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Posted on August 26, 2024 | 218 Comments
A couple of news items just in, relating to my recent critiques of manufactured food. Apologies for harping back to this theme, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the unfolding story. At the end, I’ll cast forward to new themes.
So, this recent article is another rather starry-eyed piece heralding the bright future for Solein, the protein powder manufactured from bacteria by the Finnish company Solar Foods. What’s interesting about it is that it gives a few facts and figures about the company’s production processes, presumably derived from the company itself, which corroborate figures I provided in my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
The article suggests that Solar Foods’ new factory can produce a maximum of 160 tonnes of Solein annually, and that it uses an average 7,000 MWh of electricity to do so. Assuming a top-end figure of 70 percent digestible protein content (there are reasons to think the true figure is less), that translates to this calculation:
7,000,000 kWh / 160,000 kg / 0.7 = 62.5 kWh per kg protein
This is pretty close to the 65.3 kWh/kg that I calculated in Saying NO… and nearly four times more than the 16.7 kWh/kg figure that George Monbiot gave in his influential book Regenesis that promoted the method.
It’s clear that the 62.5 kWh/kg figure only covers some of the energy costs of the process. It excludes, for example, the energy needed to capture and supply carbon dioxide to the process – as well as, presumably, other inputs and infrastructure costs. It also involves dividing an average by a maximum figure. So all in all the 62.5 kWh/kg figure is certainly an underestimate, but it sets a floor for the prodigious energy costs of the process.
I’d already shown that the 16.7 figure was wrong, but this new article is the final nail in the coffin. It’d be nice to see that figure retracted – alas, that’s out of my hands. Given the basically non-existent ‘transition’ into clean energy outlined in my previous post which is failing to meet even existing needs for energy, the vast increase in renewable electricity generation that would be required to fund the additional energy demands of manufactured food if it’s to play any major part in a sustainable future makes this technology a non-starter as a mass food approach.
Another issue with that type of bacterial protein powder that I barely touched on in Saying NO… is its worryingly high content of a bioplastic known as PHB, which can break down in the gut into a pharmacologically active compound known as hydroxybutyrate, with potential applications reported for the treatment of narcolepsy, alcohol addiction withdrawal syndrome, cationic and chronic schizophrenia, chronic brain syndrome, atypical psychoses, drug addiction withdrawal, circulatory collapse, Parkinson’s disease, cancer, radiation exposure, and various other neuropharmacological diseases. All of which could be good news, but not necessarily if you’re ingesting it in quantity on a regular basis as a food and a major source of dietary protein.
But alas technical unfeasibility and uncertain health effects rarely seem to be a bar to popular acclaim about the latest saviour technologies. Even the august environmentalist organisation Greenpeace appears to have jumped on the bacterial bandwagon. True, it’s in the context of exposing livestock industry lobbying against manufactured food, which is fair enough. But whereas Greenpeace has stood up to biotech boosterism and advocated for community-based and agroecological approaches around issues like Vitamin A Deficiency, it seems to have sided in this instance with one corporate claim against another, and swallowed something of a tall tale about microbial food and energy futures.
Part of the hype around microbial food focuses on the notion that it provides a substitute for meat. One of the problems with this view is that there are already perfectly good alt-meat products available based on soy and other legumes. The land footprint of the microbial product is possibly less, but that has to be weighed against its huge energy footprint, plus the numerous additional costs – environmental and otherwise – in the extended, materials-heavy supply chain fuelling microbial alt-meat factories. The trophic inefficiency arguments against eating meat find an exact parallel in arguments against eating microbial alt-meat.
It seems to me that what really gets microbial alt-meat proponents excited is the possibilities of the technology to do away with farming – what some herald as a ‘Counter-Agricultural Revolution’. It’s easy to see why food corporations like this idea, because it greatly increases their already considerable powers to monopolize production, but harder on the face of it to see why anyone else finds this appealing. I think the answer is that our contemporary civilisation has become so alienated from the idea that humans should make their livelihood, as other species do, by participating as ecological protagonists in the economy of nature, as “plain members and citizens of biotic communities” in Aldo Leopold’s famous phrase, that pursuing purportedly nature-free or land footprint-free food production so that more land can supposedly be ‘left for nature’ has become appealing.
I’ve already written plenty about the numerous problems with this line of argument, and I won’t repeat it here. Instead, I’ll just comment on the way the debate plays into corporate hands. Bruce wrote on this site “My worry is that the pushback against lab grown meat will be used to defend some of worst current practice” and I agree that’s very likely to be the case. When you push against meat industry interests for a biotech approach that so clearly doesn’t stack up on numerous grounds it’s a gift to those meat industry interests. Likewise, the horror show of the global meat industry is a gift to alt-meat synbio interests. Often those two respective interests have much the same money behind them – another case of the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ game that neoliberal capital plays so well.
What goes missing in this is the pro-nature and pro-human case for local agroecological farming, which can encompass mixed farming and pastoralism – including at commercial levels – that isn’t representative of ‘the meat industry’. It saddens me that a lot of thoughtful and hardworking but increasingly demoralised farmers get tarred with this ‘industry’ brush by people who too easily and indiscriminately buy into global discourse about the need for reducing meat. However true that might be (and, well, it’s quite complicated…) it’s rarely true that local agroecological systems with livestock components – or, for that matter, with grain components – replicate the failings of ‘meat industry’ or ‘arable industry’ systems. We need these farmers. I wish public narratives around farming were less full of scorn, less indiscriminate in their targets, and less starry-eyed about fanciful biotech alternatives.
It’s possible to do low-energy agroecological farming without livestock – it’s just that it’s usually a bit less efficient and it involves more human or machine labour (if the latter, then arguments about its greater sustainability pretty much go out of the window). But I’m all in favour of people giving different systems a go and seeing what works. Generally, I think low-energy agroecological systems will settle on the mixed farming approaches that preceded fossil-fuelled modernity in most populous places, and the pastoralist approaches that preceded it in most unpopulous places. But who knows? Maybe there will be something new under the stock-free sun.
Anyway, the real parting of the ways is not between stock-free and mixed/pastoralist agriculture, but between corporate agriculture (above all, big arable, but also big meat and big alt-meat) and local, non-corporate, community-oriented agriculture. I think this needs continuous emphasis and repetition, lest the ecomodernist public-to-corporate money pipeline and its associated clearance rewilding approach further erodes the possibilities for future sustainability.
Current reading: Philip Loring Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology …which is kind of a propos to the above. Loring writes “…it is indeed possible for us to coexist with the rest of the natural world, to restore the damage we’ve caused. We do this not through self-quarantine, by leaving nature alone. We achieve this by integrating our lives and destinies with those of the species, landscapes and seascapes around us.” (p.26). Loring’s remarks on ecomodernism are heavy hitting, equating it with white supremacism. So far, needless to say, I haven’t found myself in full agreement with everything he writes, but I’m with him on the need ultimately to integrate our lives and destinies with the surrounding biota, and to avoid what he calls ‘self-quarantine’ – which I believe is the direction the manufactured food narrative is taking us. How, alternatively, to better integrate our lives and destinies with our surroundings is the focus of my future projects.
Time pressure and internet access are still troublesome at my end, but I’m hoping to be a bit more present here soon…
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hydroxybutyrate ? Sounds like a powerful brain altering chemical. What could go wrong with eating lots of that ?
The need for continuous (exponential !) growth drives the ecomodernist narrative. Their whole model falls apart without it. And, as noted last time, rebuildable energy has not decreased the amount of fossil fuel being used.
I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts on how we move to a more sustainable system.
Hi Greg,
As I said in another comment (which I think the website is moderating on behalf of Chris, though I’m not sure why), 3-hydroxybutyrate is a molecule our bodies make in any situation where we are burning fat instead of carbohydrates. That includes: fasting overnight, fasting for longer periods, prolonged periods of exercise, very low-carb diets, and metabolic problems interfering with glucose metabolism (such as type 1 diabetes or very advanced type 2).
So I’m not too worried about it, though I’m also not convinced it’s a good thing to have hanging around in huge quantities if we do have glucose available to metabolise instead. Possibly an example of the dose making the poison.
Endotoxins and other sorts of things are another story, of course; I’m not saying that studge (sorry, Solein) is safe, just that hydroxybutyrate isn’t my first concern with it.
That said, nutritional science is really still at the leeches-and-bloodletting stage, so there are pretty strong precautionary principle arguments for not eating any industrially ultra-processed food at all. I don’t follow that entirely in my own practice (pre-packaged food of the junk snax category is remarkably convenient when you work outside away from home all day and need to bring your food with you, though I am getting better at packing better lunches and I definitely feel the benefit when I do…) but I hope that the high proportion and diversity of whole foods I eat does offset that some.
One of the studies linked above by Chris includes this about the potential use of PHB (polyhydroxybutyrate) in food as a treatment for neurodegenerative conditions, epilepsy, cardiac disorders, and diabetes:
“These data support the potential use of PHB as a nutraceutical compound in functional foods suitable for other extraintestinal conditions (neurodegenerative, epilepsy, cardiac disorders, diabetes), as in this work, 3-hydroxybutyrate has been also quantified in other tissues, such as plasma and brain, after its generation by gut microbiota populations from ingested PHB.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141813022001271
If the ingested PHB (breaking down into hydroxybutyrate components) has effects on bodily processes and disorders like these, it brings up the issue of potential side effects (short- and long-term), and the uncontrolled doses which people could be ingesting daily, especially if the bacterial protein is an ingredient in random food items such as pasta, chocolate, burgers, gelato, etc.
No, thanks, I’ll skip the bacterial protein.
3-hydroxybutyrate is produced endogenously in humans whenever we are burning fat instead of carbohydrate. Diets that encourage higher-than-usual levels have been used for treating epilepsy for decades, iirc, but they are very difficult to stick to.
I’m not saying studge is safe, just that hydroxybutyrate is really not my first concern in terms of safety.
I don’t know how many of the various types of hydroxybutyrate could possibly result from the breakdown of PHB (polyhydroxybutyrate) by gut bacteria. The first related paper which Chris linked above states that “The main product of biodegradation of PHB is 4-hydroxyl butyrate (HB), which is active pharmacologically and is a very promising compound for treating different diseases…” So this could be a different kind of HB than what the human body sometimes produces when stored fats are burned.
Another form of HB is Gamma Hydroxybutyrate (or GHB), which WebMD says “is a chemical that is found in the brain and made in a lab. It has sedative effects. It’s illegal for use in dietary supplements. GHB acts on several nerve pathways in the brain and has been used in drug-facilitated sexual assault and as a party drug. Due to safety concerns, it is a Schedule I controlled substance, making it illegal. A prescription form of GHB called sodium oxybate (Xyrem) is used for treating excessive daytime sleepiness (narcolepsy). People also use GHB for alcohol use disorder, opioid withdrawal, depression, and other conditions…”
https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-950/gamma-hydroxybutyrate-ghb
Note that GHB is said to used as a treatment for some of the same disorders that ingested PHB in food is said to be a potential treatment for.
So for me, it’s premature to conclude that the breakdown of PHB in the human gut would only result in the same insignificant effects as the body burning stored fat.
Hi Steve
Every time I try to go into any depth (which is not particularly substantial depth) on the biochemistry of this, my comment gets eaten by the spam filter.
PHB is produced by a very broad range of microbes and you probably already consume it when you eat yoghurt (Lactobacillus acidophilus being just one of the microbes that synthesize this in cytoplasm). It’s in beer and wine too, though again in small amounts. I don’t think there’s any evidence that PHB breaks down into GHB, but if the PHB in Solein does break down into clinically relevant doses of GHB, that’s going to be found out very quickly indeed, and they can pivot to producing neurotransmitter drugs instead of food.
For the third time, though: I am not saying that studge is safe, just that 3-hydroxybutyrate is really not my first safety concern with it because 3-hydroxybutyrate is already widely present in human bodies.
The risk from bacterial endotoxins seems greater, to me.
Plenty of “toxins” exist in food we all eat all the time, of course. That doesn’t mean we should be blasé about introducing novel ones, but 3-hydroxybutyrate is not a novel substance.
I would like to know what measures are being taken to ensure that Solein is actually safe for long-term human consumption.
I understand that Kathryn is not so concerned about the PHB content of bacterial protein powder, because 3-hydroxybutyrate is already found in the human body when stored fat is burned.
I’m concerned because some peer-reviewed studies say that the results of PHB breaking down in the gut can have neuropharmacological effects (and not just 3-hydroxybutyrate was mentioned), to such an extent that PHB in food is suggested as a potential treatment for various medical conditions. I presume that these conclusions were made by the researchers with full awareness that the human body produces some type of HB when stored fat is burned.
If PHB is already present in fermented products such as beer and yogurt, then the amount of PHB would be minuscule in comparison. Among the traditional fermented foods, yogurt seem to have a relatively high bacterial content. The amount of bacteria in a serving of yogurt would be measured in milligrams, at most (the percentage of bacterial content is less than 1%), whereas the amount of bacteria in a serving of bacterial protein powder would be measured in grams (and the percentage of bacterial content in this novel food is 100%). Not to mention that the bacterial protein powder is made from hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria, which are more prone to producing PHB than the bacteria found in traditional fermented products.
Steve
My suspicion is that it’s the other way around: people researching dietary sources of PHB as a prodrug for 3-hydroxybutyrate are trying to find an easier way to achieve large doses of the latter than the current methods used for treatment of drug-resistant neurological conditions — that is, extremely high fat, low-carb diets, which tend not to be easy to stick to, and to have other health effects unrelated to the metabolism of 3-hydroxybutyrate. Of course, whether the health effects of these diets when used for management of neurological conditions are due to “3-HB is helpful” or “something about glucose metabolism is unhelpful” is another question, and not one I am prepared to comment on given the amount of literature I would need to read through. Presumably someone somewhere has done a meta-analysis.
The dose does indeed make the poison, or the medicine for that matter. In the case of 3-hydroxybutyrate my understanding is that sufficiently high blood levels will prompt an insulin response (similar to that in the context of high blood sugar). When this doesn’t happen then yes, you are in trouble, it’s called diabetic ketoacidosis. But if you have a working pancreas it should really be a non-issue, and if you don’t have a working pancreas then you’re probably monitoring these things anyway (every diabetic I know is very familiar with the symptoms of DKA.)
I don’t know whether human gut bacteria can convert PHB to 3-hydroxybutyrate fast enough to cause this particular problem. I would be interested to know the other metabolites of the PHB, too, and there are effects like “what does that much PHB do to your gut microbiome, anyway?” to consider. But the 3-hydroxybutyrate part of things really, really doesn’t worry me, even if the doses of it are fairly high.
(Here’s hoping this one doesn’t get eaten by the spam filter.)
“But the 3-hydroxybutyrate part of things really, really doesn’t worry me…”
What about the 4-hydroxyl butyrate, which is also mentioned as a pharmacologically-active result of the biodegradation of PHB?
“I would be interested to know the other metabolites of the PHB, too…”
Hear, hear. Overall, I’d agree with the cliché that “further research is needed” before the bacterial protein powder is authorized as a novel food.
Hi Steve
I looked at the reference study cited by that bit of the one you quoted, and can’t find anything about 4-hydroxybutyrate (aka gamma-hydroxybutyrate) in it, it all seems to be about beta-hydroxybutyrate which is 3-hydroxybutyrate. Further it looks like the “biodegradation” referred to was done chemically in a test tube, not even a mammalian intestine. The output seemed to depend somewhat on the feedstock. Granted it was late and I was tired and trying to read a pdf on my phone, so I could be wrong here, but… at the moment I would say the statement about PHB becoming 4-hydroxybutyrate is misleading or possibly in error, and that a more nuanced explanation is something along the lines of “it depends what you feed the bacteria to make the PHB in the first place”.
Given that 4-hydroxybutyrate is also an illegal street drug in many countries, I imagine Solein would want to avoid producing a precursor to it even in subclinical doses in a food, and would select their feedstocks appropriately.
@ Kathryn
The other paper which Chris links above is definitely referring to PHB in human food being a potential treatment for various conditions (neurodegenerative, epilepsy, cardiac disorders, diabetes), and that in itself raises a red flag for me (but not for you, I get it) regardless of the mechanisms or degradation products involved to cause such effects on the human body. If PHB in food has potentially strong enough effects to be a treatment for these serious medical conditions, then I have some food safety concerns about intake amounts and the uncontrolled daily doses that could result if bacterial protein is added to multiple types of food items.
A paper from Stanford says that PHB in the diet was found to have effects on the immune system (in animal studies), and PHB was suggested as “a promising alternative to antibiotics”.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.8b04038
Maybe PHB in food will turn out to be great for human health, with no short- or long-term side effects at all. Or maybe there will be some unexpected side effects and downsides. I think it warrants further research before approval as a novel food.
