Synthetic food seems like a good idea no? We used to grow rubber for example but now we just make synthetic rubber.
In: 0
The main reason is: We dont know how to do it more cost effectively than just letting a plant do it.
Rubber is simple compared to food, and even then we cheat. Synthetic rubber isnt made from nothing, it is made from million year old plants that sat in the ground so long that everything planty about them became condensed. Super plants really.
We can, in many cases. It just takes more energy than letting plants (or animals) do it, so capitalism sticks with the cheapest approach.
What goes into the machine? And where does *that* come from?
Planting a seed and waiting is like 100 times less work. Not just in physical labour but in energy requirements.
You can create simpme synthetic sugars(But probably not all nutrient) in a lab, but a single gram of it would be way to expenaive to eat it.
Food requires energy, the easiest and cheapest way to do this is to let plants collect the “free” energy from the Sun to create food any other method is going to increase costs.
You can’t get something out of nothing. You have to invest material and energy to produce anything. The thing is, that life is much more efficient at that than technology is, and will be more efficient for the foreseeable future.
It takes just a bit of light, carbon, water and a few other nutrients to create all kinds of fruits and vegetables we can consume. If we were to try to do it ourselves, it would take us so much more investment in energy, equipment and time. We would literally need to “forge” foodstuffs with the energy requirement it would demand. But again, living matter is far more efficient at that. It makes sense to use those highly efficient biological processes to make food reliably. These biological processes also are very good at recycking. We can get a perpetual system that can feed itself for a very long time with very little outside nutrient requirements.
even in space, we will likely use hydroponics to grow food, rather than producing it from carbon stores.
To make something, you need other things
To make.”Food” you need edible things
To make bread, you need a bunch of basics like flour, yeast, water, etc. Flour comes mostly from wheat, wheat needs to be grown in fields.
We’re probably not far off having large-scale lab grown meat production and mass scale algae production that we can process I to other “foods” that are pretty close as well. But it’ll be a while before all that kicks in properly and replaces traditional farming.
Over the course of a few hundred million years, nature has devised away to take sunshine, carbon dioxide, and some trace elements and turn them into an energy storage unit we think of as food. Sure, we’ve tweaked nature’s already incredibly efficient processes over the past few thousand years cultivation, selective reading, and now genetic modification. But fundamentally process to do this created through uncountable millennia of evolution has produced an incredibly successful and widely dispersed food factory. While we could likely produce similar results on a small scale, the amount of energy and hardware we would need to use almost certainly far exceeds that used by the process developed naturally. In other words, any effort at a fully artificial food development program would use more resources and yield less results than doing it the way we do it now.
There’s new technology being developed that synthesises edible starch from carbon dioxide. So that’s kinda wild: a machine that sucks in air and out comes sago pudding
Cell biologist here!
Food is essentially, stored energy in specific molecules that can be broken down to release said energy, or useful/important molecules that *require* energy to be built from simpler component parts.
Plants (and other photosynthetic life) have a way of naturally (and fairly efficiently) using energy from the sun to create these molecules for themselves. The basic idea is, they specialize in absorbing these energy and nutrients from their environment, hence the reason they are be absolute bottom of most food chains. Animals and things that eat plants, don’t absorb energy from the sun, but instead consume plants. They can also produce many of these other useful/important biomolecules necessary for life *using* that same energy too, but for some, they actually become reliant on plants to produce these as well (life trends towards efficiency, so if you can get what you need from your diet, you might lose the ability to produce something expensive yourself).
To create food from essentially nothing, we would need to invest a lot of energy, and create not only energy-storage molecules, but ones in the exact form(s) required and usable according to our biology. That is no simple feat, and to add to that, many of our methods of creating energy (coal, oil, etc) depends on *burning* energy sources that originated from “grown” sources anyways. We do have solar/wind/etc power now of course, but the efficiency is still questionable compared to plants, and the biosynthesis process would require a *lot* of effort and synthesis steps.
It’s simpler/tons for efficient to just keep using plants.
Latest Answers