Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, thinks a team of scientists from Finland have come up with a solution to feeding mankind without destroying the environment. It's 'hello microbes, goodbye farming.'
Christians believe that Jesus turned water into wine when a wedding celebration suddenly ran out. Monbiot says we may be able to replace crops and livestock by a bit of alchemy involving nothing more than microbes and water. Beat that, Jesus.
In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.
This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.
But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.
The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts.
We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time.
There may be hope yet.
ReplyDeleteAt the rate we're going it's not going to matter. Neoliberal economics isn't going to distribute that to the places where people will be starving, and many places are going to get too hot to live in (or too underwater) whether there's food or not. By the time the population has imploded to a billion or so, normal food will suffice.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have my doubts about just how efficient something like that will be at scale. It's like those oh-so-cool vertical urban farms--sure, in theory if you could stack multiple storeys of farm vertically you could make more food on fewer square feet, but by the time you've built the infrastructure, like the building, the water supply, piped in the light because duh, plants need sun, brought in all the inputs and lifted them to the 20th floor, you realize it's a ludicrous idea that uses way more resources than it puts out.
So, fine, some microorganisms are edible, and as any brewer could tell you, they can be grown. But they have a metabolism--they eat, they excrete, they die, they die from too much buildup of what they excrete. Once you've supplied all their needs, are the inputs really going to be less than for the same amount of farmed food?
I also have serious doubts about anyone who says something like "using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source." Um, no, hydrogen extracted from water is not an energy source. It [b]costs[/b] energy to extract hydrogen from water. You can then get some of it back by burning, or I suppose for some creatures metabolizing, the hydrogen--but not all of it. It's a negative sum game. So in this scenario we're trading power for food in some way; ideally, let's say the power comes from arrays of solar panels, via some kind of electrical infrastructure, and then you use it to electrolyze water, and then you use the hydrogen for . . . something that helps you grow bacteria. With farmed plants, the plant [b]is[/b] the solar panel. How likely is this bacteria deal to be more efficient than plants at creating food?
Maybe this is going to be [b]the[/b] massive breakthrough. But I wouldn't be surprised if it sort of toddles along, gets mentioned in a few scientific articles in both serious journals and pop science magazines for a couple of years, and then a few years later the occasional person is saying "Whatever happened to that schtick with feeding people on bacteria?"
ReplyDeleteAs I read Monbiot's piece the whiff of optimistic desperation was inescapable. The drawbacks and pitfalls to this including the energy/caloric balance were plain although he does admit to doubts and hurdles even if he doesn't factor them into his glowing endorsement.