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