A number of the comments so far have been attacking Solein with something along the lines of “why not just eat plants”. In my mind, I see two distinct advantage

A number of the comments so far have been attacking Solein with something along the lines of “why not just eat plants”. In my mind, I see two distinct advantages of this approach as a component of altering the food production system to reduce environmental impact. The first is that while plants are efficient at utilizing solar energy for their growth, we aren’t actually able to eat most of what they produce. Take the wheat plant, for example. It is widely cultivated partly because it is so good at producing calories cheaply. Even so, of the roots, the stalk, the leaves, and the seeds, we only eat part of the seeds. From the seeds, we will strip away at least the chaff and often the germ and the bran as well leaving only the endosperm to actually eat. Even that assumes that one of a dozen possible crop failure cases didn’t kill the entire plant before it could be harvested. The advantage I see to the Solein manufacturing process is that we can turn a far higher percentage of the gathered solar energy into actual consumable calories with far less land. The second is that a portion of the carbon footprint of modern agriculture is transportation. The distance between where our food is grown and our local grocery store is often thousands of kilometers. If Solein could be produced in the same urban area that it is eaten in, then we can cut that transportation distance to dozens of kilometers or less.