19 ms·

Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

100 points by T-A 4y ago

ehayes 4y ago
Hot take: actual steak is made from recycled carbon dioxide
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- elil17 4y ago
  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.
  - User23 4y ago
    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?
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      Not sure why you're downvoted because the answer to your question is definitely "no". Everything else, at the moment, is not much more than slides on a pitch deck.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        Meat production is not carbon sequestering, it is carbon emitting. Most agriculture in general involves replacing more carbon sequestering natural growth with agricultural fields.
        asdff 4y ago
        I think that would depends on what the natural growth is actually able to sequester, no? Not all areas clearcut for farmland were lush, quite the opposite actually with artificial irrigation bringing in the possibility of generating all that biomass.
        dqv 4y ago
        No, meat production is still carbon emitting. What you’re thinking of is having cows manage land. For that to sequester carbon, you have to keep the cows alive and not be in a constant consume-supply cycle.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        There is carbon stored in the soil that tilling lets out. And of course all of this is before you get into methane emissions from fertilizer, etc. and the fuel costs of transporting all these crops around as feed. I mean you can just look at the stats for carbon emissions from meat production.
      - manwe150 4y ago
        I thought plants are notoriously bad at this in practice. Not because they can’t, but because they actually don’t need that much CO2, and are also rather finicky to keep alive. Other algae are better. And CO2 scrubbers exist for closed environments like subs and space ships.
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    Animals can use land that can't be used for direct air capture or plant agriculture.
    - smt88 4y ago
      Animals need enormous amounts of water. If you have water, you can produce plants. What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example.
      - anothernewdude 4y ago
        > If you have water, you can produce plants. Simply untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica > What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example. Careful moving those goal posts, you'll hurt your back. Not a goal anybody set. But here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangeland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangeland Animal farming improved human use of land, and indeed crop farming depends a lot on animal byproducts. Or do you prefer unsustainable mineral fertilizers?
    - dqv 4y ago
      Yes you’re right, but only insofar as those animals are not slaughtered for food.
      - anothernewdude 4y ago
        Even then.
        dqv 4y ago
        Even then what? If the cycle continues where you’re continuously slaughtering and replenishing the animals for food and not letting them live their natural life, the argument that it is better at carbon capture is moot.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Well, they use ever so slightly less fossil fuel methane (which is how this process is powered). So much of a muchness, really.
elil17 4y ago
I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them. 2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way to control the chirality of the proteins (50% will be poisonous mirror images of proteins, think thalidomide). Chiral sorting is still really hard. 3. It will taste nasty. The article discusses 1 and 3 but 2 is an interesting one that I think doesn’t get much attention.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Could you use an enzyme to reliably produce chiral molecules? Maybe we will be able to mass-produce nano-machines or something that could facilitate this on an avogadro's scale.
  - manwe150 4y ago
    Like your apropos username, I think what you are describing is basically a cow
- moralestapia 4y ago
  I used to be a biologist and worked a lot with bioreactors. 1 is absolutely true and on top of that, and also since this is meant to become food, you need to be extremely careful to make sure that none of your batches become contaminated by literally anything that lives in the surrounding air, water and all other inputs to the process. Plus, when you "scale" out your process (i.e. use a bigger bioreactor) these problems grow as much, there is no economy of scale here, quite the contrary the larger this gets the bigger the headaches. I guess they deserve the benefit of the doubt but I'm bearish on them succeeding. I really hope they prove me wrong, though!
- usrn 4y ago
  You can go half way and just use micro organisms like algae. Those are very easy to keep alive, they really just need sun and CO2. Then you can use the sugars and lipids as feed stock for the next step.
trothamel 4y ago
This sort of article always feels a bit misleading, because what they're making isn't meat. If you can't trust that aspect of it, what else about the article is wrong?
User23 4y ago
Grass is made from recycled carbon dioxide and cows are made from grass. And we already know beef is delicious.
- owl57 4y ago
  That's an interesting angle. I haven't pictured myself made from chicken before.
  - monkeybutton 4y ago
    Water, air, chicken, dirt, star stuff. Seriously though, by mass, aren't plants by mostly carbon that was separated from CO2?
    - ByteJockey 4y ago
      > Water, air, chicken, dirt, star stuff. God, the Captain Planet re-boot got weird...
  - dash2 4y ago
    “… those creatures we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves.” Thomas Browne - Religio Medici
  - detritus 4y ago
    I've often joked that I'm at least 1/4 potato, given how many of them I eat.
- dqv 4y ago
  What are recycled jokes made of? 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.
howlin 4y ago
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.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I wouldn't call bioengineering and it's effects on the ecosystem a straightforward endeavor.
