Pod Insights Gastropod Yes, You Really Can Make Food From Thin Air—And We Tried It About this episode Every second of every day, plants on earth do something miraculous: they take the carbon dioxide from air and turn it into food. With very few exceptions, everything we eat starts out that way. But what if we wanted to cut out the middlemen, re-wild all those fields full of wheat and corn, and manufacture dinner directly from the atmosphere ourselves? Scientists began dreaming of turning air into food back into the 1800s, but it's only recently that dream has become a reality—with results that, depending on where you live, you can already taste for yourself. In this episode, we’re exploring the history and science that made this particular sci-fi future real: from a space-age vodka and military-grade yogurt-like substance to surprisingly delicious gas-based butter and bonbons. Join us this episode as we explore the weird science and fascinating history behind this futuristic food, and discover how it might help us save this planet *and* survive on new ones.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Nicola Twilley? Here we go. Here's my first food from the air ever.
0:05 Cynthia Graber? It feels so science fiction. I mean, the fact that it actually was created literally from air.
0:11 Nicola Twilley? I know.
0:11 Cynthia Graber? I can't even imagine. So I'm gonna get out a knife here.
0:15 Nicola Twilley? I am pretty excited. So I need a knife and a plate. And I have some bread.
0:24 Cynthia Graber? Yes, you heard that right. Nikki and I were about to taste food that was literally created out of thin air.
0:30 Nicola Twilley? And it wasn't imaginary. It was real. Real, spreadable, meltable, edible butter made from air.
0:38 Cynthia Graber? Right now, you're all probably wondering, what in the world are you talking about? And we are going to answer that question this episode of Gastropod. You are indeed listening to Gastropod. We're not science fiction. We're the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.
0:53 Nicola Twilley? And I am Nicola Twilley. And this episode, can we really bypass plants and animals and just get all our nourishment from the same stuff we breathe? And why on earth would we want to?
1:05 Cynthia Graber? This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
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2:31 Nicola Twilley? Okay, before we get to the future, we need to make a brief stop in the past, where the future was being invented, to meet a Frenchman named Marcelin.
2:39 Speaker 04 Marcelin Berthelot was a renowned chemist from the 19th century. His claim to fame really was synthetic chemistry. Synthetic chemistry being combining elements to make new compounds versus analytical chemistry, which is taking apart compounds to get to their elements.
2:59 Nicola Twilley? Bill Gergie is a science writer, and he told us that Marcelin's research wasn't about creating food from air, exactly, but it set the stage for that because he had the idea that we didn't need plants to create food. This was a really radical idea. Most of everything we eat comes from plants originally.
3:16 Speaker 05 So if you think about every calorie you've ever eaten, it really all starts with photons coming from the sun and that form of energy getting transformed into food molecules through agriculture.
3:31 Nicola Twilley? Kathleen Alexander is co-founder and CEO of a food-from-air company called Sabre.
3:35 Speaker 05 And so to really have humans thinking about, like, do we need this agricultural paradigm to make food? That didn't really get started until we started understanding how to think about molecules.
3:48 Nicola Twilley? Which was in the 1800s, when chemistry as a science emerged. And one of the first things these new chemists did was figure out what food was made of.
3:57 Speaker 04 So food really is, we think of carbohydrates and proteins and lipids, right? Fats, you could throw in vitamins and minerals. And those are probably like the five basic categories to simplify. But carbohydrates are what the name says. They're carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And that's it. From carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, we get sugars, like glucose and fructose and sucrose. And we get starches, which are sort of long chains of those sugars.
4:30 Nicola Twilley? The same is true for protein if you just add one extra element, nitrogen.
4:34 Speaker 04 It's made of these amino acids that are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And that's it. And lipids are fats.
4:43 Speaker 04 Those are same thing as carbohydrates, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The chemistry is a bit different, so they're insoluble in water, but that's it.
4:53 Cynthia Graber? I'm going to repeat this because it's kind of mind blowing. All food at its core, from fish to bread to oranges, the so-called macronutrients that are the basis of these foods, fats, proteins, carbs, they're all made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Like Bill says, that is literally it.
5:11 Nicola Twilley? But at the time, in the 1800s, a lot of leading chemists thought there was something else in organic living matter, some kind of vital spark or force, something we humans couldn't make.
5:22 Cynthia Graber? Marcelin Bertolo didn't agree with that point of view. He argued that if we combined the molecules from nonliving stuff in the right ratio, well, then we could make something that was chemically identical to organic living matter.
5:33 Speaker 04 And he was a real advocate for synthetic chemistry and believed that synthetic chemistry was going to replace the entire food chain.
5:44 Cynthia Graber? Marcelin created all sorts of useful things in the lab from chemicals, not from air, but he even was able to create fat in his lab. The fat in our diets comes from living things. It comes from plants or from animals. This didn't. That said, it wasn't food, not the way he'd imagined it, but he'd done what a lot of people thought was impossible.
6:02 Speaker 04 And so he was really sanguine after having so much success on the notion that, you know, it would just be a matter of time and not much time before all foods were manufactured from these basic elements. Of course, there were a ton of skeptics at the time, but there really was this rising tide of optimism about the future of chemistry and where it was all going. And it really started right around that time.
