- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world’s first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.
The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.
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If it’s not dairy, is this not margarine rather than butter?
Also, a
proprietary process
Ugh, capitalism
I mean, it was backed by Bill Gates, mr proprietary himself
Gates
just like he did the vaccines/.(not for himself but for the pharma companies.)
It is neither plant or animal based, the chemical composition is claimed to be like butter, so it is even less margarine than it is butter. Margarine is hardened plant oil or technically it can also be made from animal fat. So this is neither margarine or butter, it is synthetic butter, since it synthesized chemically, rather than made by the traditional more natural method.
But yes capitalism indeed. Why try to help the world if you can’t make money on it? 🙄
Yes, this has nothing to do with butter.
Don’t say the m-word, it makes milk boys nervous
proprietary process
Where the carbon is replaced with butter.
Once we kill the Earth, this will be how food is manufactured. I am now going to finish my box of Soylent Green.
I’m not sure why people are so puritanical about this. I think Beyond Burgers and Soylent are great.
In case you don’t know, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Soylent very much had that in mind when naming their product. It’s meant to serve the same purpose as the titular substance: a wholly complete food source. Also constantly referencing Soylent Green to denigrate Soylent was precisely what I was referring to lol
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Yeah but you referenced Soylent when the original comment was about Soylent Green (which, as you tacitly acknowledge, came first) so you kind of got the cause and effect backwards
well he’s not arguing against eating people, he’s arguing against a distate for the concept of food replacements. not every post-apocalyptic replacement has to be made from people either
I don’t think the person at the beginning of the thread was saying all food would be made from people. I think they were referencing a fictional product for irony and that the person who responded didn’t catch, and the responding person said what they said to follow up and anyone with the will to read can interpret for themselves…
Enjoy your heavily processed food full of saturated fat and more than 4x the sodium of beef burgers.
And a touch of GMO goodness with your soylent.Brother do you know what a GMO is?
Do you know what obvious sarcasm is?
Not that obvious, it seems
I assumed “GMO goodness” was more than low bar enough.
How on earth is he going to process the scientific explanation in the article?sukhmel probably assumed you meant that you were parodying someone who hates artificial foods and GMOs and did not actually hate them yourself
Do you? Because you sound like some of the arguments I’ve heard from conservatives/cowbrains when I’ve talked about not eating meat and trying substitutes.
Like it would take very little effort to make this sound like part of an Alex Jones rant, talk about the nutrition aspect and transition into a lazy ad pivot and you’re basically there.
TF are you going on about conservatives, Alex Jones and whatever?
That’s some rambling associated with inhabitants of the US banana republic and their fanatic fixation on making everything about them and their 2 sides of the Uniparty.
“Someone in the world doesn’t like GMO’s, that’s also side B’s stance and automatically bad!”
“What, Side B says the sun comes up in the east? If they say it it must be in the west!”Simplistic ridiculous campist thinking.
Really I hope both of your camps burn that joke of a country to the ground and disappear.
Bye now
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.
What is wrong with entertainment, though? Taste is one of our senses, like hearing or seeing, having food that tastes good is not inefficient , it’s lovely - I think having a good palate and appreciation for lots of flavors is a positive good in a life.
That’s a very shallow take. Food taste good thus must be good? You do not dare to explore this any deeper?
? I grow vegetables and fruit, make healthy meals, mostly homemade. Sourdough bread, fermented drinks with odds and ends to divert waste. Why do people think good food doesn’t taste good? Good food tastes great.
No one’s argueing that food doesn’t taste good but there’s more to food than just taste and kinda sad that you don’t see it.
I am so confused. Why do you think I said taste is the only thing that matters about food? I did not say that. I said that it does matter, and should not be devalued, would never argue that it’s the only thing that matters, and never said that.
I think you genuinely have a reading comprehension disability.
Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.
and you reply with “but food tastes good” — duuuuuh but why would that matter to anything? like seriously dude, spend some time with yourself.
“Soylent Green is people!”
Space Butter
This, but unironically.
There’s plenty of objects out there made of CHONPS.
If we don’t kill ourselves first, at some point we’ll eat the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud.
Bring me the corpse starch
…carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen…
Pretty sure that is what regular butter is made out of too.
Yes, they aren’t trying to make an alternative butter substitute as I understand it. They’re trying to make real butter via a purely chemically synthetic process.
How is this not just crisco, hydrogenated fat? Butter seems like it has more going on, traces of milk proteins & sugars that give it flavor.
Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).
This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.
Both of those things are basically C, H, and O.
So are you
This isn’t butter, this is one type of butter fat. It’s missing the milk solids, proteins, and other molecules that contribute to butter’s smell and taste.
I can’t believe it’s not butter
I shall add some potassium and market it as buttOCK
Maybe they add some of those under “natural flavors”?
Then it’s no longer vegan.
The article doesn’t say it is vegan. And despite their “no plants, no animals, no oils” claim, the added “natural flavour and colour” needs to come from somewhere. Generally these are derived from plants, animals or oils.
Overall an interesting breakthrough, but the contradictions make me ask some questions.
