cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34272214
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.
I’m a traditionalist, I prefer my butter silicon based. Maybe germanium or tin if it’s a special occasion
Didnt the Nazis also make something similar using coal?
Butter is, like, the one dairy product I don’t miss. Pass.
How
I must be losing my mind because I thought I saw this post 2 days ago except it said beer.
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.
So when I poop the carbon butter out, how long does it take to decompose? Because unless we make one of those nuclear waste containment salt bunkers for all. the butter carbon poop this kinda seems like a dumb idea.
About as long as meat, since that is also made from carbon.
I can see why some people might conflate Carbon Monomers and Carbon Polymer Chains with plastics, because thats what plastics are after all, but it’s also the basic building block for almost all organic chemistry including proteins, fats (lipids), sugars, alcohols, and sugar alcohols (totally different thing from sugar and alcohol btw). Carbon can even form compounds with Ammonia, such as Carbamides like Urea which can be extracted from Uric Acid using Sodium and then used as agriculture grade fertilizers.
It’s why we’re called Carbon Based Lifeforms.
If you think that’s crazy you should see all the wacky shit that Hydrogen gets up to.
Atoms are atoms. All they are doing here is artificially creating fat molecules rather than getting them from the environment so the decomposing time is not affected.
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.
Were just all their rentboys.
Yeah #govegan, I love it. I am curious to try it. Great invention.
Should be a nice change from that silicon based butter I usually get.
From the description I cannot in a million years assume that it tastes anywhere near butter. And where’s the buttery taste going
“Fat molecules chemically identical to those in butter”. I’ll wait until I hear more third party people try it or I do myself.
Of course not. They’ve made artificial fat, not butter. BIG difference
water, lecithin as an emulsifier, flavor and color
I’m not giving up a small pleasure like butter just so that a billionaire can buy another private jet and wipe out whatever tiny carbon footprint savings comes from giving up butter
I too love participating in the simple pleasure of systemic animal abuse just to spite the billionaires
The cows yearn to be milked.
Is femboy milk butter ok?
Higher protein content than the cow milk variant!
Doesn’t work well in a cake, sadly.
How to spot a vegan: They’ll make sure to turn every discussion to a vegan direction with little effort.
We’re literally talking about an alternative to an animal-based food product.
Yet the other user is being scolded for a choice instead of actually contributing to the conversation. Maybe the user was indeed vegetarian and had dietary problems making butter a good source for protein.
Don’t judge other people’s diets. That’s just an ill-faithed attempt at winning them over to your side without having to show any concern for their life. Instead contribute to a conversation, ask and ye shall receive.
Nice try, VEGAN, but we’re not going to be deluded into accepting an ethical and cost-efficient alternative to a popular but unsustainable food ingredient.
You’ve filled this community with your malicious campaign of compassion towards living creatures and economic sensibility for FAR TOO LONG. Why don’t you take your EXTREMIST VIEWS on practical efficiency, carbon emissions reduction, ecological sustainability, and better treatment of sentient life and HIT THE BRICK, MATE!
Your conscience, your logic, and your morale character might be welcome in VEGANLAND, but around here we’re built different.
Lordy, this comment is so beautifully wet with sarcasm. Thank you for your creativity and the laughs! You’re awesome!
How to spot an asshole: things can only be about what I want them to be about.
You want them to have a slightly smaller mansion on Nantucket island?
How much carbon is emitted to run the factory to make it though? Are we talking a net negative here?
You mean how much butter is emitted
Some, as prepping the carbon and hydrogen will take energy. But it wouldn’t be hard to be way better than the emissions associated with dairy farming for butter. Cost could still be higher, though depending on how much material is needed for the process.
I wonder where they source the methane from. Because I pictured a comicbook flip book of a balloon blowing up behind a cow
Methane is just the primary compound in natural gas.
I mean they can get it from the ground, but it can also come from things kind of fermenting in cows/our stomachs.
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.
It kind of sounds like the beginnings of star trek’s replicators…
But that aside, somehow I doubt those are the exact only “ingredients” they use.
And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the end product contains all kinds of trace elements of various not so healthy chemicals used to get the parts to combine into the actual butter.
Like the process to get the glycerol or lecithin in a state they can use.Ofcourse a lot of our dietary ingredients are contaminated in various levels anyway.
It makes me think of Enterprise, where they don’t have replicators but they do have protein resequencers, which can take waste matter and convert it into useful things, but they can’t do energy to matter conversion yet.
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.
Incorrect, vanillin is the primary component of real vanilla beans and responsible for like 90% of the flavor.
I don’t understand what this would be correcting in what I said above. Can you show me what part this is correcting? Cause I’m legitimately confused.
You said artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck. It’s not, artificial vanilla is the main ingredient of natural vanilla, but without the other flavors
Ah gotcha! I for sure was not following what you were saying. I don’t know if that’s he real thrust of the point in my above comment, but I was more referring to the fact that artificial vanilla doesn’t necessarily come from vanilla beans. I should’ve been more precise with my language, but it’s worth noting that artificial vanilla is largely synthesized and comes from a variety of sources, not just vanilla beans (see below for the source/pertinent excerpt).
It also gets weird as to how the FDA regulates the term. I believe the key term is actually “Pure” in the “Pure Vanilla Extract” but don’t quote me on that. Not sure how it’s done by other regulatory agencies but it’s probably equally convoluted in a lot of places.
Pertinent excerpt:
However, many alternate routes to vanillin are well documented, including vanillin derived from spruce tree lignin, corn sugar, rice or wheat bran, clove oil, curcumin, or guaiacol.
Yes, that’s true, but the vanillin in the artificial stuff is chemically identical to the real thing
It would have cost you nothing to not write this.
Maybe he wouldn’t have lost anything, but I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy his comment.
Myth. Vanilla extracts either come from low grade vanilla pods or cloves. It may have been but not today.
Also, poop has natural flavour. Natural flavour also doesn’t mean it tastes good.
Spoken like someone who’s never ate shit.
You’re not going to catch me out with this one again!
Billions of flies can’t be wrong!!
Get your Synthetic poop flavour here!
My ex wife’s uncle was the director of the south American division of the arm that made coloring and flavorings of one of the big Food/Chem groups, Procter & Gamble, or unilever, or one of those. Can’t remember.
No one in his household ate any processed/ultra processed foods.
Do the math.
Fuck man I had no idea, I’ve missed out on my prime years of eating beaver anal secretions 😭
They can still be your prime years in terms of quantity of beaver ass eaten, if not in quality. But I think you sell yourself short. They’re gonna love you!
Mmmm, I like licking beaver butt. 😉
They never say what the “natural flavor” is
…it’s people?
Where do you think Trump is sending all the homeless? A big old wooden screw press…
There’s something unpleasantly psychopathic in emotion about BtVS, but this one moment was funny.
I was thinking Soylent Green, but if Buffy provided a reference point for Charlton Heston, all the better.
They add just a little butter for that real butter flavor
So, like every other butter and oil, that’s why we call them hydrocarbon.
I imagine this “butter” doesn’t contain any glycomacropeptide, α-lactalbumin, β-lactoglobulin, serum albumin and immunoglobulins
You’re probably right, but I can’t wait to see the egg on your face if it does turn out to contain glycomacropeptides, α-lactalbumin, β-lactoglobulin, serum albumin and immunoglobulins!
Hey but it’ll make bill gates a buck!