6:31 Cynthia Graber? Marcelin died in the early 1900s. Obviously, his vision hadn't been implemented by that time, and his son, Daniel, was also a scientist.
6:39 Speaker 04 He was determined to realize his father's dream of creating food directly from chemicals.
6:45 Nicola Twilley? But Daniel figured, you know, plants already know how to do this. Maybe I can steal their secrets and then cut them out of the process. Nobody understood photosynthesis at the time. Today, we know that this is a complicated process that plants have evolved, but Daniel thought it was super straightforward. He thought plants just absorbed sunlight and gases and bam, they created food.
7:06 Speaker 04 I mean, that was really it. And so he had this very sort of simplistic and almost romantic vision of what it was that happened in the photosynthetic process.
7:16 Nicola Twilley? Daniel set up his research laboratory in a park just southwest of Paris. It was called the Garden of Wonders. He had lots of plants growing in glass containers and pipes filled with different gases.
7:28 Speaker 04 But probably the coolest thing that he had was these glass tanks inside the buildings where he set up ultraviolet lights.
7:37 Nicola Twilley? The tanks didn't have any plants in them and they didn't look like much was going on. They just looked empty. But he was pumping oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide into the glass tanks, then shining ultraviolet lights on them to mimic the sun.
7:50 Speaker 04 And waiting for the magic to happen. And his, his vision of that magic and what that magic would look like, he sort of predicted that the starches would spontaneously develop in the air and fall to the tank bottom like snow. And, you know, that it would be shoveled up and those would be the starches that could be turned into, you know, into food.
8:15 Nicola Twilley? Super cool. And it totally didn't work because Daniel didn't realize that plants have a whole set of chemical reactions going on inside their leaves that turn the energy from light into chemical energy and then use that energy to break apart carbon dioxide and water into their elements and then combine them with other things like minerals to build something we can eat. Daniel might have gotten this wrong, but he wasn't a total loss as a scientist. He did synthesize a compound called formamide that was later used to create important drugs. Formamide is a precursor for amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. And it's also a precursor for sugars. And if you heat formamide, it can break down into the precursors for fatty acids.
8:56 Nicola Twilley? Daniel didn't actually get to amino acids or sugars, at least as far as we know. But still, that's not nothing, though it's a long way and a bunch of chemical reactions away from anything even resembling the building blocks of food. And soon after this milestone, Daniel died. So that was that.
9:15 Cynthia Graber? But the science of using chemistry to build molecules people needed kept going. In the 1930s, German scientists were able to create margarine using chemicals from coal. Of course, coal is kind of decomposed plant material, but turning coal into chemicals that you can combine into fat is very different from pressing olives for their oil or having a cow eat grass and then turn that into milk that we use to make butter.
9:37 Nicola Twilley? Also in the 30s and also in Germany, scientists figured out how to make an amino acid by combining industrially-produced chemicals. This amino acid was used in animal feed, but it wasn't exactly a steak or a bean or anything you could recognize and eat and fulfill your body's need for protein.
9:56 Cynthia Graber? This was all happening when Germany was gearing up for war and expecting food shortages. And then there were all sorts of shortages during the war. But afterwards, something dramatic changed, and that's the expansion of industrial agriculture.
10:07 Nicola Twilley? We've talked about this before on the show, but all that production of weaponry and heavy machinery and explosives, some of it got repurposed to make fertilizer and pesticides and tractors. Meanwhile, researchers focused on boosting crop yields and efficiency, and we had what is known as the Green Revolution.
10:27 Speaker 05 One of the things that really took off right around the time that these types of processes were being developed was agricultural seed oil production. It tends to be kind of lower in capital cost, right? We don't oftentimes pay any cost associated with clearing land or removing forests. And so there's kind of less of a barrier to scaling up, for example, vegetable oil production globally.
10:52 Cynthia Graber? What all this meant was that you didn't need synthetic lipids, like the ones the Germans had been developing. It was cheaper and easier to just go out and rip up rainforests and plant palm and soy fields.
11:01 Nicola Twilley? Yay, capitalism. But while we were busy building this brave new world, we were also dreaming of traveling to other worlds.
11:10 Speaker 06 During the Apollo missions and in the early, early missions that were just sometimes hours or days, food was taken with them, you know? And in the very early stages, it was like pasty food. So it was not even good tasting food. It was more about the nutrition.
11:26 Cynthia Graber? Mancie Roman is a former administrator at NASA.
11:29 Speaker 06 Then, as we started evolving towards the era where we were flying astronauts for about two weeks, we started sending Food that was in, in packages, right? But it was more like real food, but dehydrated. You know, you would take it in your mission and put the water in.
11:45 Cynthia Graber? While NASA was figuring out how to feed those early astronauts with delicious treats like freeze dried ice cream, they also started thinking about what space travelers might need on a longer journey, like maybe to Mars.
11:56 Nicola Twilley? It might sound appealing to eat astronaut ice cream for months on end, or maybe not. But either way, it's not an option because you simply can't carry enough of it in your space rocket. Folks at NASA quickly realized that if humans are ever going to settle in outer space, we would need to figure out how to make food where we're going, rather than take it with us. So researchers started wondering whether they could use exhaled carbon dioxide and feed that to a friendly microbe and have that microbe reproduce and ultimately sacrifice itself to yield edible, protein-rich cells for dinner.