- bnjemian 4y ago
  It's not like it gets you nothing; photosynthesis would be much less efficient in terms of the land footprint required. The article discusses the footprint required for their facilities relative to normal agriculture; the difference is massive. Photosynthesis is effectively driven by a 2D flux and thus is constrained by surface area to a pretty large extent – unless you use an electric light source, which would require renewable energy to be sustainable and thus, again, be constrained by surface area (think wind farms and PVs). With their technology, they can use a bioreactor and aerate it with the CO2, etc. required to grow the microbes they're using. That means the energy is not constrained to a 2D flux and can be delivered across all three dimensions in a volume.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  It's not. Photosynthesis is two steps: 1. Assimilating photons from sunlight to generate electrical potential by oxidizing water (ps that is kind of a crazy concept). 2. Fixing carbon dioxide by using the electron from step one to reduce CO2 to C-OH (ish) 1. Photosystem-II-I systems really suck, like, commercially available photocells are more efficient than fundamental quantum limits of the protein complex, beyond what it is likely for us to be able to do design or evolve for. Our photocells are getting better too. Also, photosynthetic organisms, especially algae, self-shadow. That's why you almost have to have those rediculous algae racetracks (look it up) and of course often the least valuable land + where there is sunlight so that it stands a chance to make economical sense is often in the desert, so for algae you're stuck shipping water to the desert :/ 2. Carbon fixation really really sucks. RuBisCo is the enzyme that is the bottleneck. It sucks so hard that RuBisCo is literally the most abundant enzyme on the planet to make up for how bad it is. Not only is it an annoyingly slow enzyme, it's oxygen sensitive, which is hilarious because step 1 of photosynthesis cracks water. Plants and algae do some crazy gymnastics to separate part 1 and part 2; look up C3 and C4 cycles, and algae had to invent colonial forms and terminal differentiation because their carbon fixers are kept segregated from their photosynthesizers; one algae -synechocystis 6803 has one of the biggest algae genomes, it probably mostly goes into a rigourous gene expression which is used to anticipate circadian cycles and prepare the cell to flip between day (photosystem) and night (carbon and nitrogen fixation) cycles.
ARandomerDude 4y ago
> 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.
- chairhairair 4y ago
  That’s not a translation it’s an explanation.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Why does this need a translation?
photochemsyn 4y ago
This is absolutely a 'do not trust these claims without seeing peer-reviewed publication in a reputable journal' territory. For one thing, this is likely to be a slow method of capturing CO2 (H2-powered CO2-capture metabolism, called 'chemoautotrophy' is almost certainly going to be much slower than green plant photosynthetic capture rates). Maybe you could speed it up by adding enough hydrogen at optimal rates, but that's not free either. 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.
- pdonis 4y ago
  I got a similar feeling from one particular statement in the article: that the founder of Air Protein previously founded a company (Kiverdi) that "now holds dozens of patents on technologies to turn recycled carbon dioxide into alternative fuels". That company was founded in 2008. So where are all these alternative fuels that their patents are for? If any kind of process like this has a hope of working at scale, using it to produce commercial quantities of alternative fuels seems a lot easier than using it to produce commercial quantities of food for humans. So if they can't even produce the alternative fuels at scale, how are they going to do it for food?
- adrian_b 4y ago
  They appear to have given very vague information about what kind of bacteria they culture. Assuming that they have told the truth and they feed their bacteria with carbon dioxide, dihydrogen and dioxygen, then those bacteria are not powered by the H2 with CO2 reaction (which is possible only in anaerobic conditions, by acetogenic or methanogenic bacteria/archaea), but by the oxidation of hydrogen. The use of the word "fermentation" is completely inappropriate. Regardless what kind of bacteria they are using, the bacteria do not carry out any kind of fermentation (which refers to obtaining energy from large molecules, either by converting them into isomers or by breaking them down into smaller molecules). In any case slowness is not their problem, because they do not use air as the source of CO2, but they use concentrated CO2, which accelerates a lot the CO2 capture. Also, if the bacteria oxidize dihydrogen, they dispose of much more energy than the anaerobic bacteria which also capture CO2, so a doubling time of a few hours is believable. What is unlikely is that they can produce their proteins at a cost comparable with, e.g., chicken meat or proteins extracted from legumes, when they use relatively expensive concentrated CO2 and dihydrogen to feed the bacteria and also a presumably expensive process to separate the protein and convert it into a product resembling meat.
acchow 4y ago
Don't farms already do this?
issa 4y ago
It is pretty insane when you think about it. We could get all the climate harm reduction benefits the article mentions if people would just choose to eat plants instead. Seems like a very simple solution.
- manigandham 4y ago
  There’s nothing simple about changing human nature. If you have to start with "if people would just choose" then it's not viable.
  - azakai 4y ago
    It's not simple, you're right, but history has shown again and again that it can be viable. Society has made a lot of progress. In the end people can just choose. If someone reading this right now eats meat, then you can make the choice to eat more plants. Please do so as much as you can, that will make a difference in saving the planet!
    - aszantu 4y ago
