This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This could be great, but "proprietary". Gates is still the same Gates. If you want to save all the land and CO2 this could, release the IP free to all. Flood the market with cheap indistinguishable synobutter, real butter can't compete with. Milk, cheese and yogurt next please.
I'm not a scientist, but isn't EVERYTHING made of carbon?
Source: Joni Mitchell, Woodstock -
We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon
"Made of" can mean "composed of" or "constructed from". This is the latter:
Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.
The entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint.
"In addition to the carbon footprint being much lower for a process like this, right, the land footprint is, like, a thousand times lower than what you need in traditional agriculture,"
Good example of how choice of words can mislead, particularly when intentional.
I'm a traditionalist, I prefer my butter silicon based. Maybe germanium or tin if it's a special occasion
but does it actually taste like the real thing? because I can already buy something that, supposedly, I should be unable to believe isn't real butter, but after doing so I remain suspicious
The first time I had "I can't believe it's not butter," I said "I can believe it's not butter."
Of all things...butter! I'm sure it'll be more expensive than real butter with the way things work nowadays.
Thank goodness we have the assurances of a billionaire oligarch to help steer humanity in the right dietary direction.
Global warming and ecological crises make shifting diets away from animal products a pretty good idea.
Whether it's antibiotics resistance, deforestation, or greenhouse gas emissions, humanity is paying a very high price for animal agriculture at the current scale.
Cyberpunk shit getting real
Butter backed by Bill Gates? Is that the same Bill Gates who became wealthy and famous for his commanding knowledge of butter?
Didnt the Nazis also make something similar using coal?
You're probably thinking of the Fischer-Tropsch process for making gasoline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
Good ol' Gates, always around to make a quick buck of the bloodied backs of humanity. Never an advancement meant to aid us all he can't swoop in to parasitize. That's right Billy boy, I didn't forget the COVID vaccine patents. Billionaires must be condemned to the rubbish bin of history.
While I think this is pretty amazing science stuff, the writing is terrible. Here is the progression of the story as written:
They made butter from carbon...
Well, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen...
OK, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and methane...
Well, no, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, and glycerol...
Wait, hang on, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, glycerol, natural flavor, and lecithin...
Now, the source of glycerol is in question, because they say this butter is both animal and plant-free. Glycerol can be made synthetically, but it's WAY more expensive to do it. Also, I'm not seeing any way to create lecithin without plants. They never say what the "natural flavor" is.
They never say what the "natural flavor" is.
A reminder that "natural flavor" doesn't mean healthier or even something you might want over the artificially created flavors. It just means it comes from a natural source and is not lab created.
Castoreum, sometimes used for vanilla and raspberry flavoring, comes from beaver anal secretions. That would be labelled under a "natural flavor" and you'd never be told more than that.
I'll take the artificial stuff any day just on principle there.
I think it's worth pointing out that vanilla extract is from vanilla beans and artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck they feel like that tastes like vanilla. Also, modern artificial vanilla extremely rarely, if ever, is derived from Castoreum because it's hard as hell to farm beavers and expensive as all fuck. The "artificial vanilla comes from beaver anal glands" is basically a prevalent internet myth that gets passed around like the, "You eat 7 spiders a year in your sleep." myth.
Yeah #govegan, I love it. I am curious to try it. Great invention.