12:32 Cynthia Graber? This was kind of a thought experiment at the time, based on some research NASA had been doing with bacteria, but it didn't really go anywhere because the technologies needed for the whole process just weren't there yet. But a lot has changed in the past 60 years or so.
12:44 Speaker 07 I think a big turning point was the CO2 capture technologies. If we didn't have that, it would be almost unthinkable to be able to do this.
12:54 Nicola Twilley? Colin Tim is a scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. And his point is that today, the big breakthrough is that we have at least feasible ways of capturing carbon dioxide from the air.
13:06 Speaker 07 We are using technologies developed in the energy industry where they're trying to recapture CO2, reduce pollution, so that companies can remain compliant and not pollute the world. We want to take those same technologies and use it to produce things like food.
13:22 Cynthia Graber? Colin's lab is working with the government, with DARPA. That's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA wants to be able to make food from air for soldiers traveling into remote regions.
13:32 Speaker 07 They've got all their, you know, trucks moving with them, their supplies. But one thing that... They are dependent upon is having food brought into them, fresh food at some regular basis. That slows them down. That means they can't be as agile in the field. They need technologies that allow them to disconnect from that supply chain of trucks coming in to their field forward position.
13:54 Nicola Twilley? Figuring out how to feed the military in the field has often led to innovations that then end up feeding the rest of us. That's how canning was invented.
14:03 Cynthia Graber? NASA may have let this slide for a few decades, but they're back on the food from air science beat now, too.
14:08 Speaker 06 And it is kind of something needed anyway. You know, we need to process the CO2 that the crew is breathing out during a mission inside a can, basically is a can, a closed can. So we have to take that CO2 and do something with it.
14:25 Cynthia Graber? So why not try to use it for food?
14:27 Nicola Twilley? If you don't do anything with it, carbon dioxide levels would build up in a space habitat and become a problem. But guess where else that's happening? Yes, right here on our own precious planet Earth, where our food system has many other problems associated with it, too.
14:44 Cynthia Graber? So the CO2 levels are really increasing and that kind of agricultural area is diminishing and we are cutting more rainforests to get more fields. Joapika Pickin is chief scientific officer and co-founder of Solar Foods. His company and Kathleen's company were both founded out of a desire to help improve the situation for everyone right here on Earth.
15:04 Speaker 05 My co-founder at one point was like up in an airplane, looking out the window and just kind of marveling at the extent to which we have subdivided like 50%, it turns out, of the habitable land on this planet to produce food. And I think it really begs the question of, is it necessary for humans to consume Planet Earth in order to feed ourselves? And the possibility of kind of being able to feed ourselves with much fewer resources is actually very compelling, I would say.
15:35 Cynthia Graber? So whether you're in space, on the battlefield, or just a regular human, the motivation to make food from air is definitely there, but you need more than motivation to actually make it work. Monsi said.
15:47 Nicola Twilley? That when she was launching this project, she talked to a NASA expert who said turning carbon dioxide from the air into useful, maybe even edible stuff, was one of the hardest challenges he could even imagine.
15:58 Speaker 06 And we were like, that doesn't sound that difficult. And he goes, no, no, no, trust us. You know, this is not going to be easy.
16:05 Nicola Twilley? Colin never thought it was going to be a snap.
16:08 Speaker 07 It's a very hard problem. And it was a convergence of a lot of technologies and a lot of experts working on their part of the problem. We had to bring in people who could build and understand the CO2 capture system. Then we had to bring in the engineers who understood how to turn that CO2 into the small molecule products that microbes could eat. And then we had to bring in the experts that understood how to engineer microbes, such that when they ate those small molecule products, it would produce glucose.
16:36 Nicola Twilley? This was Colin's big plan to bypass photosynthesis. Grab the gases you need from the air, press gang a friendly microbe into service, and bingo, glucose is served. But man cannot live on glucose alone. So what happens next to make that sweet microbial sugar into actual food? That's coming up after the break.
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18:29 Cynthia Graber? Colin said that his research team is using microbes to make food.
18:32 Nicola Twilley? Which means you can all take a drink if you haven't already.
18:35 Cynthia Graber? And this is one of the two major methods scientists can use for turning air into something edible. They can grab gases and find the right microbes that can thrive off those gases to produce something edible for us.
18:46 Nicola Twilley? Like the NASA vision from the 60s. Or, method number two, they can go back to Marcel L'Ambeurlo's big idea and just grab gases, extract the elements they need, and make food using pure chemistry. No life forms required.
19:01 Cynthia Graber? Scientists today are tackling this challenge using both of these approaches. Colin and Yoah Pekka are using the microbe approach. And while we said that carbon capture technology was critical to making this feasible, so is genetic sequencing technology. That's how both teams can quickly search through the microbes, discard the ones that won't work, and find just the right microbes for the job. Colin's also been using genetic engineering to help him on this microbial adventure, and that's something where we've made a lot of progress in the past decades.
19:27 Nicola Twilley? Colin's brief from DARPA was very specific. They wanted something that would work at the front lines. In other words, the whole machinery to grab the gases and turn them into microbe food and then turn that into human food, it had to be small.
