Remember that scene from The Matrix in which the crew of the rebel hovercraft the Nebuchadnezzar sits down to a meal of some artificial, lab-concocted glop? Apoc describes it as being “like a bowl of snot,” while Mouse say it actually reminds him of one of his favorite foods as a child, the fictional Tasty Wheat.
Dozer explains that the glop is said to be created by a single-celled organism and has all the nutrients required to support human life. In real life—and especially on our rapidly warming planet, where droughts are becoming more common and every inch of arable land will soon be needed to grow basic crops—such glop would actually be a very cool thing. It might, in fact, be the difference millions of people suffering famine and those same millions having decent, long lives. Never mind the taste, this glop would be a Godsend.
Well, this week some nerds at the University of Tübingen in Germany announced that they have essentially created some version of the magical glop. The single-celled organism turns out to be a bacterium called Thermoanaerobacter kivui, and the glop created contains both B9 and more protein per volume than beef. And all it needs to grow is C02 (the primary offender in the climate crisis), hydrogen, and some heat. Pretty cool!
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of creating artificial food. This is probably because I’ve read too many science fiction novels, where such technology is often presented as dystopian (I’m looking at you, Soylent Green) as well as utopian (see the replicators on Star Trek). Being a natural, rational optimist, I tend to believe that artificial food will be a great boon to society. In particular, artificial protein would be a wonderful thing because it would free up so much land that is currently used by livestock (the most inefficient form of food production, not to mention the cruelest in its most common form).
Don’t get me wrong—I like meat. I cook with meat. And I think free-range livestock raised with traditional, holistic practices might actually be a crucial element in the fight against climate change. But if there were a good, renewable alternative to real meat that sucks up C02 in the process, I’m all in. It could, in fact, save the world as we know it.
Hopefully, they will figure out the taste problem.
Ash Clifton, Writer 