Would You Eat Meat Made from Air?
Berkeley startup Air Protein announced it’s made protein “out of thin air” using microbes.
Science and engineering continue to make better meat analogs and lab meat.
Proteins that feed on byproducts offer a way to diversify agriculture and relieve environmental pressure.
A startup in Berkeley, California is making a vegetarian meat analog from thin air, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The process involves feeding carbon dioxide to microorganisms that process the carbon dioxide into protein. On its website, Air Protein says its inspiration came from a 1960s NASA discovery: “These natural single-cell organisms, specifically, called hydrogenotrophs, act like plants in converting carbon dioxide into food.”
In space travel, we must all become chemists.
The concrete results may seem super sci-fi, but on a particulate level, this is just electrons and stuff moving around and rechaining. (If anything is spooky about this technology, it’s how everything deep down is just dots stuck together with wiggles.) The microbes are in an enclosed environment with water and temperature control they need, and carbon dioxide is piped in. The microbes eat the hydrogen in the air and grow healthy and reproduce.
If you think this sounds like an Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode, you’re not alone. The Quorn brand got into hot water years ago for presenting an exotic fungal byproduct as “mushroom based,” which consumers felt was an outright lie. For Air Protein to say its microorganism protein is basically a form of air feels like a similar misdirection. But queasy science aside, a protein source that comes from a byproduct of a closed system is super valuable.
One of the major obstacles faced by modern agriculture is that we must keep increasing the productivity of arable land around the world, and our increased pressure and efficiency leads to use of virulent pesticides, nutrient leaching, and other factors that can affect long-term viability of farming. Having ways to build on top of the land, like the stacked vertical farms of Japan, is a good start. But capturing “waste” to recycle into viable food is a way to reduce emissions while also reducing pressure on agriculture as a whole, let alone in systems where no agriculture is possible: Snowpiercer is a very different movie in a world with some microbes or Matt Damon’s potatoes.
Air Protein isn’t the only company turning microbes into meat analogs. Quorn was a pioneer, perhaps, but today there are scientists trying to turn microbes into actual animal protein molecules as part of the general push to make so-called “lab meat,” reports the Good Food Institute. The Institute says this overall kind of technology is already used to make vegetarian rennet—the bacterial starter that turns milk into cheese, historically made with animal parts—and insulin treatments that were previously grown in living animals.
The original San Francisco Chronicle article includes another exciting idea. “NovoNutrients uses gas-based fermentation, relying on a variety of microbes, hydrogen and carbon dioxide to create a protein-rich meal that the company plans to feed to fish,” the paper reports. This is promising because of the restrictively large amount of food we have to feed to livestock animals during even their truncated lives.
Vegetarian meat alternatives require much less sheer volume of plant matter to make the same quantity compared to animal meat. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s stubborn uncles will suddenly go vegetarian, and replacing animal feed like corn or grain with a much faster and more sustainable food source is a good step.
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