19:42 Speaker 07 Yeah, so we envisioned a system that could mount on like a truck. It sits on the back of a pickup truck. It's got an air processing system that pulls in hundreds of meters cubed of air per day that scrubs out all the carbon dioxide and captures that carbon dioxide.
19:58 Cynthia Graber? And for that technology, while you'd usually think of starting in a lab, making something small as a trial, and then scaling it up, Colin had to ask researchers who've worked on carbon capture systems for power plants to do the exact opposite for him.
20:11 Speaker 07 And we asked them, hey, we know that you're used to building systems for plants. Can you make us something that would fit on the back of a truck and feed into a bioreactor? They developed novel catalysts, novel reactors. Such that they could do that for us.
20:25 Nicola Twilley? Which is great. So now Colin has carbon from the carbon dioxide in air. But most microbes can't eat just plain carbon. You have to use chemical reactions to put those carbon molecules together into stuff they can eat.
20:37 Speaker 07 So you can get things like formate, acetate, propanate, uh, molecules that by themselves, we as humans can't consume. We need to upgrade those molecules into something more complex. And it turns out that microbes are a really good way to do that.
20:54 Nicola Twilley? The microbes feed on things like acetate and create things like glucose. But these aren't food safe microbes. We can't eat them. So Colin and his colleagues have selected a whole extra team of microbes to eat what the first microbes have excreted. This second team of microbes, they're food grade and they're engineered to contribute the right ratios of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. But still, at this point, Colin's microbe feast is nutrient rich, but it's not exactly food. His ultimate goal was to make a yogurt like substance. So he recruited a couple more microbes.
21:27 Speaker 07 So we had, we have selected a different set of microbes that, uh, produce gelling agents. Uh, Xanthin gum is something you can find in your, uh, grocery store today. That's a microbial product that we were able to produce as well. And then lastly, in order to have something that really resembles a yogurt, it's got to have the right flavor profile. So we engineered microbes that could produce molecules like vanillin that give them that vanilla like flavor. Ultimately, that allows us to produce, uh, a yogurt material that has a vanilla flavor.
21:57 Nicola Twilley? And drumroll, this project has actually worked. They've made about half of like a container of single serve yogurt.
22:04 Speaker 07 Yes, we made about a hundred grams of the product already on the project. Um, and we use that as a kind of a show and tell for here's what food from air looks like.
22:12 Nicola Twilley? DARPA rules say that this yogurt material is not actually approved for human consumption yet. So Colin couldn't tell us anything about the flavor, but he was pretty excited about the texture.
22:24 Speaker 07 Oh, absolutely. You could, uh, scoop it up with your finger. It'd have the little flip of texturized, uh, material that you're looking for in, in something that you would call a yogurt, right?
22:33 Nicola Twilley? This is genuinely impressive and everything that went into that yogurt, other than the microbes, came from the air. But this particular air food is not ready for the battlefield just yet.
22:43 Speaker 07 So our project was all about, uh, demonstrating the prototype. It took us about six months to get that 100 grams of product from those air materials.
22:53 Nicola Twilley? Obviously, that would speed up once they got beyond the prototype and into regular production, but Colin estimates that making yogurt material from air on the battlefield is at least a decade away. Of course, he's taking a very purist approach. All the raw ingredients that the microbes use have to come directly from the air and the result has to be edible without any further processing.
23:16 Cynthia Graber? Yoapeka has taken a different approach, and his has worked too. In fact, Solar Foods already has a commercial facility that's using microbes to make food from gas in the atmosphere. It was the first of its kind, but it's a much more pared-down type of food.
23:30 Speaker 03 So essentially, the main raw materials are electricity and CO2. And from these raw materials, we make protein-rich powder as a food ingredient.
23:40 Nicola Twilley? For this slimmed-down, scaled-up process, Yoapeka only uses one microbe.
23:45 Speaker 03 We call it Sofi. So it's S-O-F-one.
23:49 Cynthia Graber? Like Solar Food One, Yoapeka's idea is that just the microbe itself is the final product, and it's an ingredient that can be used in food. It's not like what Colin wants to create, which is a mix of microbes and microbe excretions that are blended together to create a food, a yogurt, that you can just grab a spoon and take a bite. It doesn't need any further processing.
24:08 Nicola Twilley? And because Yoapeka wanted to use just one microbe to eat air and then get eaten itself as part of a food, that microbe had to be pretty special. He told us that to be sure Sofi wouldn't be harmful to humans, she had to be the type of microbe that doesn't use chemicals to harm other microbes around her, because if she did, that could also make her toxic to us.
24:31 Speaker 03 So basically, for us, we kind of wanted to find her, or kind of needed to find a pacifist microorganism.
24:38 Nicola Twilley? When Yoapeka and his co-founder started Solar Foods in 2017, they went out looking for this special pacifist microbe, and they found Sofi in the sediment of a Finnish bog.
24:49 Cynthia Graber? But then they needed to get Sofi's food. She needed hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.
24:54 Speaker 03 So we use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. So that's the way we get hydrogen and oxygen, and then CO2. So we have-
25:02 Speaker 06 Have in our demonstrator factory, we have a direct air capture. So it captures CO2 from air.
25:11 Nicola Twilley? Being completely honest, not all the carbon that Sophie eats comes from the air because capturing carbon from the air makes that carbon very expensive. Because while the technology exists, it is still very much in the prototype phase right now.
