By Andrea Widburg
There are two ways of viewing CO2: There’s the sane and scientific way, which is that CO2 is a relatively rare gas that is a necessary component of life on earth because it is integral to the photosynthesis that creates plant life, and plant life is the core nutrient for all other life, both as a supplier of food and oxygen. Alternatively, there’s the insane, “anthropogenic climate change” way, which holds that CO2 is going to kill us all and that we need to do the best we can to eradicate its presence from our atmosphere. In the latter category are “scientists” who think they’ve come up with the ultimate way to get rid of that pesky CO2: Convert it into food!
I know that sounds like a joke—that is, using lab techniques to create food from CO2 itself, when nature does a perfectly fine job of making food from CO2—but it’s a real article from Nature, which used to be a science publication:
From air to your plate: tech startups making food from atmospheric CO2
Food tech companies are taking bacteria that capture CO2 from air to make edible and nutritious food and drink.
Food startups based in the United States and Europe are using carbon dioxide to create food. Californian company Air Protein has raised $107 million to create steak and scallop products from CO2. In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation invested $29.2 million into a Novozymes and Topsoe project that is using CO2 to produce proteins for human food without involving agricultural land. Others are stepping into the CO2 food arena as well (Table 1). For Air Protein founder Lisa Dyson, scaling up protein production to feed 9.8 billion people by 2050 must entail an environmentally responsible approach: “How can we make more food in a way that is climate positive?”
So, when you and I think about CO2 and food creation, we have visions of sunshine, water, and CO2 coming together to encourage plant growth—plants we eat or plants that animals eat to produce milk, eggs, and meat. If you like, you can also think of it as a great way to encourage getting high because indoor marijuana growers buy CO2 to help their crop. The process is ancient, organic, and all-natural.
However, in labs across America and Europe, they’re doing something that has a definite aura of Frankenstein’s monster about it:
NASA subject matter expert in biotech Bruce Link from the Kennedy Space Center says that although photosynthesis by carbon-fixing plants is the main route to food production, there are alternatives. “[Photosynthesis] can be done either by life forms or catalytically,” says Link. “If you are in an environment where sulfur or hydrogen are abundant, you can convert the CO2 into chains of carbon, which are basically oils.”
No longer do we need something as crude as cows eating CO2-fed plants and then producing milk that humans enjoy for everything from hot cocoa to butter to yogurt to ice cream. Now, we have a much more exciting process:
Their goal is to genetically engineer microbes that feed on CO2 and hydrogen to secrete β-lactoglobulin, the major protein in whey from cow’s milk. Although milk has a multitude of other components, the consortium will start with β-lactoglobulin as it constitutes approximately 65% of the total whey protein.
Yum!
There’s more in the article but I started feeling queasy. The whole thing reminds me of the debate back in the 1970s, when there were expensive studies proving that mother’s milk is better for babies than lab produced “infant formula.” Now we’re moving backward. We’re being told that lab produced CO2 protein derived gunk is healthier than the food chain that Mother Nature has been producing for literally billions of years—and that our bodies have adapted to optimizing since humankind has existed.