      I'd love to eat plants a lot. Just turns out they give me depression.(takes about 4 days after ingestion) There is something called bio-availability and there are nutrients in meat that you don't ever get from plants. But it would be nice if there were public pig pens where you could recycle food waste into bacon. Transportation is the biggest co2 producer...
      - aszantu 4y ago
        since there were a few comments, telling me it's impossible that what I experience happens. Background: I've seen a lot of violence in my childhood, lost my friends more than once through moving or switching schools, have been abused in school by a teacher and felt unwanted in general. Although I'm smart, I always was forgetful and felt stupid, took longer to understand things than others, one of these would be enough to give depression. for about 30 years I suffered depression, started when I was about seven up until roundabout 35 years old. I was only diagnosed with serious depression(suicidal ideation, woke up at night, thought someone evil is in my room, crying a lot, hopelessness, low energy, panic attacks, unable to hold down a job), adhd and some borderline schizoid spectrum in 2012, went to therapy, rehab, and emotion control training. In 2017 I left the latest rehab with doctors telling me there was no hope. Up until that point I was the person who would eat anything, didn't care, meat, fruit, carbs, sugary stuff. I love food! Sept 2017: In the forums Keto would pop up now and then, that was the last thing I hadn't tried the last 4 years so I thought I'd give it a shot. And within a week the depression cleared. And every time I told someone they told me, that it's not okay to eat that much meat, and food can't cause depression, and I should go back to eating "normal". Energy levels where higher than I'd ever known, my mood stabilized. My finances were down to the last penny, so I had to prioritize meat over everything else, someone mentioned zero carb. At that point I still ate dandelion (picked them in the streets, on lawns, in the surrounding fields) with lemmon juice, just to get in enough fat for the ketogenic diet. I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, the panic attacks went down within a week, I stopped waking up at night and seeing things that weren't there. If this experience is placebo, I'm okay with it. No doctor has been able to explain it to me, I don't have any allergies to food, so it has to be something in the gut. I have a sibo-test sitting, but haven't done it yet. So now, roundabout 5 years later, I've been working since 2019, high performing in what I do, no needless crying, no energy crash, no suicidal ideation. I'm still forgetful, but that's okay. Baseline eating is 170 grams of fat/70 grams of protein, preferably organic, locally sourced beef, but I'll eat anything meat that comes my way. Over the years I've tested all kinds of greens and carbs. All kinds of seeds seem to give me hopelessness, while sugary fruit, tubers and processed carbs sap my energy and green veggies seem to give me the idea that someone is watching me. When I don't test for a few weeks, I'm stable and don't get any of these effects. There are some things I can eat, but even they seem to have a threshold. Currants, glazed onions, Coconut milk raspberries (A handful a week seems okay, more will trigger symptoms) artificial sweeteners - curious with these, they make me angry (again 4 days until it sets in)
anothernewdude 4y ago
Oh just stop. I'll eat Falafel and other vegan foods. But why would I ever eat a chicken or beef replacement? Just make some unconstrained good vegan food. It'll be better.
- neuronic 4y ago
  Don't be this absolute, please. So I love the taste of meat, but I generally don't think my personal enjoyment is sufficient reason to further harm both highly intelligent animals and the climate. It's a decision I have deemed egoistic with regards to myself (and myself only - I am not one for evangelism). I want to explain why my experience seems a bit different with "replacements". It is very hard to change habits, so I have not stopped eating meat completely. However, I have successfully reduced my meat consumption by a significant amount, all thanks to some substitutes making it very easy to reduce some real meat while keeping my every-day habit foods. The quality and taste of the replacements range from excellent to complete utter shit. I exclusively focus on the currently good or excellent ones and adapt new items from now and then. For example, the "Rügenwalder Mühle" company in Germany makes some excellent products [1] that are totally enough to satisfy me. Substitution works best with meats that are typically a highly processed mess filled with salt & spices. No, it doesn't fully taste the same as meat but, like I said, it tastes good enough and every gram less meat eaten is a microscopic positive change that still matters en masse. [1] https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte
  - uxcolumbo 4y ago
    If more people would think like you it'd be a great step forward, i.e. putting climate / biosphere health & stability and reducing animal suffering above their taste buds and being happy with 'good enough'. Plant based meat substitutes are becoming better and better. Some folks can't tell the difference already.
    - cheese_goddess 4y ago
      That's because like OP says "Substitution works best with meats that are typically a highly processed mess filled with salt & spices". See how Burger King and McDonalds are so eager to sell you plant burgers and plant nuggets? That's because they don't give a shit what you eat, as long as it gets you in through the door. But those are the same people, the same industry, the same organisations, that are responsible for the over-production and over-consumption of meat, and they are very directly responsible for deforestation and land use change for industrial farming. Not eating meat may or may not do anything for the environment, but continuing to support the food industry does exactly the opposite: it supports the people who destroy the environment. And the ones who torture animals to boot. Here's a simple solution: don't eat industrial shit. If you're going to eat meat, eat meat from a small, local farmer (not for the miles, but for the size). If you're going to not eat meat, then don't eat fake meat, but real food made of plants and that looks like plants. And if you can't stand not eating meat, then sit down and think why not. Moralising about pleasure is dumb. People enjoy eating meat for the same reason we enjoy eating plants: because it's nourishing. You want to save the environment? Eat real food and support the people who make real food. Not burgers.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