25:27 Speaker 06 And it is still the most expensive CO2 to capture it from from air. So we are doing that for demonstration to test how the technology works.
25:36 Nicola Twilley? Yoapeka told us that right now, most of Sophie's carbon intake comes from the carbon dioxide released when you make lime, a common agricultural product that's used to boost soil productivity. This would normally be released into the air from the factory as pollution, but instead, Solar Foods captures it for Sophie's dinner.
25:55 Cynthia Graber? And it also turns out that Sophie needs more than just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to survive. She also needs trace elements, zinc, cobalt, potassium. As we said, Yoapeka isn't a purist, so he buys the minerals from a supplier and adds them to the mix, too.
26:08 Nicola Twilley? And then, once Sophie is fed and happy and has grown and multiplied into many, many Sofies, she's nearly ready to be eaten. But first, she has to die.
26:18 Speaker 06 So we have a pasteurization step. And yeah, sorry to say, so then we kill the organism.
26:24 Cynthia Graber? At that point, they separate out all the microbes from the solution they've been living in. They dry the whole mess out, and then you have this powder. It's an edible powder made entirely of dead microbes.
26:34 Speaker 06 So it happens to be vibrant yellow color. So this yellow color comes from carotenoids.
26:39 Nicola Twilley? As well as the carotenoids, the powder is about three quarters protein with just a little fiber and fats.
26:45 Cynthia Graber? It might sound futuristic to create an edible, protein-rich, micro-based powder, but actually, this type of food has a long history. We told you in our Mexico City episode that the Aztecs used to scoop out bright green algae called spirulina and dry it for food. This is also super high protein, and it's also dried dead microbes, same concept.
27:03 Nicola Twilley? And just like dry plain spirulina powder, the taste of Sophie just by itself is not much to write home about.
27:11 Speaker 06 So as a dry powder, well, it is very dry powder. It has a bit of a like a ball past. I mean, there's maybe a little bit of carrot taste and then maybe a bit umamic.
27:24 Cynthia Graber? Slightly like a corn puff, slightly carrot-y and lightly umami, sounds okay, but it's not so appetizing just on its own. So what the Solar Chef does in their test kitchen is mix the powder into things.
27:36 Speaker 06 So for me, nice examples have been ice cream and then also in pasta. Basically, in vegan ice cream, it gives kind of firmness to the texture. And then in pasta, also in tres pasta, it then replaces egg yolk. So again, it gives kind of more texture, it's more moldable.
27:58 Cynthia Graber? Because it's a new kind of food, Solar has had to get approval from food regulatory agencies in all the different countries it wants to sell in, which means having to jump through a lot of hoops to prove Sophie is safe to eat. Yo Apeka told us that was the hardest part of the whole thing. But they've succeeded, so now Sophie is on its way to a supermarket shelf near you.
28:20 Speaker 06 So in Singapore, we have had some sales of ice cream. So these have been by Japanese company Ajinomoto. And in US, we are in process with our partners to bring products to the market.
28:32 Cynthia Graber? In the US, they're focusing on so-called health and nutrition products like protein powders, protein bars, protein mix-ins, those types of things. These kinds of products are already on the market. Right now, they use animal or plant protein and there's already a market for them. So this is a good way to get a foothold and some income, which could help them expand.
28:49 Nicola Twilley? It's kind of amazing. This was NASA's vision in the 1960s and here it is, finally for sale, at least in Singapore. We figured Yo Apeka must be feeling super proud and excited.
29:02 Speaker 06 Feelings, I'm a Finnish man, I don't have feelings or I don't express feelings.
29:07 Cynthia Graber? That said, he did find a way to kind of cautiously express a slightly positive emotion.
29:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, so nice, but still acknowledging that there is still so much work to be done. So that kind of from the initial discovery. This may be, I don't know, 10, 20%. So that it is, it just gets steeper and steeper, the hill.
29:28 Nicola Twilley? Ain't that true, buddy? About basically everything. But meanwhile, although we at Gastropod love microbes.
29:35 Cynthia Graber? OK, yes, you can have another drink.
29:37 Nicola Twilley? We should raise a glass to Yo A Pec and Colin's successes for sure. But it turns out you don't actually need a microbe to make food from the air. That story coming up after the break.
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31:31 Cynthia Graber? As we said, if you're thinking about how to make food from air, there are two basic ways to go about it.
31:36 Speaker 05 Do you want to use the machinery of organic chemistry? Or do you want to use the machinery of biology?
31:41 Nicola Twilley? Chemistry is how the Bertolos, father and son, thought we should make food from air. And chemistry is how the very first synthetic food substances were made. Margarine from coal and a couple of amino acids from various industrial chemicals.
31:55 Cynthia Graber? We told you about those amino acids. They're the building blocks of protein. And the protein we eat contains 20 of them. We need lots of different ones. So just eating an amino acid isn't complete, not like eating protein.
32:06 Nicola Twilley? But, and here's where it gets intriguing, you can't actually build most of those amino acids using pure chemistry because of whether they're left-handed or right-handed. This is a weird thing in chemistry where it turns out that many molecules, their structure isn't symmetrical. That means they can have what's called a left-handed orientation or they can have a right-handed orientation. And that difference affects how they behave and even whether we can digest them.
