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2024-11-11
My thought was "I doubt you can make fat only with hydrogen and carbon", but fats/lipids are literally hydrocarbons. Adding other elements changes the taste, so it isn't necessary to have mammals anywhere in the production chain.
Very interesting and probably not the first time this is/has been done. It seems quite obvious.
It's quite obvious at a theoretical level but not easy in terms of figuring out the actual process. A lot of science like that.
Hopefully by producing a potentially profitable product, they’ll secure the funding to drive some carbon capture systems as well.
this is a good https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01241-2 article on different ways this can be done
i learned the nazis made butter from coal!
Adding other elements changes the taste,
This is not how chemistry works at all.
To start with, fatty acids also need Oxygen because of the COOH and OH group of the glycerin in fat. They are not hydrocarbons. You know what also is just made of Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen? Hundreds of thousands of molecules. All sugars and carbohydrates. If you allow for Nitrogen too, you could cover most molecules found in biological life.
None of this has any bearing on how difficult or complicated it is to synthesize these from more basic molecules like CO2 or H2.
the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.
Yeah, never heard that one before. Weird how every non-whatever replacement foodstuff tastes just like the original... literally 0% of the time.
Butter is one of the few that I legitimately can’t tell the difference between the real thing and the vegan alternatives (some of them).
Cheese is the opposite. Not only have a never had a vegan cheese that tasted like real cheese, I’ve never had a vegan cheese that tasted good.
I want that vegan blue cheese that won the competition and then got disqualified by dairy industry corruption
I don't know about international food, but the German vegan meat companies like Rügenwalder Mühle and Like meat have made huge leaps last year. Mortadella, Fleischwurst, Schnitzel and Chicken Nuggets all taste almost identical to the original. Ground "meat" is close, but you have to chose the right kind for each recipe. More complex stuff is still really bad tho. I say all of this as a passionate vegan meat hater.
It's a synthetic saturated fat, so basically a synthetic margarine. Butter is made from milk. So the headline should read "[...] makes 'margarine' out of water and CO2", but everybody hates margarine, so I get why they chose butter instead.
Sounds like margarine with more chances to shit myself
Margarine is made of hydrogenated oil. This is chemically identical to the fatty acids in butter. It’s not an alternative for dietary purposes, it’s just a more planet friendly solution.
I see you didn't read the article
Basic internet etiquette. Never read the article. Disagree with everyone. You are always right. Everyone else is always wrong etc.
Interesting way to get fat alternatives, people are already used to eating fake butter regularly, so it probably wouldn't take much to add this to our diet.
It’s also closer to butter than butter alternatives. It’s not made to be more healthy, just more planet friendly.
The biggest question which is barely alluded to in the article is cost. If it can't compete with mass produced butter at cost and scale then it'll just be another "alternative" which is good but not as big.
They also mention that they compared emissions and land use but give no aspect of what synthetic processes are used (I'd assume they at least have provisional patents on the "how to" already).
Take all the subsidies out of the dairy industry and see how competitively priced butter actually is.
During WW2, due to the food shortage, Germans did this using the carbon from coal... The process is old and known.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter
Let's see if the process can be made more efficient this time. Allegedly, the product was virtually indistinguishable from butter.
Computer! Butter! Room temp!
Fat and oil production from animal and plant-based sources are collectively responsible for about 3.5 billion tons of CO2
You cannot be serious that animal-based and plant-based are grouped in this figure. Plant-based is likely close to carbon-neutral, and only not net-negative, because of transport, cooling etc., which will also be necessary for this artificially created fat...
Tilling, seeding, treating, and harvesting all require machinery and therefore increase carbon output in farming.
If this were to take off France and the US South by themselves could eat us out of climate change in a matter of months
If it tastes and spreads like a tub of Land o Lakes then I'll probably try it. I don't care where the hell it comes from as long as it tastes correct.
Is it as bad for your health as hydrogenated oils?
Even if it is -- I'm interested in seeing how it performs. Feed some rats 3-5x the recommended amount, see what happens. Have some long term studies.
If it is the same as what we use, right now, for a lessened cost or environmental impact, that is still worth exploring.
Don't want to be a hater but doesn't this basically create fat without nutrients? It feels like this is reinventing margarine albeit in a cool way.
They’re the same fatty acids found in butter. Margarine is hydrogenated oil.
I wonder if they can use CO2 that comes from industrial carbon capture, or if it needs to be something purer that takes a lot of energy to produce.
Also, I'm not sure if we can get industrial volumes of hydrogen from sources other than fossil fuels now. Its been a while, but last I checked it was coming from things like byproducts from reformers.
