Administrative note: Posting will be light for a few days. Back to full strength Salad soon.
Diligent Pun Salad readers may know that I've got kind of a bee in my bonnet about artificial photosynthesis. My overall summary ("A Crackpot Idea That Will Save, Or Destroy, Humanity") is here. And (of course) Wikipedia has a very deep dive into the topic here. I think it would be a great carbon-capturing solution for global warming. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article claims, the catalysts used so far "cannot perform" efficiently with atmospheric concentrations of CO₂. Bummer!
But I was slightly encouraged by this report from Jeff Bluse in Reason: This Protein Powder Is Made Out of Air and Uses 600 Times Less Water Than Beef.
OK, don't freak out about "Frankenfoods" on me.
Thanks to innovations in food science and agriculture, the world is producing more food than ever before. While this has significantly reduced global hunger since the 1970s, it has impacted the environment; in 2023, food production generated about 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World in Data.
Now scientists at the Finnish startup Solar Foods are turning air and electricity into food. The result? A mustard-colored protein powder made from naturally occurring microbes that could reshape how the world is fed.
Inside a bioreactor, a single microbe plucked from the Finnish dirt is fed a cocktail of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. Renewable electricity powers the process, which the company says is "20 times more efficient than photosynthesis," and accelerates the growth of the microorganism into a protein-rich slurry.
Not exactly what I was looking for: if the carbon that goes into the "slurry" goes into food, it will (eventually) return to the atmosphere, right? But maybe, given some biochemical tweaking, it doesn't need to. And that "20 times more efficient than photosynthesis" really grabbed my eye.
The slick website for Solar Foods is here; their constructed protein is called Solein®, and it has a website all its own here.
I just hope "Solar Foods" and "Solein" aren't just new ways to spell "Theranos" and "Edison".
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