So, in a possible future overhearing of two aliens discussing us being made out of meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ we might be able to fib and convince them the meat is made out of carbon dioxide? Universe, here we come!
tomp 4y ago
I don't understand. All meat is made from recycled carbon dioxide (plants, e.g. corn & grass, take CO2 out of the atmosphere and "recycle" it, that's then fed to animals to grow meat). As I always like to says, cows are just recycled grass. Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels).
- qayxc 4y ago
  > Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels). How so? Even the article itself brings up various reasons that don't include CO2 emissions; deforestation and water use for example. Cattle in particular are a major source for methane emissions - a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The direct contribution to global warming (via methane emissions) is very low, yes. The problem arises from feeding and waste removal. It's a multi-dimensional issue and no, cows are not just recycled grass - if that were the case they wouldn't have the same impact. Most dairy cows (appr. half the overall cow population) are fed maize, soy, and high-energy supplements in order increase yield. Silages are also frequently used and the fermenting process also adds to the GHG emissions. > Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels). That doesn't make sense. Modern farm operations rely heavily on fossil fuels and fertiliser. This isn't the 18th century anymore, there aren't herdsmen watching over cows grazing on meadows. This: https://www.agdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/bg-dairy_barn_parlor-001-1968.jpg https://www.agdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/bg-dairy_... is what a modern dairy farm looks like and these feed pellets https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/pellet-feed-for-cows-picture-id459106227 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/pellet-feed-for-cows-pi... aren't made of just grass either. It's a romanticised image that many still have in mind when thinking of meat production, but it's a heavily mechanised industry today and pictures like this https://ak0.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/4426340/thumb/1.jpg https://ak0.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/4426340/thumb/1.jp... don't reflect a large part of the industry anymore.
  - tomp 4y ago
    Deforestation & water use aren’t a problem in the first world. Maize & soy are also made from captured CO2 like grass. Yes the remaining CO2 released is from energy & transport (oil) used, but that is solved not by demonizing meat, but by improving energy generation (nuclear & solar instead of oil/coal/gas)
elif 4y ago
plants are pretty efficient at recycling CO2. plants are pretty easy to turn into meat. the market has already turned those delicious. there has to be a significant efficiency advantage for this to make any sense at all.
sovietcattle 4y ago
Isn't all meat made from recycled carbon dioxide?
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  I only eat beef that’s fed on the certifiable virgin grass, immortalis gramineae. It’s very important to me that the carbon the animal has eaten has a natural chain of custody. I don’t want to eat a carbon that’s been combusted or God forbid erupted out of someone’s ass at one point.
lettergram 4y ago
I see the title and My first thought is literally: feed for livestock? I cut hundreds of tons of hay a year for the cows I feed. The grass captures carbon, clover and various other plants add nitrogen back to the soil, and the grass (carbon) is fed to the cows. A well maintained pasture can be worked for centuries and increase production on average year over year.
hitpointdrew 4y ago
What the hell is with all the anti-meat propaganda? I am not eating soy, I am not eating bugs, I am not eating this. Just stop with this nonsense already.
- 0daystock 4y ago
  Honest question: why are you afraid of soy?
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  What is non-sense is creating all this destruction and waste of resources just so we can have some cooked animal flesh on our plates when it's not necessary for human survival in most societies anymore. Especially this community here, who relies on logic for their work. What makes more sense? A) Choosing food products that require fewer resources and land to feed the world. B) Continuing on our current path (pollution & deforestation) that will eventually mean the destruction of our biosphere.
cheese_goddess 4y ago
> If nothing changes, the food sector will soon account for almost half of the world’s total emissions budget. And this is absolutely as it should be! Half of our carbon budget to hit 1.5 C is absolutely right to spend on food production. We need food much more than we need anything else. We can do without internal combustion engines, without air travel, without everybody getting a new iPhone every few months, but we can't do without food. Having enough food to feed everyone a healthy and nutritious diet is a much better protection against civilisation collapse than making sure everybody has a car! The post tries to say that trying to meet the 1.5 C goal "without addressing animal agriculture would require other sectors to reduce emission beyond realistic levels" but those are weasel words! Climate change is caused by those, air quotes, "other sectors" - industry, energy production, transportation- burning fossil fuels and it is those "other sectors" burning fossil fuels that is keeping us from hitting the 1.5 C target. It is those, "other sectors" that need to get their house in order and reduce, no, minimise, their emissions. It's not everyone else who has to give up their food for the sake of BP, Google, Shell and Ford.

