Why can’t we just make food? Why is planting seeds and letting it grow still how we do it?

Question

Synthetic food seems like a good idea no? We used to grow rubber for example but now we just make synthetic rubber.

In: 0

Answer 1

For our purposes, plants are solar powered food making machines, and livestock are plant powered food making machines. We can’t yet make our own machines that do it more efficiently.

That being said, because raising livestock requires so much food and land there’s incentive for lab-grown meat, which can already be done. At the moment it is prohibitively expensive, but I believe that with further technological improvement and efficiency of scale it may one day be cheaper than natural meat.