32:35 Cynthia Graber? Some molecules don't have this problem. Like, there's one amino acid called glycine where there is no left and right-handed form. And so it's easy to synthesize using just chemistry. And we do that in industry. We do it easily and we make boatloads of it.
32:48 Nicola Twilley? But like we said, glycine isn't dinner on its own. It's a single amino acid, not protein. And it's certainly not food. Whereas a microbe can make digestible protein and sugar and whatever else. And it naturally only makes the version of a molecule we want. So why would anyone want to use just chemistry?
33:07 Cynthia Graber? Well, it turns out there are benefits. When you use biology, when you use microbes, they need certain conditions to survive and thrive. They need the right temperature, the right pressure. And most importantly, these microbes need a medium to live in, usually a water-based one. And it actually takes a lot of energy to smush all the gases into water, that is, to dissolve them. That's what Colin and Yoah Pekka have to do to give their microbes gas slash food.
33:31 Nicola Twilley? You don't have to bother with that if you're just making food from chemical reactions. So it can be faster, cheaper, and more energy efficient.
33:39 Speaker 05 But then how do you get around?
33:40 Cynthia Graber? Around the left and right version problem that a lot of molecules have. Well, Monty told us that one company that NASA worked with figured out an entirely new solution.
33:49 Speaker 06 So on this one in particular, this company, Air Company, actually developed a way of using CO2 to make a molecule a sugar in this case.
34:00 Nicola Twilley? Like we said, astronauts in space are already breathing out a lot of CO2. It's a waste product. And NASA wanted to see whether anyone could come up with a way to turn this waste product into something useful.
34:12 Cynthia Graber? Air Company wanted to make sugar. They wanted to make glucose. They first turned carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methanol. Methanol isn't sugar, so they needed a few more reactions. It went from methanol to formaldehyde. That's not edible. Then they made sugars that are toxic, and then they could turn those into glucose. And this was all chemistry.
34:30 Nicola Twilley? All the glucose in nature is right-handed. If you synthesize left-handed glucose in the lab, it tastes sweet, but no living organism can digest it. Plus, apparently it has a laxative effect. The chemical reaction Air Company was using would normally produce a mix of left and right-handed glucose molecules, but all those left-handed ones are not good to eat. So their big breakthrough was to develop a special enzyme to add to that final chemical reaction that made it so only the right-handed glucose was produced.
35:05 Cynthia Graber? Amazing. But glucose wasn't going to be enough to feed astronauts on a long haul flight. So Air Company's original idea was to take that glucose and feed it to, yes, microbes.
35:15 Speaker 06 Yeast in this case, which, you know, it's pretty easy to do. And then from there, make food, make the components of a powder that can be nutritious and can potentially have some taste, that can be part of something that might look like a protein shake, perhaps.
35:31 Nicola Twilley? There's still a lot of steps between the chemical reactions and the protein shake. And as Monty said, a microbe would still be involved somewhere along the line, but Air Company did successfully produce glucose from the air without any microbe helpers.
35:47 Cynthia Graber? NASA cares about glucose for space missions, but sugar is pretty Pretty cheap today here on planet Earth. So now what Air Company is doing is they've tweaked their chemistry to take gas from the air and make something to help us fly through the air.
35:59 Speaker 06 Right now, they're using a process very similar to do fuels for airplanes and perhaps even on Mars, you know, rockets and such.
36:06 Cynthia Graber? So food is kind of on the back burner for Air Company at the moment. But it turns out there's another edible product whose molecules don't have a left and right problem, which makes them perfect for creating using chemistry.
36:16 Speaker 05 With fats, there are actually many fats, including the ones we make at Saver, that don't have any symmetry at all.
36:22 Cynthia Graber? Kathleen's company, Saver, uses the same raw ingredients as everyone else: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They get the hydrogen and oxygen from water. In the future, they could get carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, but for right now, they get it directly from emission sources like cement plants and power plants. Then they do a couple of chemical reactions to transform those raw ingredients into paraffin wax.
36:46 Speaker 05 That's a very energy-dense substance. It's also very useful in its own right, with the exception that it is not fuel for your body.
36:53 Cynthia Graber? Converting it into fuel for our bodies takes another round of chemical processes. They basically add oxygen to the wax, and that turns it into a fatty acid. And fatty acids are the building blocks of fats that we eat. At that point, they have to add some glycerol, which they buy, and that binds those fatty acids together into an edible fat.
37:09 Speaker 05 And so that's kind of where we start, is this very pure fat without any water in it. And then to get it to behave like a butter, you have to emulsify it into this, like, very creamy, buttery thing.
37:22 Cynthia Graber? Notice how Kathleen calls it a creamy, buttery thing. That's because it's not actually butter.
37:29 Speaker 05 The name that you will see is MLCT oil, medium-long-chain triglycerides. And so what that is indicating is that there's this mixture of medium-chain fatty acids and long-chain fatty acids that are present in our butter. And those then are going to get metabolized in your body just exactly like those fatty acids already get metabolized in the foods that you eat.
37:53 Cynthia Graber? MLCT oil is just a type of oil. You can even buy this in supplement stores today. But when Saver thought about what to do with their MLCT oil, How to create a food that people can cook with, they decided to create a stick of butter.