100 points by T-A 4y ago

ehayes 4y ago

Hot take: actual steak is made from recycled carbon dioxide

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
elil17 4y ago
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.
- User23 4y ago
  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?
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Not sure why you're downvoted because the answer to your question is definitely "no". Everything else, at the moment, is not much more than slides on a pitch deck.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Meat production is not carbon sequestering, it is carbon emitting. Most agriculture in general involves replacing more carbon sequestering natural growth with agricultural fields.
      - asdff 4y ago
        I think that would depends on what the natural growth is actually able to sequester, no? Not all areas clearcut for farmland were lush, quite the opposite actually with artificial irrigation bringing in the possibility of generating all that biomass.
        dqv 4y ago
        No, meat production is still carbon emitting. What you’re thinking of is having cows manage land. For that to sequester carbon, you have to keep the cows alive and not be in a constant consume-supply cycle.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        There is carbon stored in the soil that tilling lets out. And of course all of this is before you get into methane emissions from fertilizer, etc. and the fuel costs of transporting all these crops around as feed. I mean you can just look at the stats for carbon emissions from meat production.
    - manwe150 4y ago
      I thought plants are notoriously bad at this in practice. Not because they can’t, but because they actually don’t need that much CO2, and are also rather finicky to keep alive. Other algae are better. And CO2 scrubbers exist for closed environments like subs and space ships.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  Animals can use land that can't be used for direct air capture or plant agriculture.
  - smt88 4y ago
    Animals need enormous amounts of water. If you have water, you can produce plants. What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example.
    - anothernewdude 4y ago
      > If you have water, you can produce plants. Simply untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica > What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example. Careful moving those goal posts, you'll hurt your back. Not a goal anybody set. But here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangeland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangeland Animal farming improved human use of land, and indeed crop farming depends a lot on animal byproducts. Or do you prefer unsustainable mineral fertilizers?
  - dqv 4y ago
    Yes you’re right, but only insofar as those animals are not slaughtered for food.
    - anothernewdude 4y ago
      Even then.
      - dqv 4y ago
        Even then what? If the cycle continues where you’re continuously slaughtering and replenishing the animals for food and not letting them live their natural life, the argument that it is better at carbon capture is moot.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Well, they use ever so slightly less fossil fuel methane (which is how this process is powered). So much of a muchness, really.

elil17 4y ago

I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them. 2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way to control the chirality of the proteins (50% will be poisonous mirror images of proteins, think thalidomide). Chiral sorting is still really hard. 3. It will taste nasty. The article discusses 1 and 3 but 2 is an interesting one that I think doesn’t get much attention.

cowtools 4y ago
Could you use an enzyme to reliably produce chiral molecules? Maybe we will be able to mass-produce nano-machines or something that could facilitate this on an avogadro's scale.
- manwe150 4y ago
  Like your apropos username, I think what you are describing is basically a cow
moralestapia 4y ago
I used to be a biologist and worked a lot with bioreactors. 1 is absolutely true and on top of that, and also since this is meant to become food, you need to be extremely careful to make sure that none of your batches become contaminated by literally anything that lives in the surrounding air, water and all other inputs to the process. Plus, when you "scale" out your process (i.e. use a bigger bioreactor) these problems grow as much, there is no economy of scale here, quite the contrary the larger this gets the bigger the headaches. I guess they deserve the benefit of the doubt but I'm bearish on them succeeding. I really hope they prove me wrong, though!
usrn 4y ago
You can go half way and just use micro organisms like algae. Those are very easy to keep alive, they really just need sun and CO2. Then you can use the sugars and lipids as feed stock for the next step.

trothamel 4y ago

This sort of article always feels a bit misleading, because what they're making isn't meat. If you can't trust that aspect of it, what else about the article is wrong?

User23 4y ago

Grass is made from recycled carbon dioxide and cows are made from grass. And we already know beef is delicious.

owl57 4y ago
That's an interesting angle. I haven't pictured myself made from chicken before.
- monkeybutton 4y ago
  Water, air, chicken, dirt, star stuff. Seriously though, by mass, aren't plants by mostly carbon that was separated from CO2?
  - ByteJockey 4y ago
    > Water, air, chicken, dirt, star stuff. God, the Captain Planet re-boot got weird...
- dash2 4y ago
  “… those creatures we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves.” Thomas Browne - Religio Medici
- detritus 4y ago
  I've often joked that I'm at least 1/4 potato, given how many of them I eat.
dqv 4y ago
What are recycled jokes made of? 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.

howlin 4y ago

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.

