A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world’s first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.
The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.
…carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen…
Pretty sure that is what regular butter is made out of too.
Yes, they aren’t trying to make an alternative butter substitute as I understand it. They’re trying to make real butter via a purely chemically synthetic process.
“Tastes just like the real thing” is a sure sign that it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the real thing
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Why is this uplifting news?
It could eliminate billions of animal deaths.
I didn’t know you had to kill an animal to make butter.
Read about the veal industry, because it’s a natural product of the milk (and butter) industry. To produce milk year round, dairy cows are inseminated (generally artificially as its more controlled and efficient than by stud), in order to keep them pregnant or with calf all year. The male calves are ‘unwanted coproduct’ and either culled immediately, or sent off to veal farms, some are fed for a few hours or weeks then slaughtered as ‘bob veal’, infant veal.
The only way to consume cows milk & butter without an animal dying for it would be to find a super niche ‘ethical dairy farm’ that raises cows for dairy only (not veal), and does not slaughter ‘excess’ infant cows or heifers that have gotten too old and been retired (usually they head off to the slaughterhouse also). If you find such a place, contrats you’ve found a unicorn - enjoy your ethical milk.
At scale, you indirectly do. The cows need to be pregnant or recently pregnant to produce milk, which means a lot more cattle than you want as their population grows. The solution is to cull the herd by turning them into meat products so they don’t destroy your fields.
And conditions in an industrial dairy are fairly fuckin bleak too
Interesting…Just a hydrogen atom away from being plastic.
There’s nothing uplifting about more UPFs.
We’re on the eve of what future generations may refer to as “The Great Hunger.” The worst impact of climate change won’t be rising sea levels. It will be Biblical scale famines from multiple simultaneous bread basket failures. On our current path, we are likely to lose 2-10% of the total human population due to famine over the next 20-30 years. Having a way to grow bulk sustenance cheaply, in a way that is immune from the disruptions of the weather? That is a technology we desperately need right now. I agree that UPFs are not ideal. But this and similar synthetic foods could prevent what is likely to be the greatest famine in human history.
I bet that price is the main issue. The reason all of these startups fall into oblivion is that price is astronomical.
This is not uplifting news
Another effort to push ultra processed food as a “perfectly safe” alternative to real whole food.
“Ultra processed” is not a meaningful scientific term. Soy sauce is ultra processed, soy milk, dark chocolate, miso paste, anything pickled, sports drinks with electrolytes, oat milk, anything canned - all of these are ultra processed according to NOVA making the term “ultra processed” entirely meaningless for deciding anything.
Dude just try to be a little open minded to a potentially good thing.
The entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint.
Idunno, did you read the process? Also, butter is arguably a processed food anyways. They’re synthesizing real fat molecules. My understanding is that it is chemically, truly fat.
How is this not just crisco, hydrogenated fat? Butter seems like it has more going on, traces of milk proteins & sugars that give it flavor.
Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).
This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.
Both of those things are basically C, H, and O.
Sounds totally safe.
Bill Gates PR. He’s definitely on the Epstein list.
Must own stock, like his ‘philanthropist’ medicine scam.
This isn’t butter, this is one type of butter fat. It’s missing the milk solids, proteins, and other molecules that contribute to butter’s smell and taste.
I can’t believe it’s not butter
Margarine?
Once we kill the Earth, this will be how food is manufactured. I am now going to finish my box of Soylent Green.
Space Butter
This, but unironically.
There’s plenty of objects out there made of CHONPS.
If we don’t kill ourselves first, at some point we’ll eat the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud.
I’m not sure why people are so puritanical about this. I think Beyond Burgers and Soylent are great.
In case you don’t know, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Soylent very much had that in mind when naming their product. It’s meant to serve the same purpose as the titular substance: a wholly complete food source. Also constantly referencing Soylent Green to denigrate Soylent was precisely what I was referring to lol
Yeah but you referenced Soylent when the original comment was about Soylent Green (which, as you tacitly acknowledge, came first) so you kind of got the cause and effect backwards
Yea maybe it wasn’t a good idea to name their product after something literally made from people. They opened themselves up it
Had a Beyond burger once. Once. I can’t put it words what I didn’t like, but it was revolting.
I like Beyond Burger more than hamburger but not more than black bean burgers or ground pork. I just dislike ground beef though. That Beyond Burger is made from isolated pea protein, flavoring and wishes. It does have a distinct flavor, and is a highly processed food.
I didnt care about the taste, but woooweee, the farts that it made were thunderous!
I think those burgers are made of compressed farts.
Funny because for me, the Beyond burger taste better than many joint patties, but the price is prohibitively expensive, so I don’t buy them that often (or eat burgers that much for that matter)
Shout out to the kirkland brand as well, damn good patties.
Enjoy your heavily processed food full of saturated fat and more than 4x the sodium of beef burgers.
And a touch of GMO goodness with your soylent.Brother do you know what a GMO is?
Do you know what obvious sarcasm is?
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.
What is wrong with entertainment, though? Taste is one of our senses, like hearing or seeing, having food that tastes good is not inefficient , it’s lovely - I think having a good palate and appreciation for lots of flavors is a positive good in a life.
That’s a very shallow take. Food taste good thus must be good? You do not dare to explore this any deeper?
? I grow vegetables and fruit, make healthy meals, mostly homemade. Sourdough bread, fermented drinks with odds and ends to divert waste. Why do people think good food doesn’t taste good? Good food tastes great.
No one’s argueing that food doesn’t taste good but there’s more to food than just taste and kinda sad that you don’t see it.
I am so confused. Why do you think I said taste is the only thing that matters about food? I did not say that. I said that it does matter, and should not be devalued, would never argue that it’s the only thing that matters, and never said that.
I think you genuinely have a reading comprehension disability.
Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.
and you reply with “but food tastes good” — duuuuuh but why would that matter to anything? like seriously dude, spend some time with yourself.
The animals we create are morally entitled to the exact same unconditional love and protection as our own children. The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. It harms us when we take pleasure in cruelty and violence. Need additional reasons why sensory enjoyment must not be the primary criteria?
Why are you conflating animal foods and pleasure in eating? My vegan kid is a foodie, a good cook and a person who gets a lot of sensory enjoyment out of the texture and flavors of food. It’s important to her.
“Soylent Green is people!”
Bring me the corpse starch
