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- cross-posted to:
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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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I’m curious about the nutritious value and in particular the cholesterol levels of this product. I suppose since it is indistinguishable from butter, it should be the same. Margarine 2.0
Whilst yes, uplifting, I also have a certain inherent skepticism to artificial facsimiles. Too often it’s an unwelcome discovery.
For instance about a year ago we found a new product in the cheese aisle, slightly cheaper than regular gouda and called “gaudina” - turns out, not actually cheese but instead made from milk powder, palm oil and other assorted stuff.
Until somebody proves through proper trials and reviews that the products have no statistically significant difference in health outcomes, I’ll be hesitant.
So, it’s probably more healthy then, with unsaturated fatty acids?
“Other assorted stuff”? The palm oil probably isn’t great, of course it’s simple existence is causing the intentional destruction of important forests and it, and the people who use it, can fuck right off, but otherwise I dunno, that doesn’t sound like the end of the world.
I think health on cheese a pretty low bar to beat tho
…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.
“Tastes just like the real thing” is a sure sign that it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the real thing
I’m watching you, Dent
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?
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.Especially tea
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
if Gates is Mr Proprietary, Jobs is King Proprietary
was
Gates
just like he did the vaccines/.(not for himself but for the pharma companies.)
The basic process is not proprietary. It’s just the Fischer-Tropsch process. It’s been in use since WWII. It produces hydrocarbon chains of arbitrary length from whatever hydrocarbon feedstock you can provide.
Dietary fats are just certain short-chained hydrocarbons accompanied by certain flavorful compounds.
The “proprietary” part is what chemicals they add to the synthesized fat to make it sufficiently comparable to butter.
The Nazis used the same basic process to produce “butter” from coal feedstocks about 90 years ago. This is nothing new.
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.
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 new technology. This is the Fischer-Tropsch process, which cracks and/or lengthens hydrocarbon chains to produce molecules of the specifically desired length. The Germans used this same process almost a century ago. They cracked coal to produce lighter chemicals (primarily methane) then re-lengthened those methane chains to produce a variety of products, ranging from fuels, lubricants, and yes: edible “butter”.
This article repackages the same technology the Nazis used to feed their U-boat crews in WWII.
You frame it like it’s a bad thing but even if the process is mostly the same isn’t that good? Also we can clearly improve on a 100 year old technology even if it’s “solved”.
My primary issue is that the entire article is somewhat deceitful. They use phrases like “never seen before”, “unprecedented”, “pioneering”, but those characteristics do not really apply to the +90-year-old technology. The only significant part of the “process” that is different from what was uses in WWII is the specific flavor packs they add to the product.
Their deceitful comments about the technology have me questioning the veracity of the rest of their claims.
Don’t get me wrong: I think that Fischer-Tropsch is one of a few important technologies we need to be adopting. The reason we need to adopt it is because it is incredibly energy intensive, but not necessarily time critical. It can provide a profitable sink for excess solar energy production during long summer days, to produce hydrocarbon fuels for the transportation and aviation industries, yet switch offline overnight, overwinter, and during inclement weather, when solar can’t meet demand.
But we just don’t consume enough butter for this application to be useful to solar generation.
The Air Force experimented with Fischer-Tropsch “SynFuels” about 15 years ago. They actually certified most/all military aircraft to burn SynFuels, to lessen our military’s reliance on foreign oil.
If this process can tune how kling the R chains get, can’t we use it as a viable petrochemical substitute? To at least make various feedstocks, albeit being energy intensive?
We don’t need to make butter now - use it to fill niche applications where very precise chain lengths are needed (for cost/profits) then branch into other premium/environment sensitive applications?
can’t we use it as a
viablepetrochemical substitute?Yes, and no. It can be technically viable, yes. That was the primary objective of the Germans in WWII, and the USAF recently: to replace lost oil reserves.
But it is very unlikely to ever be economically viable. Oil producers can easily underbid Fischer-Tropsch production.
Most of agriculture is also rarely economically viable without strong subsidies. Iirc sea oil drilling is also only made viable after strong initial subsidies.
Very few strategically important industries are economically viable without strong subsidies or regulations to start/protect them.
Catalytic converters and switch away from CFCs would have never taken off without regulations for example.
You’re right, but I am curious whether they’ll be able to pursue this chemically through non-biological feedstocks. Most existing use of Fischer-Tropsch turns fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) into other types of hydrocarbons.
And they’re specifically targeting output of fatty acids, using fractional distillation to separate each fatty acid, and then forming triglycerides according to the characteristics they’re looking for.
It all sounds very energy intensive and inefficient, so I’m not sure how they expect to make money doing this, but if they can dial in which fatty acids to assemble into triglycerides I can see this being a good substitute for palm oil and coconut oil, and maybe other vegan substitutes for animal fats like tallow and lard.
I bet that price is the main issue. The reason all of these startups fall into oblivion is that price is astronomical.
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.
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
Yea maybe it wasn’t a good idea to name their product after something literally made from people. They opened themselves up it
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…
Had a Beyond burger once. Once. I can’t put it words what I didn’t like, but it was revolting.
I like Beyond Burger more than hamburger but not more than black bean burgers or ground pork. I just dislike ground beef though. That Beyond Burger is made from isolated pea protein, flavoring and wishes. It does have a distinct flavor, and is a highly processed food.
I didnt care about the taste, but woooweee, the farts that it made were thunderous!
I think those burgers are made of compressed farts.
Funny because for me, the Beyond burger taste better than many joint patties, but the price is prohibitively expensive, so I don’t buy them that often (or eat burgers that much for that matter)
Shout out to the kirkland brand as well, damn good patties.
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.
The animals we create are morally entitled to the exact same unconditional love and protection as our own children. The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. It harms us when we take pleasure in cruelty and violence. Need additional reasons why sensory enjoyment must not be the primary criteria?
Why are you conflating animal foods and pleasure in eating? My vegan kid is a foodie, a good cook and a person who gets a lot of sensory enjoyment out of the texture and flavors of food. It’s important to her.
I don’t think drmoose would consider non–animal-based food entertainment as inefficient as e.g. butter
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.
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.
“Soylent Green is people!”
Bring me the corpse starch
Just a hydrogen atom away from being plastic.
So, can we turn the garbage patch into butter?
Margarine?
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
Bill Gates will eat the real thing anyway.
Edit: this comment is not about Bill Gates. It’s not even about butter.
I don’t get it, what do you mean?
I don’t either. Carbon based butter sounds like a healthier alternative to traditional butter.
I’m having a hard time imagining that tho
If it is exactly the same compounds, how should it be more or less healthy?
less harmful errors from the animal industry like residue antibiotics and hormones.
Less lactose and fats I imagine
If it is exactly the same compounds, it isn’t less of something. If it is less of something it won’t taste like butter.
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It doesn’t, I have yet to taste any cheese alternatives that can substitute parmigiano reggiano and pecorino romano for my Carbonara or salads, likewise with red meat and butter there’s really aren’t any alternatives at the moment (haven’t tried labgrown meat yet, that might be an actual alternative). I have tried almost all commercially available alternatives in danish grocery stores and none do what they promise.
Just to be clear, I don’t hate on alternatives. I hate products that don’t live up to their promise. Plus I try to avoid heavily processed products and that includes many alternatives.
Interesting…Whatever ‘slop water’ means in their process, they are probably only storing it because they treat it instead of sending it straight down the sewer