ehnto 4y ago
I wouldn't call bioengineering and it's effects on the ecosystem a straightforward endeavor.
bnjemian 4y ago
It's not like it gets you nothing; photosynthesis would be much less efficient in terms of the land footprint required. The article discusses the footprint required for their facilities relative to normal agriculture; the difference is massive. Photosynthesis is effectively driven by a 2D flux and thus is constrained by surface area to a pretty large extent – unless you use an electric light source, which would require renewable energy to be sustainable and thus, again, be constrained by surface area (think wind farms and PVs). With their technology, they can use a bioreactor and aerate it with the CO2, etc. required to grow the microbes they're using. That means the energy is not constrained to a 2D flux and can be delivered across all three dimensions in a volume.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
It's not. Photosynthesis is two steps: 1. Assimilating photons from sunlight to generate electrical potential by oxidizing water (ps that is kind of a crazy concept). 2. Fixing carbon dioxide by using the electron from step one to reduce CO2 to C-OH (ish) 1. Photosystem-II-I systems really suck, like, commercially available photocells are more efficient than fundamental quantum limits of the protein complex, beyond what it is likely for us to be able to do design or evolve for. Our photocells are getting better too. Also, photosynthetic organisms, especially algae, self-shadow. That's why you almost have to have those rediculous algae racetracks (look it up) and of course often the least valuable land + where there is sunlight so that it stands a chance to make economical sense is often in the desert, so for algae you're stuck shipping water to the desert :/ 2. Carbon fixation really really sucks. RuBisCo is the enzyme that is the bottleneck. It sucks so hard that RuBisCo is literally the most abundant enzyme on the planet to make up for how bad it is. Not only is it an annoyingly slow enzyme, it's oxygen sensitive, which is hilarious because step 1 of photosynthesis cracks water. Plants and algae do some crazy gymnastics to separate part 1 and part 2; look up C3 and C4 cycles, and algae had to invent colonial forms and terminal differentiation because their carbon fixers are kept segregated from their photosynthesizers; one algae -synechocystis 6803 has one of the biggest algae genomes, it probably mostly goes into a rigourous gene expression which is used to anticipate circadian cycles and prepare the cell to flip between day (photosystem) and night (carbon and nitrogen fixation) cycles.

ARandomerDude 4y ago

> 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.

chairhairair 4y ago
That’s not a translation it’s an explanation.
whimsicalism 4y ago
Why does this need a translation?

photochemsyn 4y ago

This is absolutely a 'do not trust these claims without seeing peer-reviewed publication in a reputable journal' territory. For one thing, this is likely to be a slow method of capturing CO2 (H2-powered CO2-capture metabolism, called 'chemoautotrophy' is almost certainly going to be much slower than green plant photosynthetic capture rates). Maybe you could speed it up by adding enough hydrogen at optimal rates, but that's not free either. 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.

pdonis 4y ago
I got a similar feeling from one particular statement in the article: that the founder of Air Protein previously founded a company (Kiverdi) that "now holds dozens of patents on technologies to turn recycled carbon dioxide into alternative fuels". That company was founded in 2008. So where are all these alternative fuels that their patents are for? If any kind of process like this has a hope of working at scale, using it to produce commercial quantities of alternative fuels seems a lot easier than using it to produce commercial quantities of food for humans. So if they can't even produce the alternative fuels at scale, how are they going to do it for food?
adrian_b 4y ago
They appear to have given very vague information about what kind of bacteria they culture. Assuming that they have told the truth and they feed their bacteria with carbon dioxide, dihydrogen and dioxygen, then those bacteria are not powered by the H2 with CO2 reaction (which is possible only in anaerobic conditions, by acetogenic or methanogenic bacteria/archaea), but by the oxidation of hydrogen. The use of the word "fermentation" is completely inappropriate. Regardless what kind of bacteria they are using, the bacteria do not carry out any kind of fermentation (which refers to obtaining energy from large molecules, either by converting them into isomers or by breaking them down into smaller molecules). In any case slowness is not their problem, because they do not use air as the source of CO2, but they use concentrated CO2, which accelerates a lot the CO2 capture. Also, if the bacteria oxidize dihydrogen, they dispose of much more energy than the anaerobic bacteria which also capture CO2, so a doubling time of a few hours is believable. What is unlikely is that they can produce their proteins at a cost comparable with, e.g., chicken meat or proteins extracted from legumes, when they use relatively expensive concentrated CO2 and dihydrogen to feed the bacteria and also a presumably expensive process to separate the protein and convert it into a product resembling meat.

acchow 4y ago

Don't farms already do this?

issa 4y ago

It is pretty insane when you think about it. We could get all the climate harm reduction benefits the article mentions if people would just choose to eat plants instead. Seems like a very simple solution.

