or old industrial brownfields. When you divorce your solar collection area from arable land, PF is 1700 times more efficient even than growing soy beans! https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00032/full

And 157,00 times more efficient than lamb! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... on-farming

I guess metabolically it's a bit like the way we humans cook our food before eating it - which is like 'predigesting' it. Apes that eat all raw food must lie around for hours just digesting that stuff. We've kind of done the same things with sunlight to protein here.

Dear me.

The sooner we get catabolic collapse the sooner this kind of techno-fetishistic lunacy gets consigned to the dustbin of history.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011 ... -collapse/

I'm not normally a fan of 'techno-fixes' for our environmental problems...
But just think of the the implications if agriculture really is disrupted...

Considering just one issue - supposing we didn't need cows any more to produce milk....
Think how much of the countryside could be returned to nature...
Think of all the soy that wouldn't need to be grown and imported to feed the cows - reducing pressure on the rainforest...
Think of all the slurry that wouldn't be produced to pollute our rivers...
Think of all the methane that wouldn't be released...

OK, we might have to change the words in 'The Twelve Days of Christmas', to 8 microbes fermenting...
I know it will take a mindset change, but I'm very open to thinking about it...

Precision Fermentation Comes Into its Own:
https://www.foodprocessing.com/product- ... to-its-own

Tasting the Future: Food Fermentation Breakthroughs
https://foodinstitute.com/focus/tasting ... kthroughs/

Are you kidding - Solein is now selling?
That is the best news I've had in months!

Solein? That's my favourite PF as it doesn't require crops. Admittedly - it's only 2% of this chocolate bar - but that's the whole point. It can go into so many kinds of products. And the more it scales up - hopefully the more the tech will evolve and the costs come down. The more direct Solein we'll be eating as pancakes and beef strips etc.
https://www.fazer.com/about-us/taste-the-future/

How did I miss that it was now selling? Unholy Cow move over, Solein is on the way.
If it actually gets cheap and tasty enough to displace animal grazing - that's 30% of the land on earth!

That's 3 TRILLION Trees we could regrow.

That's enormous habitats we could restore.

And in the process - also store so much carbon that we lock up all historical emissions!

https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2 ... -snack-bar

Couldn't see 'Fazer Taste the Future' bars on The Cocoa Trees Confectionery Store website...
https://www.thecocoatrees.com/

Maybe you need to message them and ask....?

I don't know what I'm reading... this is Solein's press release and at one point the factory could still have a few months to be opening, but at another point it seems to be saying something launched 18th Jan.

18th January, 2024
Solein® debuts in Singapore retail stores with Fazer’s snack bar

The new chocolate snack bar is another signal of Solein-powered foods getting closer to market. Solar Foods is set to begin operations of Factory
01 in the first half of this year: the facility will scale Solein production up to commercial levels for the first time. The Finnish food experience company Fazer is introducing a limited-edition snack bar under the Taste the Future concept in the selected Cocoa Tree stores across Singapore on 18th January. What makes the snack bar special and gives it its taste of the future is Solein®, a novel ingredient developed by Solar Foods.

https://solarfoods.com/wp-content/uploa ... ck-bar.pdf