Highlights:
- “Scientists are replacing crops and livestock with food made from microbes and water. It may save humanity’s bacon.”
- Natural disasters are threatening our food supply.
- “The UN forecasts that by 2050 feeding the world will require a 20% expansion in agriculture’s global water use.”
- RethinkX shows that proteins from precision fermentation will cost ten times less and replace many agricultural inefficiencies by 2035.
by George Monbiot, The Guardian
It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. 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.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet
