8 ms·

Solar foods

• pjc50 8y ago
  Interesting idea - biogeneration of "food" for space travel first, expanding to terrestrial once the price is down. But desperately short on detail.
• magic_beans 8y ago
  Can vegetarians on Earth benefit from this sustainable protein as well? It would be great to have options beyond soy, vital wheat gluten, and the usual bean/grain/yeast medleys!
  • Reason077 8y ago
    The single-cell protein sounds a lot like Mycoprotein (brand name: Quorn) which is normally grown/fed with glucose syrup as well as CO2. Sounds like they've come up with a novel variation or process that doesn't need the glucose? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein
    • ElBarto 8y ago
      I believe that fungi are considered closer to animals than to plants. I'll let vegans ponder that one...
      • ElBarto 8y ago
        I'll leave that here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC48023/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC48023/ "This congruence among multiple lines of evidence strongly suggests, in contrast to traditional and current classification, that animals and fungi are sister groups while plants constitute an independent evolutionary lineage."
      • Symmetry 8y ago
        Regardless of their evolutionary lineage, the important ethical consideration is whether one's food has a central nervous system. Most animals have those whereas fungi and plants do not.
        • ElBarto 8y ago
          It seems to me that the "ethical considerations" are highly personal and vary from people to people. In any case, I note that tongue-in-cheek comments are not appreciated. Sad.
          • Symmetry 8y ago
            You can't just retreat to ethics are personal when you just implied that a group of people were irrational for being willing to eat fungus. If you didn't intend to imply that then then downvotes show you should work on your communication skills.
            • ElBarto 8y ago
              Or perhaps you should work on your interpersonal and maturity skills... I didn't imply anything, you lost it over nothing trying to see things where there was obviously none. I was just tongue-in-cheek by putting some scientific facts out there, which may in fact trigger a real reflection of what not eating any animal product might mean to someone (and your point was just a generalisation that does not represent all views). It's like Reddit here. Too bad. It was a good resource.
              • fiter 8y ago
                The poster that you'r replying to didn't "[lose] it". They replied to the contents of your comments and addressed your points. "Tongue-in-cheek" comments are more popular on reddit.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    There's a suggestion in a piece on this in yesterday's Guardian they hope it can become a bulk filler in foods. Still light on details as it goes off into "what ifs". Unlike Quorn and other microbials it doesn't need a carbohydrate input so should be able to reduce agriculture needs markedly if it works as hoped. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/electric-food-sci-fi-diet-planet-food-animals-environment https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/electr...
  • nosjwshere 8y ago
    lentein
  • fulafel 8y ago
    Normal mushrooms quite protein rich as well, 2.5 g protein for every 4.3 g of carbs: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/301907?format=Full https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/301907?format=Full (Not to mention nuts, peas, lentils, etc)
    • Symmetry 8y ago
      They also tend to have all the protein varieties you need in your diet.
  • throwawaynpc123 8y ago
    http://lentein.com/ http://lentein.com/
• nmridul 8y ago
  Maybe this can be developed on a massive scale for CO2 capture. If people are hesistant to consume this protein, it could even be used to feed fish / animals. Edit - could be a possible candidate for ycombinator nature fund.
  • ElBarto 8y ago
    I think we need to see the overall efficiency first. As I understand it this process requires that you generate electricity then use that electricity to produce proteins. I suspect that good old plants may be more efficient. This technology may be more useful in space and/or in circumstances where lack of growing space is the overwhelming factor. Also, since the production is food the overall cycle is carbon neutral.
  • ryanmercer 8y ago
    >Maybe this can be developed on a massive scale for CO2 capture. You'd still have to do something with it, either 'bury' it in the anoxic depths of the ocean and large bodies of fresh water, or bury it underground in either large pits or in caves/oil wells. And you'd have to strip mine insane amounts of the necessary minerals that the algae needs, with regularity, to even approach sequestering a single gigaton a year, let alone the 40+ necessary to make a difference. I'm all for figuring out carbon sequestration but I think YC's proposed paths for handling this in their recent call for startups looking into this are a bit silly. The flooding a significant portion of the Sahara for example will have extremely unpredictable weather implications which could be absolutel disastrous never mind you'd have to be mining minerals for use in the 'ponds' that is necessary for the life to grow in them which means you'd effectively need to fertilize a quarter plus of a continent with regularity every year for decades or even centuries. Even if you could fund that, it's not sustainable. The real solution to carbon is immediate reduction of fossil fuel usage with a very short-term goal of nearly absolute cessation of greenhouse gas generation. You then need to reforest 300 million acres of North America, restore countless miles of coastal kelp and seaweed, etc etc. Even trying to replicate something like the Azolla event is unrealistic. If you take the 10 largest bodies of freshwater in the world and cover them entirely in Azolla, you are going to capture less than 10% of the carbon we are currently releasing each year and you won't even sequester all of that as to sequester it you have to sink the Azolla to an anoxic depth with every single generation of growth. So, I doubt this algae would result in sequestering even a tenth of a percent of current carbon generation.