I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts on how we move to a more sustainable system.
Indeed! This is the crux of the problem. How do we transition from a high-energy urban society to a low-energy rural society? I’ve been very pessimistic about this transition being feasible at all, but I’m willing to be persuaded.
Also, I think the eventual goal of a small farm future will be much more attractive to the general public if there are clear policy recommendations that support the transition. A proposal for a small farm future is kind of like a proposal for colonizing Mars. It might be a wonderful goal, but without realistic plans for a fleet of spaceships and making a settlement on Mars self-sustaining, it won’t get much traction among the people that could make it happen.
Chris has clearly explained the “why”, but the who, what, when, where and cost questions need answering, too. It’s a big task. It might need a think-tank with grant funding to accomplish (or the chrissmage.com comments section).
This was supposed to be a reply to Greg, but it somehow became a standalone comment.
Left a comment, can’t see it, tried to post it again but got the “looks like a duplicate” error, so I’m not sure if it’s in a moderation queue or if my browser is just not updating something properly. Anyway if it turns up please delete this one, and if not let me know and I will try to re-post.
I tried a few more times and I think the issue is that my comment has enough stuff about hydroxybutyrate to get caught by the spam filter. So I’m posting it in smaller bits and different wording. Apologies; do ignore the ones that went into spam.
In George Monbiot’s recent article about the livestock industry, he includes a hyperlink to a company named “Farmless” (one word, a synonym for “Farm-free”).
From the limited details in their press release, Farmless seems to be making bacterial protein powder like Solar Foods, requiring energy-intensive hydrogen as a feedstock. The Farmless website is a mishmash of visual effects and PR claims. It actually touts their “brewed” product as a “whole food”:
“Whole foods [showing a photo of farmed vegetables] We harvest naturally occurring microorganisms. Ferment -> harvest -> dry. Yep, that’s basically it. Say goodbye to long ingredient lists.”
The unrelated photo of vegetables looks good, and the text might sound good to the uninformed, but dried whole bacteria can include cell wall endotoxins and harmful nucleic acid content, and significant PHB content in hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria.
And unlike farmed veggies, this type of product (such as Solein) is an ingredient similar to existing types of protein powder, which need to be added to tasty ingredients to make the powder palatable, and are often used in ultra-processed foods. Bacterial protein powder is obviously a far cry from unprocessed whole foods like vegetables and beans.
I can dry my sourdough starter (also made of naturally-occuring microorganisms) but I wouldn’t necessarily want to eat it.
Its all part of the desperation to find profit from anything anywhere , legacy industries are slowly dying just look at western car manufacturers , engineering and just about everything else , the only ” healthy ” part of western industry is arms production , fake food is a possible revenue raiser , they will throw several billion $ at it just as they have for renewable energy and it will need the same kind of subsidies to work .
IMHO the less ” manufactured ” food you eat the better there are studies showing the increase in obesity runs in lock step with manufactures foods .
http://www.nutritionwithjudy.com/meet-apeel
A little light reading !
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/08/25/climate-emergency-but-the-council-workers-need-paying/#more-75032
Robbing Peter to pay Paul . “unavoidable spending challenges” . What’s next ?
Hodmedod’s is doing pretty good work in the legumes sphere, or that’s my impression; I wonder if they have energy input/protein output data for any of the farms they work with? Could be an interesting comparison with Solein. Could also be interesting to compare and contrast the amount of initial funding and subsidy received.
(This is the initial part of the lost comment.)
Chris wrote: “Assuming a top-end figure of 70 percent digestible protein content (there are reasons to think the true figure is less)…”
The maximum protein content of Solein is listed as 70% (and the average protein content is obviously less), but not all of that protein is digestible. Bacterial protein has some issues when it comes to its digestibility by humans. If only half of that protein is digestible, then the maximum digestible protein content would be only half of 70%, or 35%.
On the other hand, the digestibility of protein from soybeans (for example) is quite high:
“The average true digestibility in adult human subjects of the protein in cooked whole soybeans, in cooked soybean flour, and in soybean milk was found to be 90.5%, 94.0%, and 89.6%, respectively.”
Digestibility and Biological Value of Soybean Protein in Whole Soybeans, Soybean Flour, and Soybean Milk
William M. Cahill, Lawrence J. Schroeder, Arthur H. Smith
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/28.3.209
The digestibility of bacterial protein, when eaten by humans, could potentially be less than half the digestibility of the protein in soybeans, in which case Chris’s minimum 65.3 kWh per kg of bacterial protein would need to be doubled (or more) if we’re talking about energy required per kg of *digestible* protein.
On a “per kg of digestible protein” basis, bacterial protein could thus have a much greater energy disadvantage when compared to farmed crops like soybeans. (In “Saying NO…”, Chris estimated the energy input requirements for growing soybeans as being around 1 kWh/kg of protein, at the farm gate).
Actually the Solein powder (ileal) digestibilty as disclosed in the Novel Food application dossier is just about 25% percent versus 70%+ of soy powder. That means the that even at price parity, per kg Solein is 3x more expensive a protein source than soy, isn’t it?
The reason of low digestibilty can be very well the down-stream ultra-processing: extracting LPS (endotoxin) PHB, surpluss nucleic acids.
What do you think?
Digestibility seems to be a complex issue with many factors, and I was keeping it hypothetical, pointing out some potential issues with bacterial protein powder (which contains other bacterial components in addition to the bacterial protein).
Regarding the downstream processing, it appears to be minimal, with only “cell separation units” and “dryers” shown in this schematic for a proposed factory:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56364-1/figures/1
I won’t be eating any, any time soon. 🙂
What is the obsession with meat based protein anyway?
Fair enough if large scale cattle ranching is not good but………
There are plant based protein alternatives that are already proven. Why manufacturer studge instead?????
Venture capital funding and the enclosure of arable farmland to use for carbon credits by planting trees?
Yes. But I’m not sure that is Monbiot’s agenda.
The ” obsession ” is simple its easier to work against farmers / ranchers than take on industrial sized corporations with high paid lawyers and such plus cutting farm
emissions leaves more wriggle room for corporations to pollute .
I live in the transition area from grain growing to ranching , west of here grain will only grow with irrigation ,Getting rid of ranching will mean millions of square miles will be lost to food production, plus the US cattle heard is now lower than the number of buffalo that used to roam the west , nature abhors a vacuum , take the cattle away something will come to fill their place .
@Diogenese10
I don’t have any particular “beef” with cattle farming as such (sorry for the pun!! 🙂 ). I don’t choose to eat it myself but I don’t have a problem with others doing so.
The idea that beef protein needs to be replaced by studge protein rather than plant based protein, seems odd to me?
On Monbiot’s reluctance to engage, maybe that 16.7Kwh figure in Regenesis was simply an embarrassing typo that should have been 61.7Kwh all along, but nobody picked up on it.
It’s not a typo, George Monbiot derived his 16.7 kWh/kg number from a 10 kWh/kg figure which he claimed to be “Solar Foods’ current rate of electricity consumption”.
George Monbiot wrote this in Regenesis: “Solar Foods’ current rate of electricity consumption is 10kWh/kg bacterial mass. A protein content of 60% means 16.7 kWh/kg protein.”
Monbiot later defended this number on Twitter, claiming it was “a real world figure” that Solar Foods provided, not theoretical. He also said that his manuscript for Regenesis “was reviewed by some of the leading scientists in the field, and I had my arithmetic independently checked.”
When pressed by Chris to reveal more about his data source, George eventually specified a published paper as being the source of his number. Chris wrote this about it:
“So it turns out George’s figure isn’t a real world figure that the company provided, but from a published paper describing itself as a ‘quantitative literature review’, of whose twelve co-authors only two (the 10th and 11th listed) are associated with the company. The paper was based on literature values… It excludes various energy costs of the process, and the figure that George uses from it doesn’t even represent the full costs that the paper does specify. George wrote “Please do feel free to challenge my workings or point out any mistakes. I’m always happy to see figures improved”. I have challenged him several times since he revealed his data source, but he hasn’t to my knowledge responded or justified his figure.”
More details can be found in Chris’s “The Persisting Underestimation of Manufactured Bacterial Protein Energy Costs”, found in the Research and Publications section of this blog, linked at the top of this page.
https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-Persisting-Underestimation-of-Manufactured-Bacterial-Protein-Energy-Costs-new.pdf
Thanks Steve – it sall confirm that Regenesis is a lot worse than I suspected it to be.
Yet there’s still more breezy lab-grown protein content on The Guardian here:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/27/you-dont-need-animals-make-real-meat-man-who-grows-chicken-lab
You couldn’t make it up. Well, maybe you could.
Lab-grown meat seems like a new type of vaporware. There are lots of recent headlines such as “You’ll soon be able to feed your pet lab-grown meat”, but in that linked article published today, the company’s CEO admits that it’s still years away from being sold.
Today’s article also says that more lab work is still needed to get the production costs down:
“Our real breakthrough is to get this down to £1 per litre,” Ensor says. In addition, Meatly has gradually increased the yield of meat from a litre of medium from 2g to 10-15g. That’s far cheaper than a £215,000 burger but not the commercially viable pet food price it needs to achieve. More lab work is needed..”
Yes, literally vaporware… not decades away but merely years away.
Just making tomato and pepper soup listening to this on nano rather than cellular technology – seems sci-fi but plausible, sober and disconcertingly lucid, so Diogenes-like, I’m throwin’ out there (again):
https://dhughes.substack.com/p/interview-with-sarah-westall-july
Some big issues in that dhughes Substack (quoting below from the summary):
“~~~~~~~~~~~~
why “insiders” cannot be trusted to make a difference; the professions have all failed in their duty toward society; the key shift will come from mass non-compliance against all aspects of technocracy’;
the need for all of us to resist: totalitarianism comes for everyone in the end;
the role of conscience in resistance: totalitarianism is evil and depends on good people not standing up;
the role of propaganda in hiding technocratic agendas in plain sight;
…resisting learned helplessness and implementing solutions: ditch the smartphone; the importance of resistance at the local level; and the importance of looking inside ourselves to find whatever it is that we can do to help put down the global technocratic coup.
~~~~~~~~~~~~”
It ties in with this article recently published at Local Futures:
“First and foremost, a critic of the technosphere and its demands refuses to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations… Lastly, a resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things. Human communities, not machines or markets, should control what tools are adopted or rejected. In other words, resistance conserves what matters: the biosphere.”
https://www.localfutures.org/we-built-the-technosphere-now-we-must-resist-it/
Fun fact about PHB (a bioplastic having properties similar to polypropylene):
Instead of the usual way of making this bioplastic, by extracting it from the cells of hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria (requiring solvents and chemicals), some researchers found an easier way to produce PHB: just feed the dried bacteria to rats, and harvest the PHB from the rat feces. The rats produced fecal pellets that were white with a PHB content of 82-97%.
“Cupriavidus necator H16 (formerly known as Hydrogenomonas eutropha) was famous as a potential single cell protein (SCP) in the 1970s. The drawback however was the undesirably efficient accumulation of non-nutritive polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) storage compound in the cytoplasm of this bacterium. Eventually, competition from soy-based protein resulted in SCP not receiving much attention. Nevertheless, C. necator H16 remained in the limelight as a producer of PHB, which is a material that resembles commodity plastics such as polypropylene. PHB is a 100% biobased and biodegradable polyester. Although tremendous achievements have been attained in the past 3 decades in the efficient production of PHB, this bioplastic is still costly. One of the main problems has been the recovery of PHB from the cell cytoplasm. In this study, we showed for the first time that kilogram quantities of PHB can be easily recovered in the laboratory without the use of any solvents and chemicals, just by using the cells as SCP. In addition, the present study also demonstrated the safety and tolerability of animal model used, Sprague Dawley given lyophilized cells of C. necator H16. The test animals readily produced fecal pellets that were whitish in color, as would be expected of PHB granules. The pellets were determined to contain about 82-97 wt% PHB and possessed molecular mass of around 930 kg/mol. The PHB granules recovered biologically possessed similar molecular mass compared to chloroform extracted PHB [950 kg/mol].”
Revisiting the Single Cell Protein Application of Cupriavidus necator H16 and Recovering Bioplastic Granules Simultaneously
Kunasundari et al., 2013
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078528
(includes photos of the white pellets, in case you’re curious)
Interesting links – thanks Steve.
From minute 9 for 4 minutes, details from the UK of a new alt-protein research group being funded by the establishment to the tune of £38 million, with the aim of creating a national knowledge hub around novel protein production from plants, fungi, algae, insects and lab meat. Stated aims include connecting with consumers, increasing food security, economically sustainable protein production, reducing the GHG emissions associated with real meat, assuring producers the market is there, and messaging the public.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0022c4l
Chris – another angle you could use to criticize corporate manufactured food is how the food companies were bought up by Big Tobacco and they have made food addictive and unhealthy.
Tucker Carlson did an interview with Casey and Callie Means recently that outlines a lot of the outrages of our corporate food system and how it has harmed public health.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUH4Co2wE-I
Corporate controlled manufactured food does not have a good track record. Have ecomodernists considered this?
On the energy front , one of the the offshore wind generators farm near Nantucket lost a lost a blade in a storm , parts of that blade are washing up on the beach beaches are closed as the razor edged pieces of plastic are deemed dangerous , fishermen are upset as the detritus is cutting their nets and will kill
marine life if they ingest it .
Why even bother with manufactured foods ? There are simpler, cheaper, more resilient, even sustainable options that are readily available. Just about any legume and grain combination will provide the amino acids that are needed for making protein. Not to mention eggs and dairy.
The way it looks right now there isn’t any money to be made in studge production. Sparing nature and rewilding are not corporate or (venture) capitalist values. Neither is long term thinking. Greenwashing aside, why ?
@Greg Reynolds
On reflection, I kinda get the appeal of manufactured foods.
The idea that you could press a few buttons and any meal you want can be synthetically created by a machine, like in Star Trek, is kinda cool.
Being brought up on Star Trek and Dr Who, these ideas really appeal to me. A nostalgia for a time/childhood when anything was possible.
But……Star Trek is pure science fiction.
Teleportation is a cool narrative tool, but will never be a reality. (Who wants to be split into atoms and the reconstructed somewhere else anyway? What could possibly go wrong?)
Science Fiction Futures are far “sexier” than Small Farm ones, but will never happen. (Having said that, micro chips are pretty “out there”!)
Maybe the likes of Elon Musk have never really grown up?
I think it’s a whole chain of mistakes that goes something like:
1) humans are bad for The Environment/Nature, look, we’re Messing It All Up!
2) we can’t have Nice Things (anaesthetics, eyeglasses, insulin pumps, food security, rapid transport, computers…) without Messing It All Up, though
3) maybe we should try to only mess up about half of it, or two thirds, or something? and the other half will be able to compensate somehow?
4) we can do this by a) reducing the amount of farming going on (regardless of the type of farming or how harmful it is in whatever context), and b) finding methods other than farming to replace some of the more harmful agricultural practices
5) people will certainly pay money for something they are told is helping the environment, whether it actually is or not, especially if they think it means they don’t have to make other lifestyle changes which are harder
6) ?????
7) profit — for speculative land-purchasers, who get paid subsidies for “re-wilding” i.e. neglecting the land entirely, and also for the biotech companies who develop and patent the studge, and also for speculative land-purchasers in the areas where people are still allowed to live (less land = more demand for housing).
Key corrections to this:
1): the idea that truly wild spaces without human impact are some kind of ideal comes from a place of deep misanthropy and a refusal to recognise human beings as an interdependent part of nature rather than at odds with it or having some kind of right to extract from it for profit
2): “we can’t have nice things without Messing It All Up” is, at least partly, a bait-and-switch; food poverty doesn’t exist in today’s world because of insufficient production but because of poor distribution, and this is also true for insulin pumps, eyeglasses, and anaesthetics. Rapid long-distance transport, on the other hand, is probably not something we can all have and also all have what we need for a dignified life.
3) Re-wilding for the sake of “ecosystem services” is also a very anthropocentric view, and also we are vastly underestimating the amount of such compensation for our activities has already taken place (especially in the ocean, where most of us landlubbers already do not in fact live).
4) I’ll just be over in the corner, rolling my eyes. I don’t have to tell anyone here that not all farming is CAFO feedlot farming!
5) I mean, yes, people will pay more for greenwashed stuff, but we probably can’t consumerism our way out of this predicament, and trying to keeps people from taking more concrete and direct action that might actually help
6) I am not entirely sure what Monbiot thinks will happen here.
7) the profit isn’t in the studge, it’s in the land speculation.
