Uplifting News

“Other assorted stuff”? The palm oil probably isn’t great, of course it’s simple existence is causing the intentional destruction of important forests and it, and the people who use it, can fuck right off, but otherwise I dunno, that doesn’t sound like the end of the world.

I think health on cheese a pretty low bar to beat tho

Yes, they aren't trying to make an alternative butter substitute as I understand it. They're trying to make real butter via a purely chemically synthetic process.

That’s what I’m thinking. For example, there are milk proteins in butter that undergo the Maillard reaction to produce different flavors. Will this product have the same proteins?

Typically there are minor 'impurities' that make the 'real' thing taste different.
Vanillin, for example, is very easy to produce chemically, which is good, because growing and harvesting it naturally is very difficult, but it's missing a lot of the compounds which add subtle yet important taste and smell to the natural stuff.

Especially tea

Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).

This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.

I shall add some potassium and market it as buttOCK

I can't believe it's not butter

Maybe they add some of those under "natural flavors"?

So, can we turn the garbage patch into butter?

I mean, it was backed by Bill Gates, mr proprietary himself

You're right, but I am curious whether they'll be able to pursue this chemically through non-biological feedstocks. Most existing use of Fischer-Tropsch turns fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) into other types of hydrocarbons.

And they're specifically targeting output of fatty acids, using fractional distillation to separate each fatty acid, and then forming triglycerides according to the characteristics they're looking for.

It all sounds very energy intensive and inefficient, so I'm not sure how they expect to make money doing this, but if they can dial in which fatty acids to assemble into triglycerides I can see this being a good substitute for palm oil and coconut oil, and maybe other vegan substitutes for animal fats like tallow and lard.

I'm not sure why people are so puritanical about this. I think Beyond Burgers and Soylent are great.