manigandham 4y ago
There’s nothing simple about changing human nature. If you have to start with "if people would just choose" then it's not viable.
- azakai 4y ago
  It's not simple, you're right, but history has shown again and again that it can be viable. Society has made a lot of progress. In the end people can just choose. If someone reading this right now eats meat, then you can make the choice to eat more plants. Please do so as much as you can, that will make a difference in saving the planet!
  - aszantu 4y ago
    I'd love to eat plants a lot. Just turns out they give me depression.(takes about 4 days after ingestion) There is something called bio-availability and there are nutrients in meat that you don't ever get from plants. But it would be nice if there were public pig pens where you could recycle food waste into bacon. Transportation is the biggest co2 producer...
    - aszantu 4y ago
      since there were a few comments, telling me it's impossible that what I experience happens. Background: I've seen a lot of violence in my childhood, lost my friends more than once through moving or switching schools, have been abused in school by a teacher and felt unwanted in general. Although I'm smart, I always was forgetful and felt stupid, took longer to understand things than others, one of these would be enough to give depression. for about 30 years I suffered depression, started when I was about seven up until roundabout 35 years old. I was only diagnosed with serious depression(suicidal ideation, woke up at night, thought someone evil is in my room, crying a lot, hopelessness, low energy, panic attacks, unable to hold down a job), adhd and some borderline schizoid spectrum in 2012, went to therapy, rehab, and emotion control training. In 2017 I left the latest rehab with doctors telling me there was no hope. Up until that point I was the person who would eat anything, didn't care, meat, fruit, carbs, sugary stuff. I love food! Sept 2017: In the forums Keto would pop up now and then, that was the last thing I hadn't tried the last 4 years so I thought I'd give it a shot. And within a week the depression cleared. And every time I told someone they told me, that it's not okay to eat that much meat, and food can't cause depression, and I should go back to eating "normal". Energy levels where higher than I'd ever known, my mood stabilized. My finances were down to the last penny, so I had to prioritize meat over everything else, someone mentioned zero carb. At that point I still ate dandelion (picked them in the streets, on lawns, in the surrounding fields) with lemmon juice, just to get in enough fat for the ketogenic diet. I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, the panic attacks went down within a week, I stopped waking up at night and seeing things that weren't there. If this experience is placebo, I'm okay with it. No doctor has been able to explain it to me, I don't have any allergies to food, so it has to be something in the gut. I have a sibo-test sitting, but haven't done it yet. So now, roundabout 5 years later, I've been working since 2019, high performing in what I do, no needless crying, no energy crash, no suicidal ideation. I'm still forgetful, but that's okay. Baseline eating is 170 grams of fat/70 grams of protein, preferably organic, locally sourced beef, but I'll eat anything meat that comes my way. Over the years I've tested all kinds of greens and carbs. All kinds of seeds seem to give me hopelessness, while sugary fruit, tubers and processed carbs sap my energy and green veggies seem to give me the idea that someone is watching me. When I don't test for a few weeks, I'm stable and don't get any of these effects. There are some things I can eat, but even they seem to have a threshold. Currants, glazed onions, Coconut milk raspberries (A handful a week seems okay, more will trigger symptoms) artificial sweeteners - curious with these, they make me angry (again 4 days until it sets in)

anothernewdude 4y ago

Oh just stop. I'll eat Falafel and other vegan foods. But why would I ever eat a chicken or beef replacement? Just make some unconstrained good vegan food. It'll be better.

neuronic 4y ago
Don't be this absolute, please. So I love the taste of meat, but I generally don't think my personal enjoyment is sufficient reason to further harm both highly intelligent animals and the climate. It's a decision I have deemed egoistic with regards to myself (and myself only - I am not one for evangelism). I want to explain why my experience seems a bit different with "replacements". It is very hard to change habits, so I have not stopped eating meat completely. However, I have successfully reduced my meat consumption by a significant amount, all thanks to some substitutes making it very easy to reduce some real meat while keeping my every-day habit foods. The quality and taste of the replacements range from excellent to complete utter shit. I exclusively focus on the currently good or excellent ones and adapt new items from now and then. For example, the "Rügenwalder Mühle" company in Germany makes some excellent products [1] that are totally enough to satisfy me. Substitution works best with meats that are typically a highly processed mess filled with salt & spices. No, it doesn't fully taste the same as meat but, like I said, it tastes good enough and every gram less meat eaten is a microscopic positive change that still matters en masse. [1] https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  If more people would think like you it'd be a great step forward, i.e. putting climate / biosphere health & stability and reducing animal suffering above their taste buds and being happy with 'good enough'. Plant based meat substitutes are becoming better and better. Some folks can't tell the difference already.
  - cheese_goddess 4y ago
    That's because like OP says "Substitution works best with meats that are typically a highly processed mess filled with salt & spices". See how Burger King and McDonalds are so eager to sell you plant burgers and plant nuggets? That's because they don't give a shit what you eat, as long as it gets you in through the door. But those are the same people, the same industry, the same organisations, that are responsible for the over-production and over-consumption of meat, and they are very directly responsible for deforestation and land use change for industrial farming. Not eating meat may or may not do anything for the environment, but continuing to support the food industry does exactly the opposite: it supports the people who destroy the environment. And the ones who torture animals to boot. Here's a simple solution: don't eat industrial shit. If you're going to eat meat, eat meat from a small, local farmer (not for the miles, but for the size). If you're going to not eat meat, then don't eat fake meat, but real food made of plants and that looks like plants. And if you can't stand not eating meat, then sit down and think why not. Moralising about pleasure is dumb. People enjoy eating meat for the same reason we enjoy eating plants: because it's nourishing. You want to save the environment? Eat real food and support the people who make real food. Not burgers.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