That bit about land speculation is important! It doesn’t mean all landowners are studgemongers, but it *does* mean that all landowners with substantial acreage have a speculative interest in potentially receiving subsidies for “carbon offsets” or “rewilded habitat offsets” or some other thing that doesn’t involve being present, tending the land, and obtaining a yield sufficient for the needs of the people living there plus a little extra to put by for lean years or trade with others.
Yes, hear hear. Philip Loring’s book nicely articulates the failings of the “humans are bad for The Environment/Nature” point you make, from which much other mischief unfurls, as you point out.
Somebody on X a while ago insisted to me that “nature does best without us” – a comment that Monbiot liked, which I found interesting. I agree with you about the misanthropy of such thinking, not to mention the philosophical dubiousness. Loring emphasises the colonial and, in his view, white supremacist aspects of ‘pristine wilderness’ ideas. Various people I’ve spoken to in the food movement have expressed their concerns to me about the ‘white saviour’ implications of manufactured food & ecomodernism. This could be important ground to explore.
Chris – You really should read my first book, The Laws of Physics Are On My Side (2013). It is relatively easy to calculate the energy use of growing food, both consumption and embedded energy. Example: per David & Marcia Pimentel, the embedded energy of your tractor is about the same as the consumptive energy of the diesel fuel – within a 5% alpha. Therefore you can just double your fuel energy to get a real value for total energy. The embedded energy of a walk-behind tiller is about 3% of a tractor so one can discount it as within the 5% alpha and focus on just the consumption energy. Since it takes about as much fuel to till with a tractor per square foot (or meter) the walk-behind tiller is about twice as efficient as the tractor. Hence the soundbite: “If you are riding on it, it is not sustainable.” Another point is that measuring the energy provides an objective metric for sustainability.
I use kilocalories and kilojoules but they are readily convertible to kilowatt hours. The methodology and spreadsheets are easy to follow. It is available on Amazon in the UK, as well as Europe and the US. The other two books are Hints for Managing Collapse (2014) and Paradigms for Adaptation (2024). My background is the same as yours – sustainable market gardening and anthropology. The first book is about one-third analysis of the problem and two-thirds solutions. The second book is all solutions. The third book is how to create your own custom solutions.
@Walter Haugen
“Therefore you can just double your fuel energy to get a real value for total energy. ”
Is that total energy use for the lifetime of the tractor?
And is that calculated on the amount of tilling/area a tractor can do in its lifetime?
Your other books sound interesting. I will check them out.
“For example, David Pimentel estimated the energy needed to produce an acre of corn as 412,146 kilocalories for the machinery (including combines as well as tractors and other implements to till and cultivate) and 406,073 for the diesel to run the machinery. The embedded energy for the machinery was first calculated in total and then prorated over 10 years.” (Haugen, 2013:138-9)
Pimentel, David, et al. “Food Versus Biofuels: Environmental and Economic Costs,” Human Ecology, Vol. 37, No. 1, February 2009.
Walter, I bought and read your book ten years ago. I tried to figure out how much energy was used to smelt the steel in my grubbing hoe and how much land and crops were needed to just get the energy used in manufacture of a simple tool returned in food calories. When I started to figure the energy used for the steel in a rototiller and how much food was required to repay the energy debt I started to need years of production to catch up.
Just a request , could you please calculate how many food calories are required to pay back the energy used to smelt two pounds of steel , the weight of a heavy hoe.
I am thinking of knapping a chert blade for a grubbing hoe because I think that is where we end up
Bruce – Thanks for reading my book AND digesting the methodology of tracking energy use. Well done! Here is a useful link from one of the people I respect most, Kris De Decker.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/how-much-energy-does-it-take-on-average-to-produce-1-kilogram-of-the-following-materials/#:~:text=tech%20Magazine%20offline.-,How%20much%20energy%20does%20it%20take%20(on%20average)%20to%20produce,to%204%2C170%20watt%2Dhours).&text=Electronic%20grade%20silicon%20(CVD%20process,to%202%2C154%2C900%20watt%2Dhours).
As Kris notes, there is a range of values for the energy needed to make a kilogram of steel; 6-15 MJ (megajoules) for recycled steel and 20-50 MJ for steel from iron. Since there are 4184 joules in a kilocalorie, 6 MJ (6,000,000 joules) would be 1,434 kilocalories. This is 4 pounds of potatoes at 350 kcal/lb. One hour of work digging the soil, raking it, planting, weeding and harvesting potatoes yields about 5 lb of potatoes on average. If we add 125 kcal for an hour of human labor that brings the total to 1,559 kilocalories or 4.5 lb of potatoes. So you would get an EROI (energy return on investment) of 1.0 for your grub hoe in about an hour of growing potatoes. If you use the 50 MJ number, that is 8.3 times the potatoes needed to depreciate your grub hoe. Now, since your grub hoe will last for years and even decades without noticeable wear and tear except for filing the edge, the embedded energy is paid for after 1 hour at 6 MJ/kilogram or after 9 hours at 50 MJ per kilogram.
The idea of using a grub hoe for potatoes and other crops is a good one and I have done this in the past. I also grubbed out a 40 foot row of sunchokes on the edge of my garden two years ago and I don’t do anything with them except leave them for survival food in the future. (I have regular sunchokes to harvest in my main garden.) Back in Washington I had a Grecia Magna hoe which was a very good tool for this kind of thing. Now I am in France and I cannot get the Grecia Magna hoe (from Italy!) that I could get in the US. I use grub hoes that I picked up at “vide greniers” (French flea markets) and their embedded energy is already accounted for – or depreciated out – by their previous owners.
The chert blade is a good idea too. If you are anywhere near Glass Butte, Oregon, you can get obsidian there. This is more brittle than chert though. Good luck in all your efforts.
Thanks for the reply Walter and after many years since taking your energy calories to food calorie to heart it is good to meet you… happy gardening and high praises for a good grub hoe.
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/08/energy-shortage-fears-sink-googles-irish-data-centre-plans/
Not enough to run a new data
centre , Enough to run goop factories ?, I doubt it .
Kinda looks like the ” growing the economy ” is being kicked into touch by reality …..
@Diogenese10
Interesting article. Those tech companies want to plug into the existing energy infrastructure.
Why don’t they build their own powerplant alongside the chip factory?
Money, I guess. 🙂
Interesting concept……. Countries no longer trying to attract foreign companies because it will cause too much of a drain on shrinking energy supplies.
Thanks for comments. I’ve been offline for a couple of days – sorry if people have been having trouble posting comments.
Only time to engage briefly with a few points I’m afraid. I’m hoping to be a bit more back in the saddle soon.
1. Greg, Joe – how to move to a sustainable system? I have written quite a bit about this, but I don’t think there are many straightforward implementable solutions to worldwide systemic dysfunction. Indeed, solutionism is part of the problem. It would be easy to list a bunch of government policies that could bring a small farm future about, but futile I think – a peashooter against the heavy armour of the neoliberal/ecomodernist ‘you’ve never had it so good’/tech progress ideological status quo which will have little traction with received opinion. Though saying that, I think it would have more traction with ordinary people than with the gatekeepers of political and media power. Anyway, I see this as a longer-term matter of building ecological, cultural & spiritual orientations that might help people do a better job of steering through the crises to come. Generally, things change when people stop believing that the existing political dispensation offers them what it claims. I think we’re close to that in a lot of places. But the changes that happen in such circumstances can be troublesome.
Joe’s example of a Mars mission is an interesting one, in that it seems to me in some ways it’s the opposite of what’s needed. A Mars mission would be a high-capital, high-energy, quasi-military and quasi-colonial venture with specific organisational aims. Effectively, that’s exactly how the global political economy got to where it is now – no surprise that the ecomodernists talk about ‘moonshot’ investments in their favoured technologies to save our ass. We basically need the opposite – a low-capital, low-energy, deep reclamation of local community agency. Which makes it hard to specify in detail. The who, what, where, when and cost questions are going to be locally contextual, although no doubt with many common patterns. I’m interested in people’s examples. I’ve learned from many commenters on here over the years about theirs. And from books like Carwyn Graves’s ‘Tir’, and Philip Loring’s book mentioned above. But it remains an uphill struggle.
2. Kathryn mentions Hodmedod’s. Yes, a much more sensible model than bacterial protein powder. They identified a dearth of high-protein grain crops that could be grown locally. But overall I’m wary of the reductionism involved in focusing on ‘protein’ or similar. Livestock, for example, can’t be reduced to a source of protein, and neither can cereal or beans.
3. John, Steve, Kathryn & Simon all raise questions about what game Monbiot is playing. Beats me, it’s an absolute puzzle. John says that “Venture capital funding and the enclosure of arable farmland to use for carbon credits by planting trees” isn’t his agenda – which is probably true, but it might as well be. Monbiot’s unwillingness to clarify his energy data and respond to my critique of it baffles me.
4. Josh – thanks, might have a look at that. General essay question for commenters: “Tucker Carlson – discuss.”
5. Walter – thanks. I’ll add your books to my reading list.
…General essay question for commenters: “Tucker Carlson – discuss.”
Please don’t, unless it relates to a Small Farm Future.
I misspoke, it was an immediate visceral reaction to the imagined potential for a protracted, polarized, and unrelated political debate at this blog.
Chris mentioned in an earlier comment (above) “the gatekeepers of political and media power”. I think that the changes leading to a more localized future will require the political and media power to be diluted and spread around. So when somebody getting a lot of attention in the alternative media “outlines a lot of the outrages of our corporate food system and how it has harmed public health” as Josh described, for example, I think those efforts are commendable, even if I don’t particularly like some of the alternative media guy’s political leanings.
I previously quoted the dhughes Substack (thanks to Simon) about “the role of propaganda in hiding technocratic agendas in plain sight,” and “the need for all of us to resist: totalitarianism comes for everyone in the end”, which is related. While I agree about the importance of resisting totalitarianism, little steps in its direction may be obscured by the government and mainstream media, so props to the independent and alternative media.
Being familiar with multiple sides of an issue is further from totalitarianism than having only unified sources of similar propaganda. As critically thinking adults, we can separate out the wheat from the chaff, and determine our own takeaway if presented with competing narratives.
Thanks for your thanks, Steve! I’ve just started digging deeper into Professor Hughes’ work, and feel it well worth reaching the consideration of a wider audience as far as poss, hence… do check it out, please.
https://dhughes.substack.com/p/interview-with-wayne-rohde-august
Have a good weekend, all.
Tucker Carlson:
Too far right to be someone I pay much attention to, and I’m not going to look the guy up just to comment here, but being vocally anti-immigration is an automatic yuck from me. I also get the impression is that he has been kindof racist, in a white nationalist “great replacement” theory sort of way. If I’m wrong about either of those things then he needs better PR management, because those are the things that spring to mind when I think of him
I do think human migration is an important thing to consider deeply and carefully with regard to a small farm future, but I’m not going to have that conversation with anyone who operates by putting down one relatively powerless group of people to gain popularity in another. I’d far rather focus on our common humanity and work to transform the class and power relationships that are actually the cause of so much suffering.
He has put down the mighty from their seat : and exalted the humble and meek.
He has filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he has sent empty away.
(That’s God, not Tucker Carlson.)
(Apologies for the deleted and reposted comment, I managed to misquote the Magnificat in the first attempt…)
Well, I’m equally happy not to discuss Carlson. Don’t know much about him. Where this potentially relates to a small farm future is the strange political pivoting that’s happening, and that I’ve mentioned here before and in my ‘Doppelganger’ essay, where mainstream left-wing positions are increasingly aligning with corporate/capitalist solutionism and (dissident) right-wing positions are increasingly articulating critiques of it, but also articulating racism and a range of other problematic ideas. People on the left sometimes use the word ‘diagonalism’, but the diagonalism of the left itself is salient. Lots of potential for finger-pointing and guilt by association (the origins of organic farming are a frequently invoked case in point … but the ecomodernist left doesn’t talk about the skeletons in its own closet). Another interesting set of issues that could do with some airing (from those who want to…)
On the blurring of the boundaries/definitions of “left” and “right” in particular to farming, it’s always been complicated.
The Confederacy was all for an Agrarian based society and was starting to evolve an “aristocracy”. Built on the bedrock of Slavery and White Supremacy.
The Union was more inclined to go down the “tech” route and industrialise.
But both were exploitative in their own ways. Wage labour seen as one step removed from slavery.
The Corn Laws were also a tussle between two forms of power.
The mercantile/industrial against older aristocratic/Agrarian.
I see the right wing media as a tool of the powers that be. Quite happy to flip flop the narrative when it suits best.
It’s all divide and rule stuff.
I think left Vs right is often an unhelpful binary. When “left” encompasses everything from anarcho-communalism to totalitarian Stalinism and “right” encompasses everything from valuing freedom of expression to corporate capture of the state, white nationalism and fascism, we need more than one dimension. Insofar as this relates to my own comment on Tucker Carlson, perhaps I shouldn’t have categorised him as “too far right” for me — but I stand by my comment that if he isn’t actually a white nationalist he probably needs to manage his reputation much differently.
As for the emergence of racist and white nationalist politicians, I think John is correct that there’s some divide and rule going on, and I think my point about putting down one group of people to curry favour with another is salient. Mainstream media is absolutely implicated in this (compared how many times Nigel Farage has been on Question Time or whatever to how many times Caroline Lucas has), and so part of a good response — both to far right populism and to authoritarianism on the so-called left — needs to be in the realm of cultural change.
Relatedly, probably the best article I’ve read about the recent race riots in the UK is this one:
https://myblackface.wordpress.com/2024/08/08/riots-cartwheels-and-brains-interrupted/
A thread on X from George Monbiot & a counter-thread from me, that may interest some here who inexplicably fail to keep up with all the latest controversies on that platform (Elon Musk … discuss!)
George:
1. Whenever I write about new fermentation technologies, that could greatly reduce the environmental impacts of our diets as well as the exploitation of animals, I run into the same set of objections. In this thread, I’ll take them one by one.
2. A. “I don’t want to eat food from factories”.
Well that’s unfortunate, because almost everything you eat has passed through at least one factory before it reaches you. Even your fruit and veg are likely to have been through a grading and packing plant. Cont/
3. The meat you eat has passed through a long series of factories: the mills producing the feed, the industrial buildings in which the vast majority of farmed animals are kept, slaughterhouses, packing plants and warehouses. Cont/
4. And yes, most of that also applies to “pasture-fed” meat, most of which uses supplementary feed, is finished intensively and slaughtered and packed by the usual means. (It also has an even bigger environmental impact than factory animal farming https://theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
).
5. B. “I don’t want to eat microbes”.
No bread, beer, wine, tea or olives for you then.
“I mean bacteria – I don’t want to eat bacteria!”.
So kiss goodbye to cheese, yoghurt, anchovies and cured meats.
In fact, everything you eat is full of them.
6. C. “I don’t want to eat ultra-processed food”.
Nor should you. But what precision fermentation produces is a high-protein flour. Like any other flour, it can be used to make good food or bad food. It is no more or less susceptible to junk food manufacture than wheat flour is.
7. D. “These microbes are often genetically modified”.
They are. There are major problems with certain GM crops, such as Roundup Ready maize, whose main purpose was to enlarge the market for a proprietary herbicide, and the dominance of the company that produced it. Cont/
8. But GM microbes have been used uncontroversially in precision fermentation since the 1970s to produce insulin, the rennet substitute chymosin, enzymes and vitamins. You eat the products most days. Cont/
9. There’s a real genetic contamination crisis in the food industry, but it comes from business as usual: antibiotic resistance genes moving from livestock slurry tanks into the food chain. GM microbes paradoxically offer our best hope of stopping genetic contamination.
10. E. “What if corporations capture these technolgies?”
This is an entirely reasonable objection. The risk is real and we should engage with it, demanding a new food economy that differs radically from the existing one, where extreme consolidation has already taken place. Cont/
11. But this is not an argument against the technology itself, any more than the dangerous concentration in the global grain trade (90% of it in the hands of four corporations) is an argument against trading grain, without which billions would starve. Cont/
12. We need to address corporate capture and control everywhere. Anti-trust laws should be strong, intellectual property rights should be weak. This requires political action. It does not require the abandonment of useful technologies.
13. Did I say useful? I’ve come to see new fermentation approaches as the most important environmental techs ever developed: the only means I can see of reversing the expansion of one of the two most destructive industries on Earth, livestock farming.
My response:
Some counterarguments to
@GeorgeMonbiot’s 13 tweets with which he tries to combat concerns about the ‘new fermentation technologies’ underlying the latest form of alt-meat products
1. But first the key problem he didn’t mention. These products are vast consumers of precious generated electricity. George has claimed they use ~17kWh/kg protein. The real figure is well over 60kWh/kg – ie. untenable as a sustainable mass food.
