cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34272214
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.
This could be great, but “proprietary”. Gates is still the same Gates. If you want to save all the land and CO2 this could, release the IP free to all. Flood the market with cheap indistinguishable synobutter, real butter can’t compete with. Milk, cheese and yogurt next please.
I’m not a scientist, but isn’t EVERYTHING made of carbon?
Source: Joni Mitchell, Woodstock -
We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon
“Made of” can mean “composed of” or “constructed from”. This is the latter:
Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.
The entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint.
“In addition to the carbon footprint being much lower for a process like this, right, the land footprint is, like, a thousand times lower than what you need in traditional agriculture,”
Good example of how choice of words can mislead, particularly when intentional.
but does it actually taste like the real thing? because I can already buy something that, supposedly, I should be unable to believe isn’t real butter, but after doing so I remain suspicious
The first time I had “I can’t believe it’s not butter,” I said “I can believe it’s not butter.”
Of all things…butter! I’m sure it’ll be more expensive than real butter with the way things work nowadays.
I’m a traditionalist, I prefer my butter silicon based. Maybe germanium or tin if it’s a special occasion
Cyberpunk shit getting real
Butter backed by Bill Gates? Is that the same Bill Gates who became wealthy and famous for his commanding knowledge of butter?
Thank goodness we have the assurances of a billionaire oligarch to help steer humanity in the right dietary direction.
Global warming and ecological crises make shifting diets away from animal products a pretty good idea.
Whether it’s antibiotics resistance, deforestation, or greenhouse gas emissions, humanity is paying a very high price for animal agriculture at the current scale.
Problems come up: “BILLIONAIRES SHOULD DO MORE!” Billionaires do more: “WE CANT TRUST BILLIONAIRES!!”
The conclusion ought to be that billionaires shouldn’t exist. Even if they donate most of their wealth, they will still donate in ways that aren’t necessarily solving real problems.
On that we agree
Ruminants creating greenhouse gasses is a problem that can solve itself by returning to huge fucking pastures and cooperative farming.
Instead, we’re getting synthetic food. We’re a decade removed from human grade kibble at this point.
Here again, capitalism is the problem. A capitalist offering capitalism solutions to problems created by capitalism isn’t appealing.
There’s a term for that high-carbon butter-like substance. Migraine or something…
Didnt the Nazis also make something similar using coal?
You’re probably thinking of the Fischer-Tropsch process for making gasoline.
Good ol’ Gates, always around to make a quick buck of the bloodied backs of humanity. Never an advancement meant to aid us all he can’t swoop in to parasitize. That’s right Billy boy, I didn’t forget the COVID vaccine patents. Billionaires must be condemned to the rubbish bin of history.
Were just all their rentboys.
Yeah #govegan, I love it. I am curious to try it. Great invention.
While I think this is pretty amazing science stuff, the writing is terrible. Here is the progression of the story as written:
They made butter from carbon…
Well, it’s actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen…
OK, it’s actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and methane…
Well, no, it’s actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, and glycerol…
Wait, hang on, it’s actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, glycerol, natural flavor, and lecithin…
Now, the source of glycerol is in question, because they say this butter is both animal and plant-free. Glycerol can be made synthetically, but it’s WAY more expensive to do it. Also, I’m not seeing any way to create lecithin without plants. They never say what the “natural flavor” is.
They never say what the “natural flavor” is.
A reminder that “natural flavor” doesn’t mean healthier or even something you might want over the artificially created flavors. It just means it comes from a natural source and is not lab created.
Castoreum, sometimes used for vanilla and raspberry flavoring, comes from beaver anal secretions. That would be labelled under a “natural flavor” and you’d never be told more than that.
I’ll take the artificial stuff any day just on principle there.
I think it’s worth pointing out that vanilla extract is from vanilla beans and artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck they feel like that tastes like vanilla. Also, modern artificial vanilla extremely rarely, if ever, is derived from Castoreum because it’s hard as hell to farm beavers and expensive as all fuck. The “artificial vanilla comes from beaver anal glands” is basically a prevalent internet myth that gets passed around like the, “You eat 7 spiders a year in your sleep.” myth.
Incorrect, vanillin is the primary component of real vanilla beans and responsible for like 90% of the flavor.
I don’t understand what this would be correcting in what I said above. Can you show me what part this is correcting? Cause I’m legitimately confused.
You said artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck. It’s not, artificial vanilla is the main ingredient of natural vanilla, but without the other flavors
Ah gotcha! I for sure was not following what you were saying. I don’t know if that’s he real thrust of the point in my above comment, but I was more referring to the fact that artificial vanilla doesn’t necessarily come from vanilla beans. I should’ve been more precise with my language, but it’s worth noting that artificial vanilla is largely synthesized and comes from a variety of sources, not just vanilla beans (see below for the source/pertinent excerpt).
It also gets weird as to how the FDA regulates the term. I believe the key term is actually “Pure” in the “Pure Vanilla Extract” but don’t quote me on that. Not sure how it’s done by other regulatory agencies but it’s probably equally convoluted in a lot of places.
Pertinent excerpt:
However, many alternate routes to vanillin are well documented, including vanillin derived from spruce tree lignin, corn sugar, rice or wheat bran, clove oil, curcumin, or guaiacol.
Yes, that’s true, but the vanillin in the artificial stuff is chemically identical to the real thing
It would have cost you nothing to not write this.
Maybe he wouldn’t have lost anything, but I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy his comment.
Also, poop has natural flavour. Natural flavour also doesn’t mean it tastes good.
Spoken like someone who’s never ate shit.
You’re not going to catch me out with this one again!
Billions of flies can’t be wrong!!
Get your Synthetic poop flavour here!
Myth. Vanilla extracts either come from low grade vanilla pods or cloves. It may have been but not today.
Mmmm, I like licking beaver butt. 😉
My ex wife’s uncle was the director of the south American division of the arm that made coloring and flavorings of one of the big Food/Chem groups, Procter & Gamble, or unilever, or one of those. Can’t remember.
No one in his household ate any processed/ultra processed foods.
Do the math.
Fuck man I had no idea, I’ve missed out on my prime years of eating beaver anal secretions 😭
They can still be your prime years in terms of quantity of beaver ass eaten, if not in quality. But I think you sell yourself short. They’re gonna love you!
They never say what the “natural flavor” is
…it’s people?
Where do you think Trump is sending all the homeless? A big old wooden screw press…
There’s something unpleasantly psychopathic in emotion about BtVS, but this one moment was funny.
I was thinking Soylent Green, but if Buffy provided a reference point for Charlton Heston, all the better.
It kind of sounds like the beginnings of star trek’s replicators…
But that aside, somehow I doubt those are the exact only “ingredients” they use.
And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the end product contains all kinds of trace elements of various not so healthy chemicals used to get the parts to combine into the actual butter.
Like the process to get the glycerol or lecithin in a state they can use.Ofcourse a lot of our dietary ingredients are contaminated in various levels anyway.
It makes me think of Enterprise, where they don’t have replicators but they do have protein resequencers, which can take waste matter and convert it into useful things, but they can’t do energy to matter conversion yet.
They add just a little butter for that real butter flavor
I must be losing my mind because I thought I saw this post 2 days ago except it said beer.
