this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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From air to your plate: tech startups making food from atmospheric COβ
Nature already did this. It's called plants.
How would that work? Surely one periodic table chemical couldn't singlehandedly convert itself into all the nutrients the body needs.
You're right, you can't. You need some additional stuff. Plants takes both CO2 from the air but they also need for instance nitrogen from the ground. Now, of course 80% of air is nitrogen but it's bound up in an extremely stable state that plants can't really use. It takes too much energy to break the bond. If we could find some way to extract nitrogen cheaply from air though, it would be a real game changer.
Why not just eat the plants?
Well plants do other stuff than only produce food, so I guess the idea is that it might be possible to produce food more efficiently than a plant does, which isn't that far-fetched.
So it's not "don't eat plants" as much as "look, we made this bacteria that can produce a vegetable-soup with slightly more calories per energy input than a carrot".