2. George says people object to food from factories but argues almost all food ‘has passed through’ a factory. Yet there’s a difference between processing plants – scaled up versions of farmhouse tech – that food ‘passes through’ & factories that actually synthesize food
3. Ditto with ‘the meat you eat’. The meat many poor pastoralist peoples eat never goes near a factory. ‘Factory good, meat bad’ narratives put them at risk. George seems to have abandoned his take in ‘No Man’s Land’ on the pro-nature & social character of trad pastoralism. Why?
4. The debate about pasture-fed ruminants is a bottomless pit, but George’s arguments about its environmental inferiority to factory farming have to be taken with a shovelful of salt. Here’s one among many counterarguments: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/more-extreme-claims-from-george-monbiot-the-sustainable-food-trust-responds/
5. In relation to ‘eating microbes’, there’s a big difference between long-established plant-based foods that are acted on by tiny amounts of microbes, like bread, and some of the novel foods George is advocating comprising dead bacterial biomass…
6. …especially when the bacteria produce various endotoxins, nucleic acids, biopolymers and suchlike that have to be removed or reduced before safe human consumption. Whether to call the final product ‘ultra processed food’ or ‘flour’ is perhaps a matter of opinion
7. People no doubt have different views about GM tech, but George is right that historically a lot of it has been geared to market monopolization by biotech companies. He doesn’t explain how bacterial protein powder manufacture will avoid vertical & horizontal market integration
8. Yes GM has been used to make various food & pharmaceutical inputs for a long time (different microbes, different issues) – but not mass food, which prompts questions as to why. One issue is large-batch contamination. See for e.g. this from Jim Thomas: https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20310-the-many-problems-with-george-monbiot-s-bullish-backing-for-biotech-brewed-bacterial-banquets
9. George is right about the problem of antibiotic resistance in intensive livestock ag, driven by competition for low food prices (which he favours). But he offers no evidence to support his notion that GM microbes are our best hope of preventing such problems
10. George says we should demand a new food economy to replace the old one of extreme consolidation. Not as extreme as manufacturing industry. Compare the no. of bean growers worldwide & the likely no. of alt-meat companies. Manufactured food is a gift to corporate monopolization
11. There is a greater inherent potential to create producer monopolies with manufactured microbial food than with farmed food – hence, potential for corporatization IS an argument against the technology itself
12. George argues for a politics of strong anti-trust laws to prevent corporate capture. How well has that been working in the present global economy? Tinkering with government policy & tech solutionism is another version of BAU
13. George gives no evidence for his view that bacterial protein powder will displace the demand for meat. Existing plant/fungal alt-meats like Quorn & soy-based products haven’t done so. Why is it likely that bacterial alternatives, probably at higher cost, will be different?
Thanks for this.
I’m not going to try to argue too hard with George (if he’s not listening to you he’s really not listening to me and life is far too short) but his assertion about most of my food coming from factories is plainly false. I read it while eating a pear I picked from the tree myself and planning a potato and bean salad. It is true that the spaghetti I ate last night was made in a factory, but I can make pasta at home and have done so in the past (and will again in future, just not at the time of year that there are apples covering most of the kitchen surfaces). Granted, I’m not everyone, or even average. But the limit that currently prevents me from even more self-provisioning is simply a lack of storage space, which is very much an issue that arises out of living in a context where people are compelled to earn money to pay for things, and in order to do so are displaced from non-financialised economic relationships. Just because we do have industrial food systems doesn’t mean we should have them and just because they have some advantages in some contexts (yes, I think it is actually good for a community to store enough grain to get through a famine) does not mean they are benign. And anyway, where does he think food came from before the industrial revolution and factories?
As far as I can tell his logic is something like:
1) industrialised food systems are everywhere and they are inescapable because economies of scale make the food cheaper and then fewer people starve
2) industrialised food systems are very bad for the environment
3) therefore we should switch to different, even more industrialised food systems, to protect the environment while also not starving
Problems:
1) is mostly a lie. Scratch the economies of scale and after a certain point you get economies of exploitation for the sake of extraction: of labour, of fossil energy, of “ecosystem services”. Take away or compensate properly for the extraction and exploitation, and there’s no economy of scale to having four companies in charge of some ridiculous percentage of grain in the world. Instead, I suspect almost everything we eat today could be produced *more* efficiently on a community or household scale (depending on the items in question; a trout is probably household scale, with some communal management of the stream, grains and pastures are probably community scale, apples might be either depending on whether you’re dealing with one tree that has three varieties grafted onto it, or a hundred trees in an orchard). The only reason food produced this way isn’t cheaper in monetary terms than industrialised food is that with industrialised food we don’t pay workers properly and we don’t pay for the costs of damage from burning literal fossils (never mind the opportunity cost risks inherent in using up a one-off resource).
2) Yes, very good, we agree here.
3) …I think I can only demonstrate the problem here by analogy, so here’s one: If I have a problem with eyestrain from spending too much time on the computer, I probably can’t fix it by resolving to computer harder, not even if this newfangled computer is different and designed with a screen that is said not to strain the eyes as much. At some point, I will instead need to go outside and look at things that are far away. I will need to ask what all this computering is in aid of in the first place and find other ways to meet those needs.
I would like to think that Monbiot understands the problems inherent in 1) and the bait-and-switch of economies of scale Vs economies of exploitation, but if so, he’s certainly willing to pretend he doesn’t for the sake of appearing to be right about 3).
What a condescending so-and-so. I’m going to eat another pear.
Further, I’ve just realised Monbiot co-authored a book with Peter Hutchinson released in May 2024 called “The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life)”.
This seems rather at odds with his willingness to promote food production technology which fits very well into neoliberal models.
Protein is a fairly straightforward issue.
What about all the fats and micronutrients in meat?
Iron, B12 etc
What happens to replace these?
@John Boxall
Indeed.
Meat is a difficult thing to replicate in a lab.
Texture alone isn’t enough!!!!
“What about all the fats and micronutrients in meat?
Iron, B12 etc”
Plants can do all that and they take their energy direct from the sun.
Seems obvious or am I missing something with lab meat????
Perhaps added to the costs of fake meat should be the cost of manufacturing the vitamins and minerals that are not in the goop . Over a century ago grain millers were ordered by the government to replace vitamins and minerals that were removed in the processing of grain , people were getting rickets because the mills had found a new and more profitable market for the vitamin D , that law is still in effect .
Animal feed mills know exactly what each breed of animals needs what in the compounded feed for maximum growth and returns , you can guarantee that goop factories will do the same , ration out what you get for the maximum productivity of the peasants .
A few follow ups on new comments:
Agree with John A on the hypocrisy of the southern agrarians – an example of what I called ‘front parlour republicanism’ in A Small Farm Future. The uncomfortable thing is the way that similar, if less stark, hypocrisies attend most attempts to step outside the Mordor economy.
While I agree that there’s a divide & rule game within the right-wing media, I think it’s a mistake to conflate all right-wing positions together as cynical attempts to smokescreen the status quo. There are genuine conservative critiques of neoliberalism, which I find interesting. Meanwhile, I find the increasing connivance of much of the mainstream left with business as usual neoliberalism increasingly problematic, and another version of divide and rule, wittingly or otherwise. Monbiot’s points 10 & 12 exemplify it. We should demand a new food economy. Anti-trust laws should be strong. Bless.
Wise words from Steve & Kathryn respectively on the lessons from Carlson & Monbiot – thanks. And thanks for the riot blog Kathryn – it was very funny, in a sad kind of way.
Thanks also for the discussion of supplying essential micro-nutrients in alt-meats. Diogenes touches on a point that I’ve sometimes pondered. Animal feed is carefully formulated to be super-nutritious because the profit motive dictates it. Not so for human food, where humans are supposedly ends in themselves. An economic system driven by the profit motive is quite likely to produce unhealthy but tempting food, and a high-cost medical/pharmaceutical industry to deal with the consequences. Here in the UK, the government only really cared about good population-level nutrition in times of war, and set up good public health policies around it at those times.
As I have said elsewhere the highly processed ” food ” runs in lockstep with obesity and the increase in diabetes .
Kinda on the subject , in Virginia it can take up to 7 years to get a data center hooked up to the grid .
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/data-centers-spy-country-northern-virginia-face-seven-year-hookup-wait
On the subject of Monbiot regulation of goop , it don’t work !
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/more-half-commercial-baby-foods-are-unhealthy
How long baby food has been in existence / regulated I have no idea but they still ain’t got it right .
The amazing thing is that you can feed humans crap and they still manage to overcome the deficiencies ….. I suppose manufacturers rely on human resilience .
@Diogenese10
Hmmmm. Why does your linked article not surprise me?
I guess ultimately, convenience is preferred over health.
$
Funny story time!
My parents thought store-bought baby food was expensive and full of added sugar and salt (and in the early 1980s it probably was) so they made all my baby food. Often they’d just chuck some of whatever they were having in the blender, but sometimes my father would find something on sale, buy a bunch of it, cook it, purée it, and then freeze it in ice cube trays, presumably to avoid having to wash the blender after every single meal, or for ease of visiting grandparents, or whatever. (They didn’t have a microwave, but an ice cube melts pretty fast in a small saucepan on the stove.)
I believe it was after Christmas that my father found some small turkeys at the grocery store, greatly reduced in price now that the holiday period was over with. So he duly bought three of them, took them home, roasted them, puréed them, and froze them. All in all there was 27 pounds of puréed turkey.
Puréed turkey turned out to be the very first food I absolutely refused to eat.
Off-topic but readers here might be interested in this piece on rocket mass heaters:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thelastfarm/p/why-we-should-burn-wood-for-heat
The comparison to heat pumps is particularly apt.
I still want a rocket mass heater for the allotment shed but I think the committee would have kittens.
Yeah agree with you Kathryn. Biomass ultimately a lot easier to maintain and potentially more sustainable than heat pumps. But it’s a lot less resilient in the face of user error (wrong fuel, bad design, etc). With all these technologies I think it’s worth considering sub-ideal conditions along with ideal conditions.
Regarding rocket mass heaters there’s diversity of opinion. I know some of the folks at Living Energy Farm don’t like them, but I can’t remember why.
I’ve heard masonry heaters like that used to be common in rural German households are quite efficient, but more difficult to DIY https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/12/sunbathing-in-the-living-room-oven-stoves-and-heat-walls/
It’s true that rocket mass heaters that are improperly installed or used incorrectly can be dangerous. The same is true of anything that uses combustion.
However, we tolerate the consequences of “user error” with things like letting humans drive two tonnes of metal around at 50mph with a fire and electricity inside, or having oil furnaces or gas boilers inside homes, or indeed home ovens, hobs and fireplaces existing at all. Yes, you need to use fuel of the correct size and that has been dried properly; yes, you definitely need to construct the thing safely in the first place. But these are skills that absolutely can be learned, just as I have learned how to forage for wild mushrooms in London parks: being sensible and taking the risks seriously, without being unduly afraid of them.
Living Energy Farms is, if I recall correctly, in or near Louisa, VA. I’m sure you can do a lot more with solar in winter at 38°N than you can where I live (51.5°N, and I really live in the southern part of the country), to the point that passive solar probably makes a lot more sense there than here. It likely isn’t worth the bother of a rocket mass heater somewhere that you don’t need supplementary heat in the first place. But that’s really a matter of the right tool and the right behaviour for the context. Similarly, I don’t forage for seaweed, even though it’s very safe compared to the fungal world: I don’t live all that near the coast, and day trips that end with carrying wet seaweed home in overcrowded trains seem unappealing, as well as prohibitively expensive.
Yes I agree with you, skills can defo be learned and we tolerate user error elsewhere (altho it’s so often used as a reason to get people to do less themselves). Really good point about LEF being further south, makes sense they place a high emphasis on solar.
@Kathryn
One day I’ll pluck up the courage to make a rocket stove mass heater.
You might like one of these for the allotment shed? Bit easier to make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBJIdW8hS1I
On coppicing…… another advantage to it as a fuel in conjunction with a rocket stove, is that it’s a lot easier to process than cutting, chopping, splitting, carrying and storing logs.
A small hand axe is all you need.
From past comments he’s made, Alexis at Living Energy Farms seems very wary of fire and especially open flames, so favours and promotes passive solar heating and batteries/LED bulbs over fireplaces and candlelight.
Back to Diogenese’s point about flour having to have the nutrition lost through modern milling techniques reintroduced in the form of various additives (by law), it seems that the well-known health-promoting goodness of consuming ‘whole foods’ (i.e. “bread wi’ nowt’ taken out,” among other things) is being completely ignored in the rush to synthesise novel food stuff. Where’s the wisdom in that? (he asked rhetorically).
At 38°N they could just go to bed when it gets dark!
I do love my LED headlamp for lighting, it’s certainly safer than a candle. But something that I cook breakfast on which then warms the house for a few hours doesn’t strike me as particularly worse than my existing gas hob. For sure it’s not a good idea with a baggy polyester fleece dressing gown on, but I don’t wear a baggy polyester fleece dressing gown.
When I lived in a bedsit that had a gas cooker but only a very poor electric heater that absolutely ate electricity, I figured out I could fill my big stock pot with water, bring it to the boil, turn the hob off, and then sit in front of the cooker for the evening until it was time for bed and it kept me warm enough without costing quite so much. It would definitely have been better to use a hot water bottle instead but in the first few weeks I was there I didn’t have one, or a kettle for that matter. It was a very happy day when I found a perfectly good stovetop steel kettle in a skip! I still have it, it makes a noise like a train when it boils. (Now I also have a wonderful 3L steel yutanpo — it looks like some kind of giant woodlouse but stays warm for ages and ages and I will probably have it for decades.)
The issue isn’t so much “easy to make” as “allotment committee will be quite irate if I have a chimney on my shed”. I’m certainly not willing to use one in an unventilated space.
The gas tank design is cute, but as a non-welder I was thinking of something more like a metal box I can bolt together.
John, going back to your PV panel pondering, I just came across this comment from an article on Resilience:
“As large-scale atmospheric flows slow during climate breakdown, heatwaves will be ramping up rapidly. This will be an important issue because semiconductor heterojunctions in solar cells are well-understood to stop working above certain temperatures. I already run mine under shadecloth to minimize the buildup of junction-diffusion-related damage, extending their lifetime. Although extending their lifetimes is wise, it is, ultimately, not a solution since these are among the highest-tech items ever built by mankind, and so unlikely to survive a large-scale breakdown in the food supply.”
It’s from this piece:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-07-19/what-is-causing-record-shattering-heat/
@Simon H
Thanks for the link.
Yes, I guess, in a SFF, when the PV panels are gone, they are gone.
My PV panels are connected to the “grid” and just export energy when they are generating a surplus. So always in use.
But, in the future, when the “grid” fails, I’m thinking of using the panels on a DC system for lighting and possibly a fridge/freezer, batteries etc.
I was wondering if covering the panels when not in use (fully charged batteries) would increase the panel life?
Probably have to remove them from the roof though, for it to be practical.
I’ve been thinking about Mr Monbiot’s comments on X.
1) Does he ever wonder about the reasons people’s reasons for objecting to studge ? Casting them as ignorant or acting bad faith seems a little hysterical, a bit like George does not believe his own propaganda.
The complex system needed to meet a basic need aside, has he considered the environmental impact of building and maintaining such a system ? It looks very energy intensive. We know the environmental impact of current consumption. How much does it reduce energy consumption ?
2-4) A head of broccoli going in one side of the packing shed looks exactly like a head of broccoli coming out at the end of the line. It is easy to see how a cow walking onto a kill floor becomes meat. Not so much with electricity and bacteria. Referring to his own article, his own opinions and selected partial truths are not convincing.
5-8) Boil down to “I don’t care what you want to eat. Eat this novel protein.’
9) No downside to manufactured or ultraprocessed food is considered.
10-13) Does this mean that there will be home scale fermentation set ups ? Will every town of 5000 people have a local, independent plant to produce a million pounds of fake meat (per year) ? What does it take to get that done ?
He can’t be oblivious to these kinds of considerations.
Greg wrote: “A head of broccoli going in one side of the packing shed looks exactly like a head of broccoli coming out at the end of the line. It is easy to see how a cow walking onto a kill floor becomes meat. Not so much with electricity and bacteria.”
Yes, and the factory needs ammonia and mineral inputs for the bacteria, along with those crazy amounts of electricity. The same 65 kWh (est.) of electricity consumed to make only *one* kilogram of protein could instead be sent to another factory to make around 15-30 kilograms of recycled steel, or 4-10 kilograms of steel from iron (calculated using numbers from Walter’s comment above for “the energy needed to make a kilogram of steel; 6-15 MJ (megajoules) for recycled steel and 20-50 MJ for steel from iron”).
