- cross-posted to:
- upliftingnews@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- upliftingnews@lemmy.world
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.
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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
How much carbon is emitted to run the factory to make it though? Are we talking a net negative here?
Mmmmm. Nom nom!
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!
So, in essence, this, but with added marketing steps.
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
…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.
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.
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.
Myth. Vanilla extracts either come from low grade vanilla pods or cloves. It may have been but not today.
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!
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.
Also, poop has natural flavour. Natural flavour also doesn’t mean it tastes good.
Get your Synthetic poop flavour here!
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!!
Mmmm, I like licking beaver butt. 😉
They add just a little butter for that real butter flavor
All butter is made from CO2 it simply goes through a processing step known as cow.
You missed the grass or corn step.
To put it in simple terms, 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.
So their process sounds like it creates synthetic lard, not butter. This can still be a good thing as the extra ingredients to make it “butter” aren’t really the hard/impactful part of butter.
No, the fat they create is butter fat
I don’t eat carbon-based foods. Exotic silicon lifeforms, fresh from Titan’s methane seas.
How do you know when someone is a non-carbon eater? Don’t worry they will tell you.
Oh look; AI has gotten so advanced that computers now have haut-quisine.
This is interesting…
Lab grown meat have problem where they cannot create fat. So if this works, maybe this is the solution.
“So you’re using this gas right now to cook your food and we’re proposing that we would like to first make your food with— with that gas,” said Kathleen Alexander, co-founder and CEO of Savor.
That doesn’t sound appetizing… Lol.
Sounds like more of an actual air fryer. Maybe they can cook stuff in fatty gas rather than dropping it in oil.
I would like to propose you eat my gas
“Eat my gas” should be their slogan.
I’d actually be willing to give it a try if it’s vaguely price-competitive, but their website is all glam shots of butter and people doing things with butter and not only doesn’t sell it but doesn’t tell you where you can get it.
Also, they did not do a good job of choosing that name. It looks like there’s a very-similarly-named French Canadian manufacturer of butter, Savör, which apparently isn’t too religious about using their umlaut:
At Savor, we believe the best butter starts with the best environment. That’s why we source our grass-fed dairy butter from New Zealand, a country renowned for its pristine landscapes, sustainable farming, and exceptional dairy quality.
I foresee a collision between those two.
If butter increases in price, but Savor keeps it low, consumers will buy it to maintain healthy finances.
Pretty sure I know the factory that this butter comes from. The Miraka plant; north of Taupō. Geothermally powered, restricts it to a relatively small region in NZ.
Maybe the manufacturer is in New Zealand and the French-Canadian people are the guys who package and sell it or something. Dunno, just did a quick skim of their site.
I doubt it, I think the Miraka plant is produces mostly primary products not the secondary stuff.
Yeah well… I never liked Savör products too much. They go out if their way with all their branding and claims, but you can get very tasty butter from local creameries at similar prices, without the need to ship it frozen halfway across the globe. Especially with milk sourced from the eastern townships or the Saguenay region. And Quebec (where Savör is operating) runs on 100% hydro power, which is equal or better to geothermal. So whatever Savör is gaining from the Miraka plant, is lost on the need to import basically.
I get that, why import stuff that you produce locally…
I try to never get imported food products that we make here… It just seems wasteful.
You had me in the first half
Bill is going to be serving this on all his jets and yachts
Why not just make a fuel that can power cars if you’re gonna go this far.
@MuskyMelon @Gsus4 hydrogen probably… just need further development, I think we are in a technologic race, battery is still winning but it can change…
hydrogen probably… just need further development
You can get a hydrogen car today. Just that if you’re outside a few places like Japan and California, finding a fueling station might be a bit difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
Sales in Japan began on 15 December 2014 at ¥6.7 million (~US$57,400) at Toyota Store and Toyopet Store locations. The Japanese government plans to support the commercialization of fuel-cell vehicles with a subsidy of ¥2 million (~US$19,600).[12] Retail sales in the U.S. began in August 2015 at a price of US$57,500 before any government incentives. Deliveries to retail customers began in California in October 2015.[13] Toyota scheduled to release the Mirai in the Northeastern United States in the first half of 2016.[14] As of June 2016, the Mirai was available for retail sales in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, and Norway.[15] Pricing in Germany started at €60,000 (~US$75,140) plus VAT (€78,540).[16]
2025 Mirai
Starting MSRP $ 51,795
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#%2Ffind%2Fnearest%3Ffuel=HY
They do fuel up a lot faster than BEVs do, but the fuel cost is considerably higher than for BEVs.
cost :/ and low energy conversion efficiency. Whereas expensive novelty edibles may have a high price, fuels, not so much.
We focus too much on efficiency and cost sometimes. Sometimes efficiency is only a “nice to have” while being outweighed by practicality, convenience, safety, and any of the other factors we choose to make a priority.
It is expensive and inefficient for an airplane to have two engines instead of just one. We do it anyway because it’s required for safety and redundancy. We made that the priority, and that was an active choice. We need to start making more active choices about what the priority is when it comes to our energy futures. All priorities have tradeoffs. Cost and efficiency have their own tradeoffs. Question it when people tell you that things can’t be done because of “cost” or “efficiency”. When they do that they’re presupposing what the priority is, but often it’s billionaires trying to cut corners to make themselves richer at our expense, our safety, our futures. We can do inefficient things. Sometimes it’s even the right choice.
I think you’re missing that there are better ways to produce fuels for cars than to chemically synthesize petroleum. It’s all about cost and efficiency if you’re just looking for portable energy. Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline…
Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline…
The problem is, people can, do, and will use that exact same argument to say we don’t need any more solar panels or wind turbines, because we don’t need and can’t use or store the excess power for anything and that’s why we need to keep thermal plants as backup for base load generation. Look, when we produce too much electricity, the electricity cost goes to zero and negative! It’s “wasteful and inefficient”! But these two problems can solve each other. Synthetic fuels (doesn’t have to be gasoline, hydrogen is step 1, methane/LNG is a bit more manageable as a chemical fuel. As long as the carbon source is atmospheric, then it and other synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral to burn) provide an on-demand energy sink/storage method that can support and drive more electrification and renewable power, it just has to be part of a consistent and systemic approach with strict regulation and a clear view of the big picture (something sorely lacking these days).
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Honestly, I’m mostly wondering about the nutrition factor. Not that you expect much from butter, but we all know this will be slipped into other things, just like hfcs.
My #1 fear of this… I’m sure they’ll fix it:
(Yes, I used AI to make that. “Black Butter” is also apparently real and actually looks super tasty!)
So as a block it’s your #1 feer, but in a jar it looks super delicious?
Carbon butter - ick.
Black apple butter looks amazing!
So Bill Gates invented margarine?
Nope:
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
And even more obviously:
Fundig an existing product doesn’t mean you invented it
Isn’t margarine hydrogenated oil? These guys made the oil, apparently.