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I don’t get it, what do you mean?
I bet that price is the main issue. The reason all of these startups fall into oblivion is that price is astronomical.
but also in this case we already have perfectly fucking fine margerine, if you splurge on slightly more expensive (which is still like half the fucking price of butter) stuff it’ll taste pretty damn close to butter so long as you’re not doing a side by side comparison.
I would like to see the LCA analysis on this one. I would not be surprised if this ends up using energy causing more damage than the damage that dairy farming methane and land conversion is doing.
I’d be very impressed if this somehow created more methane than cow farts.
Mostly comes out the other end. Burps mainly, the farts mostly contain poo
I would like to subscribe to Cow Facts
If the energy used to run the plant comes from burning natural gas, it very probably could.
I once saw a company that advertised “Bio-Diesel”. Destilled out of Maize alcohol on heat from burning lignite coal… The entire process is an ecological disaster and a sham worse than just using straight up mineral oil products.
EDIT: I am not saying that this would have to be the case here, but why it is so important to do an LCA. Comparing environmental effects of different possibilities is not trivial and sometimes what seems to be the obviously better choice turns out being worse.
California does have many natural gas power plants. And it’s plausible that this start-up is relying on the public grid to develope their butter. But it seems unlikely that people trying to create animal and plant free butter are doing it without considering the environment.
If the energy used to run the plant
But that’s not a problem with the process. That could be applied to anything.
Power source isn’t part of the equation unless the process can only be done in a location with a specific type of power source. Otherwise, you just compare the power amounts used between the two options, and multiply by something like the national average CO2 burden from all power.
The process requires high temperatures and pressures.
In refineries this is achieved by burning some of the gas for heating. When this plant is also heated with gas it definitely is part of the equation
Harness cow farts
If Bill Gates is involved we can be sure it’s to help humanity, and not to help capitalists and rich people to get richer.
He has a very good PR team because this man was also backing the former Monsanto company, with proprietary grains, supposed to help solve famine in the world, but causing poor farmers to be sued into bankruptcy and commit suicide. Oh and the grains also commit ‘suicide’ so if you are not sued because the wind flew proprietary grains to your field, you better have enough money to buy new grains from corporations every year.
So I’m sure anything he does can’t be bad. It’s all altruistic and for the good of humanity. Surely nothing proprietary there. All open source. For humanity.
Fuck Bill Gates.
He’s also on the Eipstein list.
“Tastes just like the real thing” is a sure sign that it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the real thing
Typically there are minor ‘impurities’ that make the ‘real’ thing taste different.
Vanillin, for example, is very easy to produce chemically, which is good, because growing and harvesting it naturally is very difficult, but it’s missing a lot of the compounds which add subtle yet important taste and smell to the natural stuff.That’s what I’m thinking. For example, there are milk proteins in butter that undergo the Maillard reaction to produce different flavors. Will this product have the same proteins?
Especially tea
I’m watching you, Dent
Sound like coal butter, which existed in WW2 but was discontinued because of inefficiency.
And the most important question: how does it taste?
No the most important question is how much energy does it take?
[…] they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, […]
So direct air capture, instead of industrial waste CO2, good luck with that.
Sure, if you want to call a hydrocarbon like methane “carbon” I guess. Why not.
Failing to parse this one; could I ask what did I miss in the article?
they aren’t using pure carbon, but compounds. the title suggests otherwise
Even the blurb in the description contains all the reference you need.
I see the methane; but it comes right after ‘pulling carbon out of the air’. Still, appreciate being held to a standard I guess.
Anything but stop polluting…
We could cut our carbon emissions? NO, no! This is an opportunity for profits! We can use this to squeeze just that bit more money out of people and it sets us up nicely to replace real butter when the total collapse of the ecosystem means that real dairy becomes an impossible luxury.
So, how’s that work on bread made from sand coming along?
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
But this is not good either.
why?
Replacing a large amount of agriculture, which produces a lot of emissions, could potentially cut emissions.
The last step in the process is being glossed over, where they mention the final ingredient is glycerol. Google says the primary ways we get glycerol is from plants, animals, or good ol oil. They specifically say this doesn’t use plant or animal products, so I’m left assuming this entire process hinges on ‘drill baby drill’
I just read an article about scientists researching how to darken parts of the the sun to fight climate change lol
We are past the point of runaway. Even if stopped all greenhouse gasses from being added today would still get hotter. We need solutions to allow us to survive that time.
I’m pretty sure the point is to reduce reliance on diary products and therefore livestock farming, a major source of global warming.
This sounds less like uplifting news and more like replacing something good with something proprietary and patentable, in the name of greenwashing.
Rich fucks will provide any solution but reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
This is also my reservation about this type of thing.
Something good?
You know the “real butter”.
yeah! natural butter! the kind that takes cows to produce! that real butter! the same cows that produce enormous amounts of methane! the same cows that are treated poorly! that REAL butter! not this chemically identical crap! FUCK chemically identical! what has chemistry even done for us recently?!
Bill Gates PR. He’s definitely on the Epstein list.
Must own stock, like his ‘philanthropist’ medicine scam.