George calls it “flour” but what comes out of the factory is yellow-brown powder with a smell which reminded the article’s author of “dried dirt on a sunny day” (in the article linked by Chris above). That seems about right, since it might arguably be called “dried sludge powder”.
A potential argument for calling it “dried sludge powder”:
Regarding the process for making bacterial protein powder (from hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria), some related papers have describe the output of the bioreactors, before separating out the water and drying the microbial cell mass (remember those three words), as a “slurry”. At some point in the process, the slurry presumably becomes sludge (as defined by Wikipedia) before becoming a fully dried powder.
Wikipedia says “sludge is a semi-solid slurry that can be produced from a range of industrial processes”.
The three words “microbial cell mass” are also used in the following description of another type of sludge, of human origin:
“…the microbial cell mass settles to the bottom and is removed. This mainly organic material is called secondary sludge.”
https://extension.psu.edu/what-is-sewage-sludge-and-what-can-be-done-with-it
The more-complete quote from Wikipedia’s page on “Sludge”:
“Sludge is a semi-solid slurry that can be produced from a range of industrial processes…The term is also sometimes used as a generic term for solids separated from suspension in a liquid; this soupy material usually contains significant quantities of interstitial water (between the solid particles).”
” Does this mean that there will be home scale fermentation set ups ? Will every town of 5000 people have a local,”
That reminds me of chairman Mao demanding villages produce their own iron , A catastrophic disaster for the villagers !
In related news, a press release announced yesterday that Solar Foods has concluded that Solein is “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) for its intended use. “Obtaining self-affirmed GRAS status is the first step towards entering the United States. We will shortly be able to launch commercial activities in this significant new market, including marketing and sales operations, and drive our growth.”
You might be wondering what’s a “self-affirmed” GRAS status, and why the manufacturer is allowed to determine the safety status of its novel food product in the US, instead of the FDA making that determination?
“By 1997 FDA had tentatively concluded that it could no longer devote substantial resources to the GRAS affirmation petition process. The agency published a proposed rule outlining a GRAS notification process to replace the resource-intensive GRAS affirmation petition process… The GRAS notification program provides a voluntary mechanism whereby a person may inform FDA of a determination that the use of a substance is GRAS, rather than petition FDA to affirm that the use of a substance is GRAS… FDA then evaluates whether the submitted notice provides a sufficient basis for a GRAS determination and whether information in the notice, or otherwise available to FDA, raises issues that lead the agency to question whether use of the substance is GRAS.”
https://www.fda.gov/food/generally-recognized-safe-gras/how-us-fdas-gras-notification-program-works
Probably what’s known in the industry as a coup de GRAS.
The precautionary principle is largely unknown here. Sometimes it seems like people are being sacrificed on the altar of the God of Progress.
Back to manufactured food…
It doesn’t seem reasonable that a couple studies funded directly by the manufacturer (in-vitro and a 90-day rat study) could be sufficient testing for determining that this novel food is Generally Regarded as Safe for human consumption. Shouldn’t it be scientifically tested on actual humans first (over a longer period, and looking at more potential problems, including the effects of the PHB content of bacterial protein powder) before being able to make such a determination?
The 90-day rat study on Solein had these interesting results regarding testosterone reductions in the male rats: “A possible trend was observed for mean TST [testosterone] reductions relative to the vehicle-control in males (-41% at the low dose and -62% at the high dose)…” [The vehicle-control refers to the control group which was force-fed doses of water (the vehicle) instead of being force-fed doses of a Solein and water mixture.]
The closing sentence of the rat-study’s conclusion actually says “future studies should be conducted”:
“Considering the absence of signs of toxicity presented in this study, Solein® is a potentially viable alternative protein source and future studies should be conducted to contribute to its safety profile.”
Choi, B., Glávits, R., Murbach, T. S., Endres, J. R., Hirka, G., & Szakonyiné, I. P. (2024). 90-day oral toxicity study in rats of a protein-rich powder derived from Xanthobacter sp. SoF1. Journal of Applied Toxicology, 1–15.
https://doi.org/10.1002/jat.4663
Absolutely, we need better testing and a different mind set. It doesn’t seem reasonable that a product that doesn’t kill half the rats in 90 days is deemed safe. Any changes in 90 days should be enough reason to ban the product. Ninety days is not that long, even for a rat.
Almost all new products and chemicals are tested that way. And never tested in combination with other products that are are used or consumed with.
Human testing is a little trickier…
Some alternative proteins (including Solein) present an ethical dilemma for serious vegans. Stick with plant-based foods, or eat novel foods which have been tested on animals?
It looks like Solein is now disqualified from ever getting the “Not Tested on Animals” certification which could be important to vegans like George Monbiot (the testing involved rats being fed Solein before being “sacrificed”.)
In fact, novel foods such as Solein which have been tested on animals are *ineligible* for Vegan certification by Vegan Action (“certified products are identified by the Certified Vegan logo with a letter V inside a heart”) and The Vegan Society (“products with the Vegan Trademark sunflower growing from a letter V”), according to this article:
https://earth911.com/how-and-buy/vegan-and-cruelty-free-certifications/
The cynical side of me predicts that the industry will back the creation of a new certifier, or a new type of certification, which allows the vegan certification of novel foods like Solein. In the meantime, it could be argued that you can’t eat food with Solein content if you want to stay vegan.
Thanks for the further comments, all read with interest. I’m probably going to be mostly offline for the next couple of weeks, but I hope to be back here with new posts starting toward the end of the month. Feel free to keep the discussion going in the meantime!
A question I have about a fossil-free future:
Just how difficult is it to make bladed tools from the vast amounts of metal we have already mined and smelted? My impression is that the iron age saw some deforestation just for the charcoal, and that if we’re talking bronze age technology, well, we’ve already mined most of the easy copper and tin (and the hard-to-get stuff is even harder to get without aforementioned fossil fuels).
On the other hand we have vast piles of scrap steel currently driving around on both urban and rural roads, and when those run out the metals in landfill sites, while nasty to retrieve due to various forms of contamination, probably won’t be any worse than mining.
My own instinct is along the lines of “if we’re still here in a thousand years we’ll still have metal hand tools and even things like ploughs that can be drawn by horses, but they’ll be very much more expensive than they are now”.
Shorter term, if we move away from fossil fueled farming in the next century (as surely we must), I could see things like spades and forks becoming more difficult to get hold of, as production costs for them rise exponentially just as many more people are suddenly getting into growing food on a small scale.
I’ve been thinking recently about “minimum viable gardening equipment” for a few reasons (mostly, growing on five different sites, some of which are several miles from one another, but also in terms of which tools I use the most and which I would recommend to new gardeners). So in more practical terms: if readers of this blog could choose only five metal tools to use for growing food, what would they be and why?
Katherine, 1) grub hoe 2) heavy rake for smoothing dirt 3) springy rake for acorns 4) long handled loppers 5) a big dustpan for acorns
I used to use a shovel in my youth but I prefer surface compost and time these days. Shane Simonsen has a new post about how we might try to avoid steel altogether.
Walter Haugen’s work on embedded energy combined with my interest in building soil fertility by hand means most crops would require a legume cover crop to be included in EROI considerations. Kinda like doubling the work required for that crop of potatoes. Hauling lots of compost or manure by hand, even with a handy little wagon , gets pretty taxing when gardening an acre or two. It may sound counterintuitive that repeatedly incorporating legume cover crops with a grub hose is easier than hauling tons of compost around but at scale it feels that way to me.
I started a substack ,steeleb.substack Shane encouraged me.
Nice choices! Though the best springy rake I ever used was a bamboo one my mother had when I was a child.
Shane’s post partly inspired my thoughts on the matter, I meant to mention it but was off on a tangent again.
Nice substack — see you around. I’ve been thinking about a “no food shopping” challenge for a while, but it’s considerably harder to do without livestock.
Steel rusts , car bodies would disappear in 50 years or so , truck chassis may last a couple of centuries before they are a stain in the soil , the problem is that there is no iron ore deposits that are easy to get , massive open cast mines diving poor grade ore .
As an example Morwelham in Devon closed its copper mines when the ore had less than 5% copper around 1890 ish , today they are digging copper ore at 2% , so without large quantities of diesel mining comes to a halt .
Stainless steel will last longer but how long is the question , cast iron lasts well but is brittle .
Long term view is full medieval with wooden spades and ploughs .
If you could only choose five metal garden tools, which would you choose and why?
Chiming in late on the minimalism kick, I was once told from someone who studied somewhere in Africa that the only tool used by one tribe she worked with was akin to a machete – pruning, hacking holes in the dirt to plant trees, splitting wood, you name it. It’s also a very simple tool, when you think about it, though I don’t have one myself. It would also be handy to wield against any physical danger, being more fearsome than a frying pan, say. I could see it working well in a setting of natural exuberance. Kathryn’s comment re. one set of bed sheets got me thinking along these lines, and as with one of anything useful, it might pay to get a spare, though I guess this is where my pseudo poverty porn noodling gives way to serious preppin’.
@Kathryn
Interesting concept.
Hmm.
Let’s see. (Perhaps not totally relevant to gardening but….)
I’d try and go “no till” so…
1. Hand Axe or hatchet.
2. Austrian Scythe. (Probably with a short fat blade for general “hacking back” rather than for cutting vast fields of wheat)
3. Peening tools for Scythe.
4. Biochar retort with processing grill/grate
5. Shovel.
(Rakes can be made of wood)
I think there is plenty of steel about to last a few generations and can be beaten into shape without the need of wood/charcoal.
https://sciencenordic.com/denmark-greenland-inuit/greenlands-iron-age-came-from-space/1412749
Good choices — though in my experience there are some crops for which tillage really does help considerably (potatoes, in particular, you’re either going to have to dig or you’re going to have to grow them in pots).
@Kathryn.
I’ve got zero experience of growing spuds. Can they be grown in piles of compost on top of the ground?
I’ve seen videos of vertical potato growers. Had a friend who tried it with mixed results.
@John
Regarding spuds: yes, you can grow them in piles of compost on top of the ground, but you’ll need a bigger pile of compost than you think, and you may need to top it up to stop the tubers getting exposed to the light and turning green. Some people also grow them using the “Ruth Stout” method of laying huge amounts of straw on the ground, with the potatoes underneath, but my impression is that this is only really viable if you have a very high number of predators locally, otherwise the voles thank you for all the lovely bedding that has tasty food hidden inside. The straw can also keep the ground colder in the spring (it’s insulative, but also light in colour, so the early sun won’t warm that ground as much), delaying the start of growing — whether this is a feature or a bug kindof depends on what happens with frost.
Vertical growing in potato towers or stacks depends a bit on the type of potato, I think: like tomatoes, they come in “determinate” and “indeterminate” varieties. The indeterminate ones are more likely to do the thing where they make potatoes all the way up. But finding out which variety is which seems to be non-trivial, there are a few lists online but nothing definitive — and of course there are hundreds of varieties. After mixed results (sometimes I had impressive yield, and sometimes… not), I’ve largely given up on this method.
There is also the “lazy bed” system where you plant the potatoes in raised rows that go up and down the slope of a hill (perpendicular to where the contour lines would be). This means that frost tends to settle in the little valleys between the rows, rather than on the plants, and it also means that heavy rainfall runs down the hill instead of over-soaking the plants. I haven’t tried this, largely because I don’t hvae a suitable slope; and while the Near Allotment is in a frost pocket so we are prone to frosts right up to the end of May, the growing season is still plenty long enough to have lots of potatoes to eat.
My current preferred method for potatoes is to grow them in 35L pots, which I can move around if I need to, but this is partly related to having found 64 plant pot trays and several pots of the appropriate size in a skip the other year and eventually settling on potatoes as the most sensible thing to grow in them (and eating the one-off cost of purchasing some more pots, after trying much cheaper options like re-used coffee sacks and finding them wanting).
@Kathryn
Thanks for the spud growing tips.
Might give them a go. I think the pot system would suit me best.
@Kathryn
Following on from your 5 garden tools question.
How about your 5 household electrical appliances?
It depends on the context…!
If a computer counts as a household appliance, then:
1) router/modem
2) computer or smartphone (I probably don’t really need both)
3) instant pot
4) oven
5) indoor lighting
We have a gas hob, but if that weren’t available I would consider cooking on wood instead, and in that case I might want an electric kettle. The Instant Pot model I have can also be used as a pressure canner and a slow cooker, or just to boil water, but it has the issue that you can only really do one thing in it at a time.
If I’m not allowed the computer, or if nobody else has one anyway, then it looks more like:
1) instant pot
2) oven
3) indoor lighting
4) washing machine
5) electric toothbrush — I actually think these are kindof terrible, but mine does mean better oral health with less effort, and I’d quite like to keep my own teeth for as long as possible, so.
The only one of these things that I haven’t lived without for at least two months at some point in my life is the indoor lighting.
Something I have not had, and think I woudl like, is some kind of stand mixer/food processor doohickey that can chop things. My knife skills aren’t too bad and my knife is pretty sharp but when you’re processing kilos and kilos of, say, apples or potatoes, chopping is definitely a bottleneck. However I have absolutely nowhere in my current kitchen to store such a thing. Ho hum.
@kathryn
Never heard of an instant pot before???? Curious.
OK. Let me refine the question.
If the “grid” fails but you have a PV/battery/DC system, what would you prioritise as your 5 most useful electric gizmos.
Your answers probably would still be the same I guess.
Washing machine is an interesting one. Not something I have considered. It’s probably my favourite household appliance. Such a time saver.
In a “no grid” scenario the sewage and water supplies would fail. But I guess you could rig up and bucket fill a cistern above the machine to supply the water via gravity. The solenoid valve would open and close as normal.
The waste water could just go into a soak away .
@John
The Instant Pot is a brand name of electric pressure cooker, which can also act as a steamer, rice cooker, slow cooker, yoghurt maker or just be used to boil water (though a kettle would make a lot more sense). So if I had a mains connection, it’s pretty versatile as a cooking machine. Unlike a traditional stovetop pressure cooker, it doesn’t need close supervision in use. I also like it because, being contained, it doesn’t heat up the kitchen as much as some other options. To run it off of a solar PV system I’d need a battery and inverter, I think. But I also notice that I left the refrigerator and freezer out of my previous comments, which is something of an oversight. I’d probably rather have a freezer than a refrigerator (if it comes to it I can make an icebox), and I’d rather have that than a washing machine or oven.
So my list if I were using solar PV on a DC system would look something like:
1) freezer
2) lighting
3) computer
4) oven
5) hob
But… it’s fundamentally harder for me to imagine this, because I haven’t lived without mains electricity for any reasonable length of time, and also I live in a situation where cooking with wood is very difficult — I almost certainly wouldn’t bother with an electric oven or hob if I had a Rayburn. I garden with hand tools all the time, though.
It would be nice to also have a charger for the batteries for various outdoor garden tools, but I’m not counting those as “household appliances”.
Living without a washing machine is okay if you have sufficient space to dry your laundry in, and enough spare clothing: when you undress for bed, any clothes that need washing (as opposed to wearing again) go into a bucket of soapy water, and in the morning you swill it round with a stick a bit, rinse the soap out in a second bucket (or possibly a third), lay the clothes out on a (clean) towel, roll up the towel, stand on it, unroll everything, and hang it up to finish drying. Or that’s largely how I did it. This would get tedious fast if you were doing it for an entire family though; there’s a reason most people had one or maybe two sets of work clothes, and one set of “Sunday best”.
@Kathryn.
I’ve got a friend who uses an electric pressure cooker and loves it.
I tend to cook in a frying pan/wok than in the oven, so I’m thinking more Rocket Stove hot plate scenario.
“To run it off of a solar PV system I’d need a battery and inverter, I think.”
Only if you were cooking at night. If the sun’s out, you could run your Instant Pot during the day direct from the panel through the inverter, without the need for the batteries. Who knows, maybe a DC version will hit the market?
I think we are going to have to fit much more around “mother nature” than we do now, so cooking when the sun shines maybe one of those adjustments we will have to make.
I’m liking your list. I’ll let you have recharging of garden tool batteries as an option.
(But then….which garden tools??????)
I think I would go:
1. Lighting
2. Freezer (like you, I could always freeze some blocks for a toolbox)
3. Washing machine.
4.??????
Beyond lighting, freezer and washing machine I can’t think of anything that is a massive game changer in terms of time/labour saving. Hand blender? Hardly essential.
Out of all those, I guess that lighting would be the easiest to maintain over a long period. Least complex. Lots of LEDs out there to keep us going.
Freezer refrigerant would be difficult to get hold of.
Washing machine printed circuit boards will eventually fail and be difficult to replace.
If someone came up with a long life battery that was easily serviceable, it would help things.
