Food without agriculture

After years of revision and review, our paper on Food without Agriculture has finally appeared in Nature Sustainability.

This is a pretty big idea.

Every human in history has been powered by plants via photosynthesis. Solar fusion -> sunlight -> photosynthesis -> (animals) -> food.

This is different. Eat the stuff Savor or Solar Foods is making and you’re an autotroph, powered by new energy. Using energy we made, not energy we took. Not parasiting off some natural ecosystem you're pretending to still be a part of.

The dream is so big. There are so many reasons to want the option of food without farms. Roll back agriculture and we could free up half the land on planet earth, half the fresh water, reverse habitat loss. Avoid famine or extinction. Feed Taiwan indefinitely in any blockade. Colonize space. Etc. 

Making all the foods we know and love this way is out of reach, total sci-fi. But just Savor— just fats & oils, simple molecules that are easy to make at ultra high purity, sold mostly as bulk slimes like palm oil or anhydrous milk fat—that's totally doable.

The prize would be enormous. Saturated fats are 10% of the calories that humans eat. Make that the Savor way and you reclaim about 5% of the land on planet earth. (That's like the size of Australia. What’s Australia worth?)

It’s pretty clear that Savor will make the lowest cost fats on earth. The chemistry is so simple (basically the chemistry of making fuel, plus the chemistry of making soap), the feedstocks are so cheap. It's a series of thermochemical steps that have all been scaled before, making the exact same triglyceride molecules people already eat. It being 2024, the question though is “what’s the climate impact?”. 

So that’s the bulk of what the paper is about. The climate impact of Savor fats & oils.

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Most people focus on the potential for making these fats with captured CO₂, as Savor is also doing. Electric food.

But since you respire ~1/3 of a gram of CO₂ per calorie you eat, and the average calorie of energy on U.S. electric grid was associated with >1/3 g CO₂ emissions, for now it’s better to make these foods from fossil methane than it is to make them from CO₂^[1].

Of course, both methods are vastly better than producing fats from plants or animals. Climate-wise, you're better off eating food made from coal than you are eating palm oil.

That makes sense -- we invest more than a calorie worth of fossil energy into each calorie of food that makes it to your plate. And we know that biofuels (e.g. food-to-fuel) tend to be net harmful climate-wise. So maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise that fuel-to-food makes climate sense.

There’s so much to like about the Savor approach. It seems obvious that ‘baseload calories’ like fats for baking should be made this way. Great taste, unmatched scalability, vastly lower CO₂ footprint than conventional agriculture, vastly less land required, vastly less water use, producible virtually anywhere and from a variety of feedstocks even in a warming world... and still certain to be controversial when they roll out 🫠.