• tomp 8y ago
  The website is a bit sparse, I wonder where they get elemental hydrogen and nitrogen from. Does anyone know anything more about their technology, e.g. how they actually construct the proteins (I'm guessing either in cells, or using some enzymes outside of cells - but then what produces the enzymes?). Edit: Ah, an article posted by another comment includes more information: > This sounds like science fiction, but it is already approaching commercialisation. For the past year, a group of Finnish researchers has been producing food without either animals or plants. Their only ingredients are hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, electricity from solar panels, a small amount of water, carbon dioxide drawn from the air, nitrogen and trace quantities of minerals such as calcium, sodium, potassium and zinc. The food they have produced is 50% to 60% protein; the rest is carbohydrate and fat. They have started a company (Solar Foods) that seeks to open its first factory in 2021. This week it was selected as an incubation project by the European Space Agency. > They use electricity from solar panels to electrolyse water, producing hydrogen, which feeds bacteria that turn it back into water. Unlike other forms of microbial protein (such as Quorn), it requires no carbohydrate feedstock – in other words, no plants. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/electric-food-sci-fi-diet-planet-food-animals-environment https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/electr... Edit2: I wonder how this (water + CO2 + solar power) compares with just growing algae in water in the sun, in terms of energy efficiency and process stability.
  • mothsonasloth 8y ago
    I think the problem with Algae is that you won't get as high a yield of proteins, because the plant cell is producing other chemicals as well. Compared with animal cells that are producing a protein specifically and can be engineered to produce more.
    • ryanmercer 8y ago
      >I think the problem with Algae is that you won't get as high a yield of proteins, because the plant cell is producing other chemicals as well. And algal-derived protein and fats seem to cause digestive issues with some individuals. Rosa hit some issues with this, apparently, with the soylent food bars (man I miss those things) to the point where they discontinued the bars and have yet to bring them back 2 years later. For those unfamiliar the bars were causing some individuals to vomit and have diarrhea. It was believed, by the community (as far as I know Rosa never made a statement), that the algal flower was the culprit. Rosa also discontinued their use of algal oil from TerraVia in their other lines shortly after, some suggested it was TerraVia actually cutting them off in retaliation for allowing people to suggest the flower was causing people to become ill but I can't imagine TerraVia would choose to 'fire' a rather large (and growing) customer. Rosa switched to a sunflower oil. If I were this company I would immediately start testing their 'food' on a wide variety of people because I have a hunch they will find that a notable percentage of the population is going to have digestive issues.
• nosjwshere 8y ago
  someone's too late http://lentein.com/ http://lentein.com/
• ligand 8y ago
  This is there whitepaper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hsbi4amp0am0l5y/Solar_Foods_Flyer_03_2018.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/hsbi4amp0am0l5y/Solar_Foods_Flyer_... The website prompts you to sign up to the mailing list to get a copy. Its very sparse on details unfortunately.
  • philipkglass 8y ago
    Here are more detailed papers that I found by way of the Guardian article about this company: "Carbon emission avoidance and capture by producing in-reactor microbial biomass based food, feed and slow release fertilizer: Potentials and limitations" https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilje_Pikaar/publication/326571432_Carbon_emission_avoidance_and_capture_by_producing_in-reactor_microbial_biomass_based_food_feed_and_slow_release_fertilizer_Potentials_and_limitations/links/5b57cdbbaca272a2d66702a9/Carbon-emission-avoidance-and-capture-by-producing-in-reactor-microbial-biomass-based-food-feed-and-slow-release-fertilizer-Potentials-and-limitations.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilje_Pikaar/publication... "Microbial protein: future sustainable food supply route with low environmental footprint" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1751-7915.12369 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1751-7915.12... "Autotrophic nitrogen assimilation and carbon capture for microbial protein production by a novel enrichment of hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria" https://www.powertoprotein.eu/wp-content/uploads/pagination_wr_12112.pdf https://www.powertoprotein.eu/wp-content/uploads/pagination_...
