r/ConservativeKiwi • u/Monty_Mondeo Ngāti Ingarangi (He/Him) • Jul 17 '24
Zee Bugs 🐛 Fats from thin air: Startup makes butter using CO2 and water
https://newatlas.com/technology/savor-butter-bill-gates/12
u/gr0o0vie Jul 17 '24
Anyone got a link to a paper on this? That sounds like it would involve some insane chemistry/chemicals/energy to create fat proteins and I can't believe it's carbon neutral.
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u/CletusTheYocal Jul 17 '24
Saw it somewhere on Reddit last night.
Turns out it creates the same fats found in canola spreads. So not butter at all.
Would be better for the environment to keep using plants to make plant butter, surely?
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u/gr0o0vie Jul 17 '24
canola spread...so it's just worse margarine? I imagine the health problems would be even worse considering how bad vegetable oils are :s
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u/sameee_nz Jul 17 '24
Davis, S.J., Alexander, K., Moreno-Cruz, J. et al. Food without agriculture. Nat Sustain 7, 90–95 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01241-2
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u/Normal-Twist7326 New Guy Jul 17 '24
So what happened to highly (or in this case entirely) processed food bad?
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u/gr0o0vie Jul 17 '24
I reckon the idea is that they get people to eat unhealthy cause ma climate change, reduce carbon and reduce the amount of people at the same time.
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u/Ness-Uno Jul 18 '24
It still is bad. If commercially viable it won't be because they've sold the public on it, it'll be sold to manufacturers of processed foods at even cheaper prices than whatever fats they're currently using.
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u/CypressHillbillly New Guy Jul 17 '24
Well, if it isn’t Bill Gates, society’s answer to a question no one asked.
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u/Monty_Mondeo Ngāti Ingarangi (He/Him) Jul 17 '24
Bill Gates has thrown his weight – and his money – behind a Californian startup that believes it can make a rich, fatty spread akin to butter, using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And 'butter' is just the start, with milk, ice-cream, cheese, meat and tropical oils also in development.
Very good for sautéing Crickets apparently
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u/adviceKiwi Not anti Maori, just anti bullshit Jul 17 '24
fatty spread akin to butter
But not actually butter by a long shot... I'm sure the other stuff will taste like milk, ice-cream, cheese, and meat. I had a crack at one if those impossible Burger patties from the supermarket not long after they became available to buy, very expensive, smelt awful, and looked like cat meat.
Shudder
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u/McDaveH New Guy Jul 17 '24
Yeah right! He's boiling down orphans & we know it.
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u/sameee_nz Jul 17 '24
It's possible to synthesise milk proteins too, it's just that cows are that much more efficient at doing it so it makes more sense to do it that way.
I have a weird feeling the fetishisation of so called 'clean and green' processes actually makes the world a bit less green. Also marginal in terms of health, the future we get from nature the more skeptical I become; recall when margarine was touted as a superior health choice compared to butter?
Dairy on porous soils such as in Canterbury and the associated nitrate leeching is super dumb, I can recall ECAN being replaced by commissioners because they were inconveniently opposed to dairy intensification in Canterbury and although it's made our country quite wealthy it's also had a tremendous environmental cost in that the water is not safe to drink on account of nitrates.
Mostly, I blame the Haber-Bosch process.
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u/wallahmaybee Ngāti Redneck (ho/hum) Jul 18 '24
Blame it for the extra 7 billion people.
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u/sameee_nz Jul 18 '24
Haber-Bosch process probably had something to do with the population explosion of the 20th C
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u/Draughthuntr New Guy Jul 17 '24
Eh, people once thought aircraft would be essentially useless because it was assumed you wouldn’t be able to see anything on the ground due to the speed that aircraft flew out. We don’t know everything, but science sometimes comes up with cool stuff (or guys in their sheds in the South Island!). Happy to give it a go. Might be cheaper than what’s on the supermarket shelves right now lol
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u/Silent-Hornet-8606 Jul 17 '24
Might also be bad news for NZ's economy - reliant as it is on Dairy & farming.
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u/howitiscus New Guy Jul 18 '24
Here is a link to a very interesting utube clip about the possible link to seed oils and diabetes.
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u/MrMurgatroyd Jul 17 '24
Margarine by an even more unsavoury process? You can keep it Gates, and I'll keep my butter.