I guess there is enough existing tech to see me out and probably my kids as well, with a bit of tinkering.
I’ve decided not to worry too much about what people 100 years from now are going to do.
I can’t influence what their world is going to look like. They will most probably have a very different outlook to me and my present understanding of the world would be totally irrelevant and useless to them.
@John
I think you may be overoptimistic about the power output of PV cells in December in the UK.
I suspect DC slow cookers do exist, though.
The “rocket stove plus haybox” option is also attractive, but again, that would likely require me to move house.
@Kathryn
“I think you may be overoptimistic about the power output of PV cells in December in the UK. ”
Yes. I’ve never actually monitored how much energy my PV panels are generating but I take your point.
Perhaps lighting is the only useful use for PV electricity in the winter.
How does your off grid system hold up in the winter Chris?
Kathryn wrote: “My own instinct is along the lines of “if we’re still here in a thousand years we’ll still have metal hand tools and even things like ploughs that can be drawn by horses, but they’ll be very much more expensive than they are now”.
This book from 1717 provides some clues, with the cost of some tools and some daily wage figures, from which we can estimate how many days of labour it took back then to earn enough to buy the tool.
A shipwright’s wage was 2 shillings per day, which is 24 pence (from page 113).
A hatchet cost 14d, or 14 pence.
A woodcutting axe (“wood axe”) cost 2s.4d., or 28 pence.
A hewing axe (around 3 pound weight) cost 3s.6d., or 42 pence.
(These tool costs are from page 124)
Thus, it took about a half day of work to pay for a hatchet; around a full day’s work to pay for a woodcutting axe, and more than one and a half day’s work to pay for a hewing axe.
The Prices of the Labour in Ship-building Adjusted…
By William Sutherland, London, 1717
https://books.google.com/books?id=SZ-6HU8b8z0C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q&f=false
My own fault, really, for thinking in terms of monetary cost, but…
I only do a few hours a week of paid work. (I do a lot more voluntary work, and also a fair amount of subsistence work and some household domestic work.) So it might take me several weeks to save up for a hewing axe…
Kathryn – I have found hand-washing gets tedious as soon as you have to do the bed sheets.
Regarding washing machines.
This one looks quite good.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-67693459
@SimonH — yes, it rather does. Especially when it’s wet out and you only have one set of sheets.
@Kathryn
On further reflection on your comments and Bruce Steele’s reply…….
I guess the people’s of pre-Columbian, Central and South America, managed to build complex Agrarian societies without metal tools. Do maybe smetal isn’t so important after all? I’d still like a steel hand axe though, given the choice)
Seems to me that there are loads of steel gardening tools already in existence. Most sheds and garages will have them hanging up, even if long neglected.
It always amazes me to see all the new shiny ones in the garden centres. Surely humanity has made more than enough spades already?
Well, digging sticks were a thing; and I’ve used a random stick myself, at times, when I didn’t have a dibber or trowel to hand. Or sometimes I’ll just use the other end of the rake handle, if the rake is what I’m already working with and I don’t want to walk back to the shed. (It’s not that I’m too lazy for the walk, it’s that I’ll get distracted along the way and do an entirely different job.)
I have broken two fork handles in the past four years, one of which was wooden and the other of which was steel. It turns out heavy clay and bramble roots are a pretty winning combination if you want to break tools. The wooden one was not mine, which was annoying, and even more annoyingly the fork part was constructed in such a way that it turned out to be fairly difficult to just replace the handle (as would have made more sense). The steel one was one we inherited with the allotment and similarly wasn’t properly repairable. When I purchase tools I do try to find ones that I will be able to repair when they break, but there are limits to my abilities to do this (I’m not a blacksmith or a welder), and I’ve also seen a lot of forks that are missing tines, or bent or broken.
I am fairly hard on my tools, though; I broke three potato mashers in the space of as many months at one point (and then finally found one that works better).
I tend toward low-dig rather than no-dig. The initial work I did on the Near Allotment involved digging long trenches and filling them up with woodchips to use as paths between the (now raised, because the clay had to go somewhere) planting rows — not something I would necessarily be able to do in a post-fossil world, but for now, I let the woodchips rot down in the paths, and every once in a while I dig them out onto the beds and then replace them with more woodchips. Previous tenants had used a roto-tiller/rotavator/whatever those things are, repeatedly, without adding much in the way of organic matter, and that initial dig was pretty hard work. There are other situations where I would probably do some digging, too, like taking on a new growing space and just not having the time to cover a patch with cardboard/newspaper/leaf mulch/etc for a season or two to kill off the grass before planting. Nevertheless, these days I use my compost fork a lot more than I use my digging fork or spade.
I guess the real driver of metallurgy technology wasn’t better farming tools but more likely warfare 🙁
A steel sword is better than an obsidian one and a steel breastplate is better than a woven reed one. As the Aztecs found out to their cost!
@John
A bit of both, I think. Hunting and warfare both involve weaponry, after all. And my understanding is that steel meant lighter ploughs, which could be pulled by horses rather than oxen.
@Kathryn
“growing space and just not having the time to cover a patch with cardboard/newspaper/leaf mulch/etc for a season or two to kill off the grass before planting.”
Charles Dowding says he just puts the cardboard down then a 2″ layer of compost on top and plants into the compost straight away.
He claims that by the time the cardboard rots away the plants/weeds underneath are dead and the roots of the veg can work their way down beyond the cardboard.
Never tried it myself, so can’t say if it works or not?
@John
I find closer to 4″ of compost works better, and even then, the technique often works better if you have some plants ready to plant out (rather than direct seeding). And even then, for me it’s pretty much ineffective on couch grass, creeping cinquefoil, brambles and bindweed — not that tillage is very much better, in fairness. But Charles Dowding is weeding very regularly; the cardboard and compost only help the vegetables get a head start on the weeds.
Regards the puzzle of the path to small farm future. We’ve been attending the Hard Art meet ups convened by the creative team behind XR, and made the food for the last session. We”re advocating a theory of change that involves the material conditions to distribute the skills of self/community provisioning through access to a land base – (the allotments, in Kathryn’s case). The successful modelling of direct democracy practices through peoples assemblies employed by XR and already used by regional and national governments acts as a frame work for the discussion of commons resources. The common sense position held by the majority around water ways and seas/sea shores as a commons resource has created local, regional and national citizen bodies and groups around which assemblies can be built. Start with rivers and seas, which will have out the ownership beneath and around the common resource, that can then be challenged. Building direct democracy institutions whilst defining commons resources and creating the Co operative structures of ownership for water feels like a solid starting point for this path.
We also covered some of the riots and a educating interview of Tommy Robinson. The description of corporate capture of our national, regional and local governments as ‘the blob’ was memorable (banofees and the blob?) but the shared narratives of activism and the right wing are obvious. Again, direct democracy models, assemblies at as local a level as possible deciding on shared material resources will work against the feelings of loss of sovereignty and alienation which characterise the slide to fascism.
Thanks for this, Joel.
I’ve had a few experiences of “consultation” and “assembly” events that turned out to be more like “take 1000 people and put them in 100 groups of 10 for an afternoon, ask them to talk through some issues and brainstorm ideas, collect these up on post-its and highlight only the ones that agree with the top-down programme you just designed and are unveiling” which left a very sour taste indeed. So if we’re going to have these groups governing common resources it’s very important that they can actually do things.
Even at the level of allotments it is sometimes difficult to feel like it’s possible to make any headway. I don’t think my allotment committee is particularly dysfunctional, either; it’s more that these are hard problems for a society where we’ve become accustomed to solving problems by throwing fossil resources at anything and everything.
Interesting new paper by academic geographers Kasia Paprocki & James McCarthy, among other things critiquing George Monbiot’s ‘disdain for farmers’ & the ‘techno-utopian visions’ reshaping rural landscapes. “Contra Monbiot, we are certainly not witnessing the “end of farming.””
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03091325241269701
I’m only about half way through but so far it is a very helpful over view of all the literature in this area. What is emerging chimes with JM Neeson’s conclusions around the enclosures – and the Marxist description that capitalism is built on ‘primitive accumulation’; the theft of land and the displacement or murder of the folks who lived on that land. It finds that research centres the land as the primary site of capitalist enterprises, as the basis of climate chaos, and more hopefully as the site of its mitigation through, importantly, the social structures created through peasantries, small farms and indigenous practices.
This report from drought-struck Italy will resonate with folks here, I suspect, and gives Chris a friendly name-check:
https://thesubversivefarmer.net/blog/we-really-need-a-plan
(It also makes an uncritical reference to the Ricciardi et al paper on the role of “small farms” in the current food system, which I suspect some of us would want to contest, though Gunnar has given me cause to rethink my position on this since I wrote At Work in the Ruins.)
While I’m here, perhaps I might give a shout out to those of you within the corner of North America bounded by Boston, Toronto, Chicago and Washington, DC, as I’m on my way to your part of the world for a series of events this month, including a two-day gathering with Ashley of Rizoma Field School/Doomer Optimism next weekend:
https://dougald.nu/america/
Thanks for that Dougald. Interesting article. Left me wanting further thoughts on why the home gardens are feeding people and the commercial ones aren’t.
Best wishes for your US tour. Say hi to Ashley from me – hope to meet her someday! Meanwhile I’m recording a podcast tomorrow with Jason, the other half of DO, based around my recent post on renewable energy. And one next week for the ‘Old Hippies’ podcast. Hmmm.
Further news from the world of microbial alt-meat: an ‘incredibly bitter’ IP lawsuit between Impossible Foods and Motif Foodworks over heme protein has been resolved in Impossible Foods’ favour. The companies issued a joint statement “This resolution affirms Impossible Foods’ category leadership and the strength of its product portfolio related to heme.”
In other words, the march of corporate monopoly in the synbio alt-meat sector that I warned about in ‘Saying NO…’ is coming along.
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/impossible-foods-motif-foodworks-heme-hemami-lawsuit-settlement/
The article states that Impossible’s heme protein is “bioidentical to soy leghemoglobin”, although it seems that not everyone agrees: https://www.etcgroup.org/content/bleeding-veggie-burger-has-no-basis-safety-according-fda
Hmm. What could go eating with eating novel proteins ?
Animal welfare, wilderness preservation and biological diversity are not corporate values.
schwabs-daughter-covid-was-precursor-to-coming-climate-lockdowns.html
Carbon credits for everyone . ( rationing in disguise )
A check for that brings up this:
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-schwab-climate-lockdown-false-wef-448903834614
For further Bakhtin Carnivalesque studies, I don’t know if you have this book, from another blog;
This spirit soars. The market state self-reproduces through codifying ecstasy to its own immiserating ends – military parades, book-burning, £360 Oasis tickets, corporate football, etc. After the Fairs Act of 1871, hundreds of fairs, mops & wakes would be banned across England within a decade. One of the great books that navigates Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ is Stallybrass & White’s Politics and Poetics of Transgression from 1986 & never republished. Happily, some naughty person has scanned & uploaded the entire thing:
https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Politics-and-poetics-of-transgression-by-Peter-Stallybrass-Allon-White.pdf
Thanks for this!
Interesting reflections of what our energy predicament means for us all .
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/09/02/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-three-a-failure-of-communication/
I enjoyed reading this.
Helps to get the mindset right.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-18-what-can-i-do/
I have council ed my grandchildren to learn a trade / job / degree on something that will be needed in the future , veterinary college , horticulture , medicine , one insists on being a computer programmer but is having second thoughts as 50,000 computer nerds have been fired this year by the major employers , MS, Goo , and such .
Train for a job that does not need grid electricity .
Blacksmith!
Cooper
Blacksmithing used to be popular in the village where I live, but in the latter stages used electricity to blow the hot coals via a fan, as opposed to the old bellows (with maybe an assistant), for which knowledge of tanning leather might be useful.
(An aside, John, here’s some news from modern day Japan I’ve just come across, slated for October: https://danielnagase.substack.com/p/japans-plan-to-destroy-the-world
@Simon H
!!!!!!!!
And I’ve got my flu and booster jabs in October.
Interesting link but the tone strikes me as rather alarmist and clickbaity. Have you seen a more nuanced explanation of the actual saRNA technology?
I will split my sides laughing if the right end up wearing masks to avoid “catching” a vaccine that isn’t even contagious.
@John
Don’t worry, the COVID booster and ‘flu jabs we get here in October won’t be the Japanese saRNA technology that that article is talking about. The mRNA vaccines do have some side effects for some people and some risks, but those risks are a lot better than those of getting COVID while unvaccinated (and probably substantially better than getting COVID while under-vaccinated, to be honest.)
Kathryn, of course it is a clickbaity title. I got to the article through this one, which I thought much more nuance-heavy.
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/why-we-cant-move-forward-with-self
@Kathryn
I’m not really worried about COVID booster jabs.
The vaccines haven’t killed me yet. 🙂
I miss being able to use emojis on this blog other than a smiley face. Find them quite useful to differentiate between serious comments and jokes.
Hi Simon
That article also reads to me as scare-mongering.
The idea that COVID isn’t a problem for someone with an “intact immune system” is particularly concerning.
First of all, if you don’t know any previously-healthy people who died in the first and second waves (when nobody was vaccinated yet), or anyone who developed long COViD, then you’re extremely privileged. I know several in both categories. Second of all, even if COVID only affected people known to be immunocompromised (not true), the implication that people with “compromised” immune systems are somehow not worth taking some steps to protect is dangerous folly. This is real eugenics-adjacent nonsense.
Would I prefer that our primary interventions were decent ventilation and, where necessary, filtration of indoor air, combined with strong societal support for things like staying home from work and school when symptomatic? Yes, absolutely: these less-invasive measures clearly are less risky than any vaccine, and they would also reduce rates of chicken pox, influenza, measles (in areas with insufficient herd immunity due to, er, anti-vaxxers), and probably things like drug-resistant TB. But we’re not doing those things for some reason — something to do with profit margins.
In a context where the only mitigation tool we are actually using is vaccination, my risk tolerance for vaccine side effects goes up, not down.
@John
Glad to hear it — and apologies for misinterpreting your tone.
Some of these things would be better discussed gathered around a rocket stove and a good meal, I think. But here we are anyway.
https://slaynews.com/news/covid-vaxxed-kids-45-times-more-likely-die-unvaccinated/
I suggest everyone takes a wide swing around covid information and don’t use Google to do it .
Get your information / disinformation by your own choice and not from those that have a axe to grind or hide .
Case in point new vehicles sold in the usa after 2020 are more UNreliable than vehicles made in 1970/80’s on a mile per mile basis , things are not improving in just about every field , medicine included
Diogenese10,
I certainly agree it’s important to avoid misinformation about COVID-19. I don’t think you are managing to do this.
The article you linked to (which is a mess of horrible popups and spam over here, ugh) fails to mention that the mortality rate is higher for people (in all age ranges) who had a fourth dose of vaccine because that fourth dose was only offered to people who had additional health problems to start with.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19byvaccinationstatusengland/latest
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/09/12/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-four-power-down/
Very interesting . 15 minute cities now make sense to me and why synthetic goop is a non starter ….
Tangential again:
I decided to grow some oilseed pumpkins this year, for the first time. They have done very well on my hotbeds/compost beds, and the vines are dying back now to reveal large green and orange pumpkins.
The seeds are tasty, but the flesh, while perfectly edible, is a bit of a nothingburger: a bit watery and insipid, sortof halfway between a courgette and a pumpkin. I made some pretty nice bhajis with some of it, but there’s rather a lot of it, which is a problem for me with my limited refrigerator and freezer space. It’s most efficient to process the pumpkin seeds all at once, rather than one pumpkin at a time, but I can’t really manage to use that much pumpkin flesh, partly because it’s about the least tasty thing I’m harvesting at the moment.
Well… it turns out the soup kitchen hasn’t had much in the way of fresh food donations this week. There were some pointy cabbages in the refrigerator but that’s about it. The vicar went to the cash and carry to buy a few sacks of baking potatoes, which will take care of the Sunday meal, but the Tuesday one (usually cooked on Sundays) was looking pretty slim.
So now my plan is to harvest all the oilseed pumpkins that are ready on Saturday (I might save one to carve for Hallowe’en, though I’m not sure how long they keep), chop them in half, scoop out the seeds, and put the walls in bags which I will then pack onto my bicycle on Sunday morning and take with me to church. Tuesday’s meal can be a pumpkin curry of some description.
I am, however, somewhat concerned for winter. If we’re seeing shortages in fresh food now, in early September, then what will winter be like? How will we manage the hungry gap? I’m aware that the distribution issues I’m seeing might have nothing to do with the harvest, but it’s still not a good sign.
Winter wakens all my care,
Now the leaves are waxing bare;
Oft I sigh and mourn sore
When it comes in my thought of this world’s joy,
how it goes all to nought.