So, in a possible future overhearing of two aliens discussing us being made out of meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ we might be able to fib and convince them the meat is made out of carbon dioxide? Universe, here we come!

tomp 4y ago

I don't understand. All meat is made from recycled carbon dioxide (plants, e.g. corn & grass, take CO2 out of the atmosphere and "recycle" it, that's then fed to animals to grow meat). As I always like to says, cows are just recycled grass. Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels).

qayxc 4y ago
> Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels). How so? Even the article itself brings up various reasons that don't include CO2 emissions; deforestation and water use for example. Cattle in particular are a major source for methane emissions - a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The direct contribution to global warming (via methane emissions) is very low, yes. The problem arises from feeding and waste removal. It's a multi-dimensional issue and no, cows are not just recycled grass - if that were the case they wouldn't have the same impact. Most dairy cows (appr. half the overall cow population) are fed maize, soy, and high-energy supplements in order increase yield. Silages are also frequently used and the fermenting process also adds to the GHG emissions. > Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels). That doesn't make sense. Modern farm operations rely heavily on fossil fuels and fertiliser. This isn't the 18th century anymore, there aren't herdsmen watching over cows grazing on meadows. This: https://www.agdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/bg-dairy_barn_parlor-001-1968.jpg https://www.agdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/bg-dairy_... is what a modern dairy farm looks like and these feed pellets https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/pellet-feed-for-cows-picture-id459106227 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/pellet-feed-for-cows-pi... aren't made of just grass either. It's a romanticised image that many still have in mind when thinking of meat production, but it's a heavily mechanised industry today and pictures like this https://ak0.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/4426340/thumb/1.jpg https://ak0.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/4426340/thumb/1.jp... don't reflect a large part of the industry anymore.
- tomp 4y ago
  Deforestation & water use aren’t a problem in the first world. Maize & soy are also made from captured CO2 like grass. Yes the remaining CO2 released is from energy & transport (oil) used, but that is solved not by demonizing meat, but by improving energy generation (nuclear & solar instead of oil/coal/gas)

elif 4y ago

plants are pretty efficient at recycling CO2. plants are pretty easy to turn into meat. the market has already turned those delicious. there has to be a significant efficiency advantage for this to make any sense at all.

sovietcattle 4y ago

Isn't all meat made from recycled carbon dioxide?

Pigalowda 4y ago
I only eat beef that’s fed on the certifiable virgin grass, immortalis gramineae. It’s very important to me that the carbon the animal has eaten has a natural chain of custody. I don’t want to eat a carbon that’s been combusted or God forbid erupted out of someone’s ass at one point.

lettergram 4y ago

I see the title and My first thought is literally: feed for livestock? I cut hundreds of tons of hay a year for the cows I feed. The grass captures carbon, clover and various other plants add nitrogen back to the soil, and the grass (carbon) is fed to the cows. A well maintained pasture can be worked for centuries and increase production on average year over year.

hitpointdrew 4y ago

What the hell is with all the anti-meat propaganda? I am not eating soy, I am not eating bugs, I am not eating this. Just stop with this nonsense already.

0daystock 4y ago
Honest question: why are you afraid of soy?
uxcolumbo 4y ago
What is non-sense is creating all this destruction and waste of resources just so we can have some cooked animal flesh on our plates when it's not necessary for human survival in most societies anymore. Especially this community here, who relies on logic for their work. What makes more sense? A) Choosing food products that require fewer resources and land to feed the world. B) Continuing on our current path (pollution & deforestation) that will eventually mean the destruction of our biosphere.

cheese_goddess 4y ago

> If nothing changes, the food sector will soon account for almost half of the world’s total emissions budget. And this is absolutely as it should be! Half of our carbon budget to hit 1.5 C is absolutely right to spend on food production. We need food much more than we need anything else. We can do without internal combustion engines, without air travel, without everybody getting a new iPhone every few months, but we can't do without food. Having enough food to feed everyone a healthy and nutritious diet is a much better protection against civilisation collapse than making sure everybody has a car! The post tries to say that trying to meet the 1.5 C goal "without addressing animal agriculture would require other sectors to reduce emission beyond realistic levels" but those are weasel words! Climate change is caused by those, air quotes, "other sectors" - industry, energy production, transportation- burning fossil fuels and it is those "other sectors" burning fossil fuels that is keeping us from hitting the 1.5 C target. It is those, "other sectors" that need to get their house in order and reduce, no, minimise, their emissions. It's not everyone else who has to give up their food for the sake of BP, Google, Shell and Ford.