38:04 Speaker 05 We were very intentional in deciding to make butter first as the kind of fat we wanted to share externally because it's one that people already have some expectations around. They already kind of know what to think about butter.
38:18 Cynthia Graber? They do indeed. I think about it with great affection. Butter holds a special place in my heart for its sheer delightful butteriness. So how do you make MLCT oil compete with that?
38:31 Speaker 05 So the kind of neat fat, as we like to call it, has the very neutral flavor. There's kind of like hints of creaminess, but compared to a butter, it's actually very light in flavor.
38:43 Cynthia Graber? So they add some flavorings to the final product to make it a little more butter-like, to get those grassy notes. For instance, they add a little rosemary and thyme oil.
38:50 Nicola Twilley? And we straight up spoon this air butter into our mouths.
38:54 Cynthia Graber? It's actually like, it's creamy, it's a little bit salty, it's a little grassy.
39:00 Nicola Twilley? Yeah, I get that rosemary. I mean, it's good.
39:03 Cynthia Graber? We did have regular butter butter out to compare it to, of course.
39:08 Nicola Twilley? I do actually love butter.
39:12 Cynthia Graber? The butter definitely has that like dairy thing going on.
39:15 Nicola Twilley? The butter is A, better, and B, definitely it's got a more, I would say cheesy note, almost, which I guess is your dairy. It's like salty, savory, and it's a tiny bit of a different melt, too. Like, the butter is creamier and the air butter is a little moosier, if that makes sense.
39:39 Cynthia Graber? We spread the air butter on bread to test that out, and it spread well, too.
39:43 Nicola Twilley? I'm not gonna lie, I love butter. But the air butter is quite good.
39:48 Cynthia Graber? I've tasted a lot of vegan butters, and they're okay. This as a non-dairy, but still sort of dairy butter is actually quite delicious.
39:57 Nicola Twilley? Kathleen told us that Savers started out with butter, but they're not limited to butter. They can tweak the fatty acid structure to create fats with all sorts of different properties.
40:07 Speaker 05 We, for example, you know, make liquid oils, we make fry oils, we've made, you know, beef tallow equivalents and lard equivalents. And we could differentiate that from a beef tallow that's like a little bit earlier melting, like a corn-fed beef tallow or like a grass-fed beef tallow, like a little waxy or a little harder.
40:25 Cynthia Graber? And they're partnering with chefs to test out these different fats. They sent us a box of four bonbons that were totally vegan. The ganache inside is usually made with cream, but the dairy fat in these was Savers Air Made Variety. Amazing mouthfeel, totally delicious. Beautiful piece of chocolate. I don't know, I don't have anything to complain about. It's really good.
40:45 Nicola Twilley? It's a little chocolate with a ganache center that tastes exactly like a chocolate with a ganache center.
40:51 Cynthia Graber? Yeah, I mean, the texture is like perfect.
40:53 Nicola Twilley? Hmm. 10 out of 10, no notes on that.
40:56 Cynthia Graber? As we said, Savers can make a variety of fats, but right now they can only make the saturated kind. These are like animal fats and palm oil and coconut oil. That's because these fats don't have the left and right-handed issue.
41:07 Speaker 05 You absolutely can make unsaturated fatty acids. You can make omega-3 fatty acids. Those actually start getting you into that thing we talked about at the beginning.
41:18 Cynthia Graber? You know how some molecules have left and right-handed versions? That's an issue with the omega-3 fatty acids.
41:23 Nicola Twilley? At which point you need something like Air Company's special enzyme to make sure you only get the version you want. So that is more complicated and definitely something for down the line.
41:34 Cynthia Graber? But even so, just making saturated fat, that gives Savers both a huge market and an opportunity to have a really important environmental impact.
41:41 Speaker 05 So our commercial and scale-up focus has really been on, you see us talking the most about animal fats and tropical oils because that's where the agricultural footprint is the largest for fats and oils. And so our goal is about how do we shrink the footprint that we produce food for humans on? And so. Land being the literal version of that, but then also emissions and water and biodiversity loss. And so palm oil fits into that equation. Animal fats fit into that equation.
42:14 Cynthia Graber? And those fats make up a lot of our industrial fat. They're used in all kinds of processed foods, from ice cream to chocolate bars to packaged cookies.
42:22 Speaker 05 Those customers are really important for us getting to impact and getting to scale. Like, if we want to make it so that we don't deforest like one more single acre of tropical rainforest, right? Like, those are the partners that we have to get on board. So our first commercial facility is targeted to be able to compete directly on cost with milk fat or cocoa butter. So these are kind of higher priced, but still commodity fats and oils?
42:51 Cynthia Graber? The idea is if Saver can compete on price with milk fat and cocoa butter and get those clients, they can use that investment to scale and become less expensive, at which point they hope to be able to compete with palm oil, which is even cheaper. While it might be a great idea to eat fewer of the kind of processed foods that contain these oils, in reality, we're eating more of them. And we've talked about how incredibly destructive palm oil is on a previous episode. So replacing that in our food system has a lot of potential.
43:16 Nicola Twilley? Overall, making food from air has a lot of potential benefits. Clearly, in niche situations like outer space or the battlefield, it could be key to survival. But for the rest of us, it's an industrial solution that could make our industrial food supply more sustainable. Kathleen and some academic colleagues recently published a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal trying to quantify some of these potential environmental wins.