Now it is and now is not,
As if it never was;
That many say, so it is:
All passes but God’s will:
All we shall die,
though we like it ill.
All the grain which grew up green,
Now it fades and all falls down.
Jesu, help that it be seen,
And shield us from hell!
For I know not where I shall go,
nor how long here dwell.
Kathryn, I like the idea of a fireside meal, for sure, and interesting to hear other views, as ever.
Unfortunately I do know people who died in the time you mentioned, but not (firsthand) in the way you mentioned, as comorbidities and age were usually a factor I would say. Sadly this carried on in a more alarming fashion once the rollout started here, with the odd occasional ‘just suddenly dropped dead’, in one case a seemingly healthy guy in his forties the day after injection. But anyway it seems we’re all basically in agreement that there exist valid concerns with modRNA, more accurately termed fairly novel gene therapy it would seem. With different experiences we all arrive at our different standpoints, naturally. Indeed, just yesterday I heard the opinion that long Covid could be a misnomer/good cover for vaccine-damaged. But enough!
Diogenese, your take on the perhaps designed obsolescence in modern automobiles matches exactly what I’ve heard from local car mechanics, one memorably advising “just choose one (modern car) in a colour you like as they are all crap – crammed with tiny wires and sensors that can fail when the wind changes direction”. His own choice was an old Toyota pick-up, decades old and relatively simple and easy to fix.
It’s pretty easy to associate higher deaths with the COVID vaccine roll-out, because the total number of COVID cases went up hugely around the same time. The first vaccination I had was in a crowded and unventilated building during a surge in cases, with most people wearing poorly-fitting surgical masks that only offer a small degree of protection to the weather or people around them (compared to, say, a well-fitted N95, or the elastomeric N99 I use), and I think that may well have been a super spreader event, locally.
And, of course, because of our nearly-complete failure to control or even monitor transmission, we don’t really have population data on what happens when someone has vaccinations but does not get COVID. (I haven’t had it yet, to my knowledge — but I am considerably more diligent than many people can afford to be, as well as being something of an outdoor cat, and a sample of “vaccinated people I know personally who also haven’t had COVID” is so small as to be entirely useless. On the bright side, I haven’t had a cold since February 2020, either, and my health is better for it.)
I’d be interested in data on post-vaccination mortality in people who had COVID before vaccination Vs those who did not have COVID before vaccination, as I understand there is some evidence that the virus itself can cause both cardiovascular and immune damage: maybe getting COVID (even asymptomatically) increases vaccine risk. But then there are also the Long Covid patients who actually got better after vaccination.
As you say — enough. Currently I am more vigilant about avian influenza (it’s in cattle now, and as a mammal I have concerns) and mpox (at least the smallpox vaccine we already have is 85% effective against this one).
On of the specifications I was quite adamant about with my e-assist bike is that I want it to be maintainable by an ordinary bike mechanic and rideable without the battery. This means a chain rather than a Kevlar belt — the belts are lighter and don’t need grease, but if they break you’re out of luck unless someone has a new one in stock, whereas bike chain can be taken apart and a new link or two put in. It means the front sprocket is a little smaller, lower gearing meaning my top speed is lower but I also at least stand a chance of riding the fully-laden bike up the hill from the allotment with a trailer and a dead battery. And I have a hub dynamo rather than running the lights off the battery. The front brake is a disc brake, which I need to learn more about, but the rear brake is a coaster brake and they are incredibly robust; I wanted to avoid hydraulics. It’s a long tail because the steering is so much less complex than on a box bike or similar. And the frame is steel, which means if it comes to it, it can be welded much more easily than an aluminium one could. It’s kindof like if you tried to reverse engineer an old pick-up truck in cargo bike form. I love it to bits.
Hi Kathryn, and yes it certainly is a headspinner. I’m more concerned, really, about mRNA vaccines being developed to administer to other species in the food chain (there are a few already available for use). A radio news piece on the threat and spread of bluetongue in cattle last week mentioned some new vaccines coming on line to treat it, one of which did not stop cattle getting the disease, nor halt transmission, but does apparently reduce the severity of the disease. Now where have I heard that before? But to use your words, there we are!
OK, I guess I started thinking about this more recently after hearing that the more mRNA boosters a person receives, the greater the likelihood of raised IgG4 antibody levels in the body, with a correspondingly higher risk – according to a few recent research papers – that a portion of the population who are genetically predisposed may develop what has been called ‘turbo cancer’ (fact check it and it either doesn’t exist or is debunked), which is the colloquial term apparently for what comes under the term hyperprogressive disease in the medical community (that does exist and was coined in 2017 I believe, in relation to the development and trials of new cancer drugs). This all fell into sharper focus for me when a healthy and active middle-aged member of my close family was suddenly rushed in to hospital after being constipated for a few days (no prior sudden weight loss, no real warning signs to speak of) to have what turned out to be an aggressive tumour removed from the colon, which it had blocked. He’s now receiving treatment and thankfully doing well. I know he followed the science, I know he has gone along with the vaccine program, and sadly I know this is just another story among many similar ones against a very complicated backdrop that makes it impossible for the layperson to draw firm conclusions with the head, hence I rely, yet again, on the gut.
Configuring bikes is a much nicer headspinner, and yours sounds like a good workhorse. Our tandem triplet (from the really excellent St John St Cycles in Bridgwater, Somerset) has a disc brake, cable operated so easier to deal with than hydraulic, which I have no experience of maintaining yet, though my wife’s bike has hydraulic disc brakes (overkill IMO). I’ll probably turn to youtube tutorials come the time. I know the Swiss Army developed a bike, but you have to think to yourself, ‘what would make the perfect Allotment Bike?’ – the way bike fashion trends go, it could yet become a whole new category… Maybe one that can be powered from behind by an electric wheelbarrow, has integrated top tube straps to attach the bespoke compost fork, and maybe a neat little leather pouch somewhere for the secateurs? Hmmm, now you’ve got me thinking!
The ducks are out, the donkey neighs (my two children are riding him now! I stand back in amazement, somewhat gobsmacked), the last of the tomatoes need harvesting, and I have an itch to make much wine, but gawddammit we’ve been invited out for the afternoon and it’s a 20-mile bike ride with rain on the horizon. Allez-hop!
Enjoy the ride! And I’m glad your family member is doing well.
Hauling things around is definitely the easy win for me in terms of the sheer utility of the cargo bike. I’ll update later with the total weight of oilseed pumpkins… I am probably going to need to use the trailer to transport them.
I do have a screw-together scrumping pole that fits in one of my panniers, and has increased my foraging yield substantially: I put it in the panniers when the first plums are ready in July and plan to remove it again after I have collected some medlars and quinces. It’s also quite handy for bracket fungi that are fruiting a bit too high to reach. Secateurs live in my front basket, though so far I’ve used them more for pruning tree branches that are hanging into the bike lane than anything else. (I’ve also used them to make chopsticks when utensils were forgotten for a picnic lunch.)
I haven’t added up the weights of individual pumpkins yet but I did stand on the scale with each of the four bags of pumpkin flesh this morning, after staying up late last night scooping out the flesh, and the total weight was around 47kg.
I was very glad of the trailer on my sux mile journey to church, and also the e-assist. I’m sure the journey would have been possible without e-assist (I’ve done it before), but it would have taken a lot longer and left me quite a bit more knackered.
Total yield of seeds seems to be around three litres. I haven’t decided whether to try and extract oil out of the seeds, or just dry and roast them to snack on all winter. I suspect even with the fat content I could end up in negative calorie balance trying to press the oil out by hand, and I do have a lot of other preserving and harvesting to do at the moment.
Some questions:
Why do you assume atopo end of 70 percent digestible protein content when they say 160 tonnes of product?
How do you know their factory figure excludes the CO2 figure?
Why do you say non-existent ‘transition’ into clean energy when it is now 80% of all new electricity each year – and still accelerating – soon to overtake all new energy – then allow a massive replacement of fossil fuels as the IEA predicts as hundreds of coal plants age out worldwide over the next decade?
Where is the evidence that Solein has PHB? If you shared a source or link – I missed it.
You talk about ‘trophic inefficiency’ against renewable energy fueling Solein – but that just comes from your peak oil doomerism and inherent hatred of renewable energy. At least you acknowledge that the land footprint is radically reduced – but did you share with your readers that it is only 10% of the land footprint of soy protein – even when counting the solar panel area? Also – soy requires arable land in a stable climate with adequate soils, sunshine, and just the right amount of rain. Solein doesn’t. Wind farms in the cold and solar from deserts can fuel this food source! We can let the rainforests grow back. There will be more mining for a while – then as we perfect recycling – the mining for renewables will fall off a cliff! (They’re already at 95% efficient at recycling batteries and wind turbines and solar panels.)
Also – if we include Precision Fermentation in the mix – the real dichotomy might not be as you phrase it – but instead be between a future battle of Corporations and Democratic Worker’s Co-ops. But we can’t have that! Where would all those beautiful cows and pigs and ducks go that we used to see in our children’s books about farms? Ah, well, maybe we will have grown up a little as a species and stop eating other animal species. (I’m now about 95% vegetarian – and only eat meat if someone hosting something serves it to us.)
We will still be growing herbs and spices and fruit and veg to flavour all these PF products. So there’s hope of some farm stories ahead. We need not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The baby in this case being abundant food for all, and nature thriving.
To answer the parts of your comment/questions that I think deserve an answer:
“Why do you assume atopo end of 70 percent digestible protein content when they say 160 tonnes of product?”
Solar Foods reports the protein content of Solein to be 65-70%: https://solarfoods.com/solein/
“How do you know their factory figure excludes the CO2 figure?”
Solar Foods’ CEO states in the article I linked that 10-20% of their CO2 comes from their own DAC and that they’re a candidate customer for the wider DAC industry. So I suppose I should have said “it excludes most of the energy needed…”
“Why do you say non-existent ‘transition’ into clean energy…”
Because fossil fuel use in electricity generation and in the wider energy economy is not declining. We’ve already discussed this at length and I’ve laid out my analysis of it here: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/08/off-grid-further-thoughts-on-the-failing-renewables-transition/
“Where is the evidence that Solein has PHB?”
EFSA dossier number NF-2021-1730 Technical dossier text – Compositional data Table 3.7
“Did you share with your readers that it is only 10% of the land footprint of soy protein – even when counting the solar panel area?”
Yes – ‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’ page 36. Although that figure excludes any cropping from the nominal hectare other than the soy, and the greater energy capture by the panels implies less energy capture within the wider agroecosystem as in the case of soy – so your figure potentially overstates the putative land sparing advantage of the microbial food and its ecological benefits. Soy indeed is limited in its growing conditions, but there are numerous other agricultural sources for the nutrients it provides, with lower-limit energy costs that microbial food is inherently unable to match.
Most of the rest of your comment mixes unprovable speculation about the future, tendentious assumptions about my position and puerile insults. I’ve already raised with you several times the problematic tone of your comments, especially in view of the fact that you hide behind a pseudonym. I find them unbecoming of serious debate. I’m interested in constructive discussion about global futures, but life’s too short for me to keep wading through these kinds of comment on my website so I’ve now banned you from further comment here.
“Did you share with your readers that it is only 10% of the land footprint of soy protein – even when counting the solar panel area?” “Yes – ‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’ page 36.”
Also here:
https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Questioning-the-case-for-farm-free-food.pdf
The link to Reference 9 in that document is broken. This is the updated link to Reference 9:
https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Energy-Costs-of-Bacterial-Food-Oct-23.pdf
Thanks Steve!
Just a question .
Do the goop foods made from soy still contain estrogen or do they remove it somehow ?
I’m not sure. Clem would be the man to answer that, but he seems to have left the building…
My understanding is that the phytoestrogens in soy are not really a problem if you’re not using highly-processed versions of it (like commercial soy milk or soy protein powder). Eating edamame,, tempeh, soy sauce and tofu as part of a varied diet you’re still going to get some phytoestrogens — maybe even enough to be protective against certain hormone-sensitive types of cancer — but not enough to cause health problems in the vast majority of people.
What I’m more curious about is how this works in livestock fed various forms of soy, if I were feeding a herd of cattle I’d want to vary their legumes, but I’m really not a livestock person.
Another update about Solar Foods, manufacturer of dried bacteria being sold as food for humans. It seems like investors don’t find it very appealing.
The company’s stock went public in early September, shortly after Solar Foods announced their *self-affirmed* GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) status for their product in the US, and the closing prices were initially around 12 euros per share .
Since then, the share price has dropped and is currently around 5 euros. The market capitalization has fallen from around 300 million euros to around 120 million euros currently.
Investing dot com shows the share price trajectory, currently with “Sell” as the Analysts Sentiment, and “Strong Sell” as the Technical Analysis.
There’s an interesting blip in trading volume and share price shown for November 19th, which I’m guessing might be related to the November 20th news release about the Solar Foods “launch” in the US, with the bacterial protein (along with other bacterial content) being added to some food dishes at one restaurant in New York City (available until the end of November).
https://www.investing.com/equities/solar-foods-oyj
With the share price currently down to less than 5 euros, I expect that believers and advocates like George Monbiot and his followers will be investing heavily, putting their money where their mouth is.
; )
I’m not really an investor in shares (beyond a very small amount of money in pension funds, where it isn’t me making the decision anyway, from some office work I did over a decade ago now), but if I were, one of my rules would be something along these lines:
If the company I’m buying shares in is not producing a product or service that I would be happy to have in lieu of a profit share, I should not buy it.
By that measure alone, dried bacteria would fail.
A lot of the rest of investment, of course, is a game of “do I think enough other people will value this product or service enough to buy enough of it that the company makes a profit?” or some derivative of same. And of course those predictions rely quite a bit on context. I wonder whether Solar Foods would be doing better if there were a different president-elect, for example.
On December 10, Solar Foods held an event for investors, and their presentation document reveals some production cost numbers for their dried bacteria slurry powder Solein®.
https://investors.solarfoods.com/files/documents/solar-foods_capital_markets_2024.pdf
With their currently new Factory 01, their expected “cost of goods sold” (usually consisting of the production costs without administrative costs, upper management salaries, overhead…) is said to range from around 25-33 euros/kg (presumably per kg of Solein®):
2025 — 26-33 euros/kg
2026 — 26-33 euros/kg
2027 — 25-31 euros/kg
[page 55]
Thus, if the Solein® production costs are around 30 euros/kg, then at 75% protein content, this translates to around 40 euros per kg of protein! And this is just the production cost, not the wholesale or retail price.
Well, if Solein®’s production cost is around 30 euros/kg, at what price do they expect to be able to sell it? Instead of being food for the general masses, Solein® is being presented as an alternative to “high-quality whey” in the high-priced protein powder market (for bodybuilders, athletes, and other consumers of protein drinks and protein bars), with 15-20 euros/kg being specified as the comparable *wholesale* value of the Solein® product.
(By the way, I looked at the current *retail* prices for whey protein powder in the US market, which is where SF will be concentrating for a while, and found that it can be bought in 25-pound bags for $10/pound, which translates to around 21 euros/kg RETAIL, including delivery to the customer’s home anywhere in the US, for whey powder with 80% protein content, and pea protein costs even less. So I think SF is perhaps overly optimistic about the WHOLESALE price that Solein® can command in the US.)
Thus, with their new Factory 01, it appears they can make Solein® for around 30 euros/kg, and then hopefully sell it for around 15-20 euros/kg wholesale. What’s wrong with this picture? Isn’t the production cost supposed to be less than the selling price?
But their salvation will supposedly come with their next factory, which is still in the planning stages. If their Factory 02 (at a yet undetermined site) gets financing (a big if?) and starts production in 2028 at the earliest, then those larger bioreactors are hoped to bring down their “costs of goods sold” to around 4-6 euros/kg. [page 55]
However, even if those larger batches and higher production rates are successfully achieved without any unexpected problems, there are still some potentially questionable assumptions behind the estimated 4-6 euros/kg “cost of goods sold”. Such as the assumed electricity price of 40 euros/MWh (or 0.04 euros/kWH). I think they are overly optimistic if they expect to buy electricity at such a low price. Commercial electricity prices in the EU are significantly higher, according to Statista.
Regarding the SF “Path to Profitability” (p. 57), they say “Profitability (positive EBITDA) expected to be reached in 2030 after successful deployment of F02 [Factory 02] and US go to market.”
However, “positive EBITDA” is not a generally-accepted measure of profitability (Warren Buffet calls it “meaningless”), since it omits the costs of capital expenditures, interest payments, taxes, and amortization.