  • JPKab 8y ago
    I want this to be real, but this rings all the bells for yet another EU funded vaporware project, like the Semantic Web. I hope I'm completely wrong.
• jaggs 8y ago
  I think this is kind of similar to what some friends have done with Ecoduna.com. The challenge with Solar Foods must be to produce enough food from a spaceship sized unit.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Not having a nearby sun wild be a challenge too, friending on the mission. Presumably they're looking to Mars first though.
• throwawaynpc123 8y ago
  i'm pretty sure solar protein is called plants.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  What protein do they produce? Not all proteins are equally healthy as far as I know.
  • daxorid 8y ago
    Proteins are broken down into constituent amino acids during digestion anyway, so as long as it has a similar (complete) amino profile as, say, albumin or chicken, it should in theory be fine.
    • qwerty456127 8y ago
      That's the question - whether or not it has a good amino profile (and reasonable low insulinemic index). Also gluten is a composite of proteins too but it's actually harmful not only to people with celiac disease as it triggers production of zonulin.
• exabrial 8y ago
  "It's a single-celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs." Finally, something we can eat when the robots take over
• philipkglass 8y ago
  What's the areal efficiency of this process? The primary input to the growth reactor is hydrogen gas. The primary input to producing renewable hydrogen is electricity. A solar farm in a good location, like Desert Sunlight, achieves an annualized power density of about 10 megawatts per km^2 (0.1 megawatts (100 kW) per hectare). It takes about 50 kWh of electricity to produce a kilogram of hydrogen via electrolysis: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-hydrogen-production-electrolysis https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-... According to this paper by some of the people behind Solar Foods, "Carbon emission avoidance and capture by producing in-reactor microbial biomass based food, feed and slow release fertilizer: Potentials and limitations" ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326571432_Carbon_emission_avoidance_and_capture_by_producing_in-reactor_microbial_biomass_based_food_feed_and_slow_release_fertilizer_Potentials_and_limitations https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326571432_Carbon_em... ), it takes about 560 kg of hydrogen to produce 1000 kg of dry microbial based biomass with a protein content of 70% [1]. At 100 kW/ha, a solar farm in a good location can produce (100 / 50) * 24 * 365 = 17,520 kg of H2 per hectare, per year. That in turn can produce 17520 / 0.56 = 31,286 kg of dry microbial biomass per year, containing 31286 * 0.7 = 21,900 kg of protein per hectare per year. According to some (admittedly quite dated, circa-1972) data collected on this page, the crop with the best areal productivity of edible protein is soybeans at 400 kg/hectare/year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_of_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o... According to table 2 in the article, the essential amino acid profile of this bacterial protein is equal or superior to soy in all respects. The areal protein productivity of a solar farm coupled to microbial reactors may be more than 50 times that of growing conventional crops. If the bacterial protein is used as animal feed for animals with a good feed conversion ratio (e.g. farmed salmon), it even looks like you could get more animal protein per hectare this way than a vegetarian diet can achieve with conventional farming. And the water requirements are reduced even more drastically than the area requirements. And the electricity production can take place on non-arable land. I would be interested to see more modern areal productivity figures for soy; presumably there has been some additional intensification since the early 1970s, though not 50x improvement. [1] Hydrogen consumption is not stated directly, but they say that hydrogen at $3/kg makes up 60% of the $2800 cost to produce a dry tonne of bacterial biomass. (0.6 * 2800) / 3 = 560 kg of hydrogen.
• spqr0a1 8y ago
  Speculating that they plan to use hydrogen-reducing bacteria: This will require substantial post-processing since bacteria have too much RNA and DNA to safely be a major dietary component for humans. Since the website mentions a Mars play, it's relevant that this drawback has been known in the space habitation literature since at least the 1970s.
  • jandrese 8y ago
    What is the dietary danger of excessive nucleic acids? What happens if you eat too much of them? Could it be alleviated by cooking the food before eating it?
    • spqr0a1 8y ago
      The purine bases are metabolized to uric acid which, in excess, can cause gout and kidney stones. Cooking does not modify them in a relevant way.