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Honestly it sounds like a needless and impractical gimmick.
Hot take: actual steak is made from recycled carbon dioxide
Sort of, but you’re also re-releasing a bunch more of the CO2 than goes into the steak. Plus, direct air capture is much more space efficient then plants.
Translation: people all over the world who were previously too poor to afford meat can now afford it.
Travelling or opening a history book will reveal quickly that only rich people eat meat routinely.
I don't know a lot about current lab-grown meat approaches, and all the outfits involved seem hush-hush about the main issue, the feedstock (what kind of specific blend of nutrients/growth factors needs to be fed to the cultured muscle cells for optimal growth), but I don't see how chemoautrophic microbial goop becomes 'meat' by any similar process.
There's a lot of hype about carbon capture and reduction to fuel/food/material it seems, but the only proven industrial approach is something like modified Fischer-Tropsch, based on the nitrogen-to-ammonia Haber-Bosch process, which involves taking pure CO2 and H2 feedstocks, converting the CO2 to carbon monoxide, and then reacting the CO with H2 at high pressure and temperature with a suitable catalyst to make a variety of long-chain hydrocarbon fuels. This has been done at scale using coal-sourced CO and natural-gas sourced H2 very successfully, so that's where you'd want to start if you were serious about it. Occidental seems to be getting into it for example, which is sort of what you'd expect, as it's basically just like large-scale petrochemistry.
Lots of Theranos vibes around the whole business though, I'm afraid to say.
> Global meat consumption, meanwhile, has dramatically increased over the last few decades and is still on the rise, projected to grow by about 14 percent by the end of this decade. Translation: people all over the world who were previously too poor to afford meat can now afford it. Travelling or opening a history book will reveal quickly that only rich people eat meat routinely.
> Global meat consumption, meanwhile, has dramatically increased over the last few decades and is still on the rise, projected to grow by about 14 percent by the end of this decade. Translation: people all over the world who were previously too poor to afford meat can now afford it. Travelling or opening a history book will reveal quickly that only rich people eat meat routinely.
Grass is made from recycled carbon dioxide and cows are made from grass. And we already know beef is delicious.
Grass is made from recycled carbon dioxide and cows are made from grass. And we already know beef is delicious.
The point of the exercise is to find alternatives that aren't so hard on the environment.
>“By contrast, our process takes a few days to make a steak, has very low water utilization, is carbon negative, uses zero arable land, and minimal land overall.”
The point is not recycling carbon for funsies, but to actually have a positive impact on the environment. Whether the process described actually achieves this is to be determined, but it is evident that animal agriculture today is a big contributor to our environmental issues.
Instead of elaborate carbon capture infrastructure, it seems more straightforward to just use photosynthetic organisms like algae. Either engineer algae to make the proteins you want, or engineer yeast or some other microbe that can take the products of algae and convert to these proteins. Honestly it sounds like a needless and impractical gimmick.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of, but you’re also re-releasing a bunch more of the CO2 than goes into the steak. Plus, direct air capture is much more space efficient then plants.
Plants have been doing a pretty good job of sustainably capturing carbon dioxide for something like three billion years. Is there any direct air capture technology that’s remotely as reliable and low maintenance?