43:43 Cynthia Graber? One benefit is in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Making Saver's fat does take electricity to power all those processes. And how their air fat compares to, say, palm oil depends on whether they use renewable energy or not.
43:55 Nicola Twilley? But for Saver's fat, the greenhouse gas emissions are already pretty much the same or lower than palm oil, even if they're just using electricity from the US grid. If they can make Saver using renewable energy and pull more carbon dioxide out of the The air is one of their ingredients, then the emissions for each stick of butter could be negative.
44:17 Cynthia Graber? When it comes to the land use question, the issue that caught her co-founder's eye when he was looking out of the airplane, the savings are dramatic. It only takes about 2% of agricultural land to make a calorie of savour as compared to a calorie of palm oil, which could lead to thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of forests being hopefully protected or rewilded.
44:35 Nicola Twilley? But as we've said, if you're using gases from the air to feed a microbe to make something like Yoapaca's solar powder, that process of dissolving all the gases into the water your microbe lives in is very, very energy intensive.
44:51 Speaker 06 So indeed, electricity is our main ingredient. Well, it basically comes from the, from the grid. And that is, of course, the main, main input into our process.
45:02 Cynthia Graber? In a different paper analyzing the benefits and challenges of this new technology, the authors say that if the entire electrical grid all over the world was used to feed protein-rich microbes like Sophie, all of that energy would only produce about half the calories that humanity needs. Obviously, we wouldn't do that. And also, we don't get all of our calories from protein. But this gives you a sense that it would take a lot of energy to make this work.
45:24 Nicola Twilley? Not only is it something we would never do, but it's also not even something we're close to being able to do. Yoapaca told us that his pilot plant can only make about 1,000 pounds of protein powder per day. That's not nothing. The company calculates it would take 50,000 hens to produce the same amount of egg protein. But it's only enough protein for roughly 5,000 people at our current consumption levels.
45:49 Cynthia Graber? It also means he's not at the scale where he can compete on the market yet. Solar's protein powder is still niche and in development. They need to eventually have a factory that can put out about 3,000 tonnes a year to be competitive.
45:59 Speaker 06 Because it basically then enables us to be there in the
46:03 Nicola Twilley? Like a whey protein, rice plant, maybe even a little less. Of course, for now, Yoah Pekka and Kathleen are still at very early days. They're still getting approval to sell their products and their factories are still pilot plants. But they are planning to grow.
46:17 Speaker 05 We are scaling up. You know, we've made it through our first regulatory approval. We are in in some restaurants and, you know, have these early commercial partners.
46:30 Cynthia Graber? It's not necessarily going to be in the super near future, but they both think that you'll be able to find these food from air products in your grocery store someday. Yoah Pekka hopes his pathway forward will be like the company Korn. They make vegan patties out of a fungus. We here at Gastropod love them.
46:43 Nicola Twilley? I've been thinking about it and kind of looking into their path. The path of Korn has been long. They started looking for their fungus in the 1960s. They found it in 1967. And then Korn products didn't go on sale in supermarkets until all the way in 1985, nearly two decades later. So that is, in my view, that is a realistic scenario for solar foods.
47:09 Cynthia Graber? OK, so maybe you shouldn't be anxiously checking their website to see when they're going to be showing up at a store near you. But this technology isn't as out there as it seems.
47:17 Speaker 06 I don't know, it's crazy, but like everything that is in the early stages is, you know, it looks crazy and ridiculous. And I think it's going to get there. I know it's going to get there and it's going to be part of the buffet of choices that people will have to feed themselves.
47:33 Nicola Twilley? The other thing that's important to remember is that buffet. Because even in a couple of decades' time, when your Oreos are made with savor rather than palm oil and your protein bar contains solar powder rather than whey, it's not like you'll be dining exclusively on food made from air. Unlike Marslan and Daniel Berthelot, nobody today thinks food made from air will be all of the food we'll ever eat.
48:01 Speaker 05 We actually think that agriculture is a very, you know, is like going to be part of how we feed humans for a long time. Like, we don't have a way of making you a tomato and we don't want to live in a world that doesn't have tomatoes.
48:15 Cynthia Graber? Two quick, exciting things for you listeners. One, we have some new t-shirts for sale. Just to let you know, this is not a fundraiser for the show. This is just something you've all asked for so you can show your love around town. You can find them at gastropod.dashery.com or on our website, gastropod.com. Be sure to check out the different fit and style options for each t-shirt to make sure to get the best one for you.
48:36 Nicola Twilley? And the second thing, we want your questions. We're making another of our favorite Ask Gastropod episodes, and they are fueled by the things you want to know. So email us at [email protected] with whatever you're wondering about.
48:51 Cynthia Graber? Thanks this episode to Bill Gergi, Kathleen Alexander, Joa Pekka Pickin, Colin Tim and Montsy Roman. You can find links to their companies and research at our website, gastropod.com. And thanks as always to our amazing producer, Claudia Geib.
49:02 Nicola Twilley? We'll be back in a couple of weeks with yet another glorious episode for your listening delight. Till then.
49:12 Nicola Twilley? Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabi Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
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