“EBITDA, short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, is an alternate measure of profitability to net income. It’s used to assess a company’s profitability and financial performance. EBITDA is not a metric recognized under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)… Increased focus on EBITDA by companies and investors has prompted criticism that it overstates profitability… Some critics, including Warren Buffett, call EBITDA meaningless because it omits depreciation and capital costs.” [from Investopedia dot com]
Thus, it appears that if they succeed at financing a larger second factory, and then achieve their production goals, and if we don’t account for the costs for their capital expenditures (such as the factory structures and equipment), then the company’s earnings still wouldn’t cover their other costs until 2030.
I didn’t find any mention of the year (beyond 2030) when their earnings are expected to cover *all* their costs (including capital expenditures).
By the way, I didn’t find the word “bacteria” mentioned at all in the presentation document, instead they called it “microorganisms” and “Solein® cells”. And it does seem notable that on the Solar Foods webpage about their science, they don’t mention the word “bacteria” at all!
The euphemistic references to “Solein® microbes” seem to avoid or obscure the fact that Solein® consists of a dried bacteria slurry mass of the whole cells of bacteria (not just the digestible parts). The article from Noema (linked above in the OP, and also linked at the Solar Foods website) actually described Solein® at one point as “homogenized bacterial carcasses”, which seems much more forthright and accurate than saying Solein® is made from “Solein® cells”.
Protein digestibility might be a problematic issue for Solein®, especially in the competitive market for protein powders.
It may be unrealistic to assume that Solein® would be viewed by potential wholesale buyers as being worth 15-20 euros/kg if the amino acid bioaccessibilities for Solein® powder are significantly lower than soy powder, for example.
You can see some test results in the redacted public version of a Digestibility study submitted to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA):
“Annex_7_1_Digestibility_TIM…” under “Technical Dossier” at this EFSA page:
https://open.efsa.europa.eu/dossier/NF-2021-1730
click on Technical Dossier (left side of page)
then under Annexes to the dossier
click on Study Report – Annex_7_1_Digestibility_TIM_Redacted.pdf
Download it (link at top right of page)
Go to page 19/35: “5.4 Protein quality — Amino acids”
Setting aside the potential “yuck factor” around eating dried bacteria slurry mass, I still see a problem with the idea that customers will pay a premium price for Solein® powder if regular quality protein powders (whey, soy, pea) are more digestible and less costly. And even if the price of Solein® were the same per kilogram, customers might need to eat significantly more of it to get the same amounts of bioaccessible amino acids.
A further update about bacterial-protein manufacturer Solar Foods:
The stock price of Solar Foods has plumbed new depths this past week (now around 4.25 euros), having fallen around 10% since my earlier comment about share prices less than a month ago, for a total drop (currently) of around 66% below their highest share prices in September, 5 months ago.
https://www.investing.com/equities/solar-foods-oyj
Solar Foods’ stock price was apparently not helped much by the recent announcement that they are bringing in a new CEO whose priorities are said to include growing the “Health & Performance Nutrition segment” and “increasing product price points”.
https://solarfoods.com/solar-foods-appoints-rami-jokela-as-the-new-ceo-to-lead-the-global-expansion-phase/
The outgoing CEO (and co-founder) Pasi Vainikka is not listed as part of the updated senior management team (as of 1 April 2025), comprised of eight Chief Officers:
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Chief Technology Officer
Chief Operating Officer
Chief Strategy Officer
Chief Commercial Officer
Chief Experience Officer
Chief Scientific Officer
I commented earlier how the sky-high energy costs of bacterial protein (like Solein) seem to make it too expensive to use as food for the masses. It looks like they’re hoping to make it more like a luxury-priced product, in an attempt to pull in some higher revenues and hopefully start covering their total costs at some unknown year in the future (profitability won’t happen anytime during the next 5 years 2025-2029, according to projections from Solar Foods mentioned in a comment above).
Speaking of total costs, the salaries of that senior management team must be adding a significant cost to each kilogram of Solein they manage to produce and sell. If the average annual salary for the eight Chief Officers is 100,000 euros (for example, with round numbers), then the senior management team costs 800,000 euros per year (plus the costs of benefits, which I will ignore).
So if their new factory achieves its full 160,000 kilograms of production in a year, then 800,000/160,000 = 5 euros as a guesstimate for the senior management salary costs per kilogram of Solein produced.
Thus, at the factory’s full production output, a guesstimated 5 euros of Solein’s selling price (per kilogram, wholesale) would theoretically go solely towards the costs of senior management, in addition to a larger portion of the wholesale selling price which would hopefully (if ever) cover the high production costs and the company’s other costs for staffing and overhead etc., and then hopefully leave some portion of the wholesale selling price as profits for the owners (shareholders).
Meanwhile, that 5 euros spent just on senior management costs (for each kilogram of Solein produced) is enough to buy approximately 7 kilograms of organic soybeans at the farm gate (wholesale) in the US (which is the market focus of Solar Foods). If we compare the amount of protein, those 7 kilograms of organic soybeans (purchased with 5 euros) have about the same protein content as 3.5 kg of Solein.
https://www.nutritiontable.com/nutritions/nutrient/?id=864
(Calculations are based on the USDA’s recent numbers: $19.51 per 60-pound bushel, or around 18.83 euros per 27.2 kg, equals 0.69 euros per kg.)
https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/lsbnof.pdf
Looked at from a different angle, instead of spending a guesstimated 800,000 euros for senior management costs, those same euros could be used to buy roughly 1 million kg of organic soybeans each year, having the same protein content as roughly 500,000 kg of Solein (which is about three times the annual production capacity of Solar Foods’ factory), with all of that protein and other nutrients from soybeans obtained without having to spend any money at all on building a factory, and without having to spend any money on the energy and other production costs to make Solein!
Whey protein concentrate is an alternative which has a similar protein content as Solein and can be bought for about $1.71 per pound at the high end (wholesale) in the US, which converts to 3.65 euros/kg. Thus, instead of spending a guesstimated 800,000 euros for Solar Foods’ senior management costs per year, those same euros could be used to buy about 220,000 kg of whey protein concentrate each year, which is more than the annual production capacity of Solar Foods’ factory, again obtainable without having to spend any money on building a factory and consuming the energy and other production costs required to make the Solein!
(Whey protein concentrate price from https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/ams_1598.pdf )
With all the hype stripped away, these types of issues (including what I mentioned in earlier comments) might be what some potential investors are considering when they decide to not buy shares of Solar Foods.
I know PV is technically more efficient in energy capture in terms of sun to electrons vs sun to human useable plant carbohydrates but I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be yet more effective to just grow beans or even algae in ponds and just use what ever electricity is being spent on electrolysis and nitrogen synthesis to process the output into protein powder.
Of course that fact I probably can’t pull a 100K salary plus a few million in stock options presumably for tofu or tempeh startup might provide some of the answer.
Absolutely right. You may add that whey protein is nearly 100% digestable versus Solein protein is 30% digestable, soy powder 75%. Quite a difference that is never addressed by the marketeers behind Solein. I guess the low digestibility is due to down-stream ultra-processing needed for lowering nucleic acid content, reducing LPS content or even to get rid of PHB. More on the digestibility here: Annex_7_2_Digestibility https://open.efsa.europa.eu/dossier/NF-2021-1730?type=node&key=37383
Some more updates about Solar Foods, manufacturer of dried bacterial mass powder, and the related dispute between Chris Smaje and George Monbiot about the energy costs of such bacterial protein.
On February 10th (yesterday), the stock price for Solar Foods fell to new depths around 3.90 euros per share, and an article was published online by Nature Communications, co-authored by the outgoing CEO (and co-founder) of Solar Foods.
This article’s data confirms Chris Smaje’s low-end estimate (65.3 kWh/kg) of the energy consumption required to produce dried bacterial protein, and the article clearly refutes George Monbiot’s number appearing in his book “Regenesis” (16.7 kWh/kg).
From the new article, which actually uses data from Solar Foods: “Figure 6a shows that, in 2030, Power-to-SCP [Single Cell Protein] has an overall electricity consumption of 70–73 megawatt-hour per tonne protein (MWh t−1 protein) [not including the energy costs of curtailed electricity and battery losses] …”
Thus, the new article specifies “an overall electricity consumption of 70–73 megawatt-hour per tonne protein” which is the same as 70-73 kWh/kg. That’s more than 4 times(!) what Monbiot claimed in “Regenesis” (and Monbiot’s subsequent calculations in “Regenesis” based on his 16.7 number are similarly invalid). It’s clearly time for a retraction by Monbiot.
Fasihi, M., Jouzi, F., Tervasmäki, P. et al. Global potential of sustainable single-cell protein based on variable renewable electricity. Nat Commun 16, 1496 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56364-1
I haven’t read much of the article yet, but I did notice their cost projections (in euros) are based on the cost of electricity to the factories being only 20–24 euros per MWH in 2030 (Fig. 4e) and 12–14 euros per MWh in 2050 (Fig. 4f), which seems overly optimistic to me, to say the least (12-14 euros per MHh = around 0.01 euros per kWh).
Even with such low electricity costs, Figure 8a shows that soybeans still cost less money per kg of protein. Figure 8d shows that even in 2050, soybeans will be produced as a source of protein with much less energy expenditure than dried bacteria (per kg of protein).
Regarding GWP (Global Warming Potential), Figure 8e shows that the range of GWP for soybeans (in kilograms of CO2 per kg of protein) actually goes lower than the range of GWP possible with “renewable electricity-based single-cell protein”. So according to this article, not only can soybeans be produced as a source of protein for much less energy than dried bacteria (per kg of protein), soybeans can be produced with less Global Warming Potential (per kg of protein) than the bacterial “renewable electricity-based single-cell protein” (e-SCP).
Solar Foods, the Finnish manufacturer of bacterial protein powder Solein®, has had some setbacks regarding the food safety risk assessment being done by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The risk assessment has been delayed multiple times, with the expected endpoint pushed further into the future, while the EFSA waits for additional data from Solar Foods on food safety-related topics.
The EFSA made its first request for additional data in October of 2023, when the EFSA’s risk assessment was expected to be finished by the end of February 2025. According to the EFSA, Solar Foods answered that request 15 months later, at the end of January, 2025. By that point, the EFSA’s expected endpoint deadline for its risk assessment had been pushed back from February to September 2025.
This month, on 21 March 2025, the EFSA made an additional data request, regarding topics such as subchronic toxicity, allergenicity, anticipated intake, and toxicological information. The EFSA now expects their risk assessment to be finished by November 26, 2025, pushing it back two more months.
https://open.efsa.europa.eu/question/EFSA-Q-2022-00140
An article at Forbes (dot com) explains Solar Foods’ situation with the EFSA:
“What Solar Foods is now in the midst of in the EU is the risk assessment phase: a scientific exercise that looks at things like the nutrition, allergenicity, and toxicity of a novel food item. EFSA is legally required to complete this within nine months, though the clock stops when it requests further information, as it has with Solar Foods.
“This phase includes a public consultation. In Solar Foods’ case this consultation had only one comment, from a critic of novel proteins querying the health impacts of consuming the polymer polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB). This is an example of a substance where EFSA hasn’t published specific guidance on acceptable levels, and thus would evaluate as part of the risk assessment.
“The risk assessment produces a scientific opinion, after which comes the risk management phase. These are separated so that “the risk assessment maintains the scientific rigor that is not to be affected from political decisions,” Ververis stresses.
“In the risk management period, the European Commission prepares a draft implementing decision based on EFSA’s scientific opinion. Then the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (PAFF Committee), which includes representatives of all EU member states, votes on whether it agrees with the decision. 15 of the 27 member states, representing at least 65% of the EU’s population, have to agree for a decision to be carried.”
Protein From Air Has A Complex Path To EU Approval
By Christine Ro, Oct 20, 2024
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2024/10/20/protein-from-air-has-a-complex-path-to-eu-approval/
Note that the EFSA’s Risk Assessment, currently expected to be finished by 26 Nov 2025, is only the first part of the approval process in the EU. The second part is the “risk management phase”, involving representatives of all EU member states and requiring a supermajority agreement.
In the US, however, Solar Foods has benefitted from a controversial FDA policy whereby a company is allowed to “self-affirm” that their product is “Generally Regarded as Safe”. From the Forbes article: “In plain English, this means that a company declares that it meets the safety standards set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA may continue to monitor the product after GRAS status.”
After Solar Foods declared the self-affirmed GRAS status, Solein has appeared in the US in snack and beverage samples at trade shows, in products made by the company Fazer (also based in Finland, where Solein is still prohibited from being sold in food since it hasn’t been determined to be safe in the EU).
“Fazer Taste the Future Snack Bar 40 g is a snack bar with dark chocolate coating and hazelnuts. It contains 7% Solein and is a source of protein.” [The 40 g bar thus contains mostly plant-based ingredients and less than 3 g of Solein, with around 2 g of bacterial protein.]
“Fazer Taste the Future Protein Drink Banoffee 250 ml is a vegan protein drink. It contains 18 grams protein, of which 2% is Solein.” [The drink thus contains less than 1 gram of protein from Solein, and 18 grams of Plant Protein as stated on the packaging.]
https://www.fazer.com/about-us/taste-the-future/
From the Solar Foods website:
“Solar Foods has an initial focus on the Health & Performance Nutrition segment in the United States, which is one of the primary global markets for high-protein products. This core segment consumes approximately 500 kilotons of protein powder annually and has shown consistent growth driven by health, nutrition and fitness trends.”
https://solarfoods.com/solar-foods-moves-one-step-closer-to-introducing-solein-to-the-european-market/
It seems to me that the protein powder customers in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment in the US, such as athletes and bodybuilders and dieters, are generally consuming relatively large quantities of protein powder on a daily basis. In my opinion, Solar Foods will face difficulties marketing to this segment if their bacterial protein powder (a) is costlier than the proven protein powders which have a long track record, and/or (b) must be consumed in fairly limited quantities each day due to food safety considerations around some components (PHB? excessive iron? other?), and/or (c) have less digestibility and bioavailability of the amino acid content compared to conventional protein powders. I’m not optimistic regarding Solein’s prospects regarding (a), (b), and (c).
Regarding the higher costs I expect for Solein, here’s a link to a comment on another page, about a recent Nature study which reveals the relatively high amounts of material inputs and energy required to manufacture bacterial protein like Solein (much higher inputs, per kg, than required for the protein in soybean crops, for example):
https://chrissmaje.com/2025/02/to-the-lifehouse/#comment-265441
In other news, Solar Foods’ stock price was evidently boosted this month by the announcement of a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding signed by two unnamed customers. It sounds kinda “iffy” to me:
“If the collaboration leads to a binding agreement, the 6,000 tonne volume would correspond to approximately half the full production capacity of Solar Foods’ Factory 02, which is now in its pre-engineering phase and is aimed to be fully operational in 2030.”
vegconomist[dot]com/protein/solar-foods-mous-commercialization-fazer-solein-products-us/
If Factory 02 is in the “pre-engineering phase”, I presume that means it hasn’t been designed yet, nor financed.
Also likely to influence the stock price, “Solar Foods announced its first million-dollar supply agreement”, with a startup company which presumably hasn’t sold any product yet as their website hasn’t even launched:
“Solar Foods announced on Thursday that it had signed a supply agreement with Superb Food. Superb Food is a startup company that develops and markets solutions for the health and vitality of people on their GLP-1 journey. Superb Food thus focuses on the Health & Performance nutrition category, which is strategically central to Solar Foods. The supply agreement is worth 1.39 MEUR and includes a commitment to purchase a total of 80 tons of Solein between Q3’25 and Q2’28. The agreement prices Solein at approximately EUR 17.3 per kg…”
placera[dot]se/placera/ovriga-nyheter/2025/03/21/solar-foods-solar-foods-announced-its-first-million-dollar-supply-agreement.html
Thus, the 3-year agreement is for a total of 80,000 kg of Solein at approximately $18.70 per kg (at current exchange rates). I wonder if Superb Food will ever get fully off the ground and operate for 3 years, and if it does, how binding is this supply agreement if lower-cost proteins are required?
Ready in 2030, gosh, it seems like a blueskying project. How much money will they burn until then. Any idea how much money they got until now?
on digestible protein basis EUR 17.3 per kg Solein is 60x more expensive than soy
Last month, a few days before the EFSA further delayed its risk assessment of Solein, Solar foods announced a “moonshot” investment plan, with curiously no mention in the press release about how large those investments might be.
“Solar Foods announces an investment plan for Europe’s single largest emission reduction moonshot project”
https://solarfoods.com/solar-foods-announces-an-investment-plan-for-europes-single-largest-emission-reduction-moonshot-project/
(A link at the bottom of the announcement leads to some details, such as 990 million euros total investment for Factories 02-04. Wow.)
“The investment decision is expected to be made during 2026. Once operational, the three factories could produce 50,000 tonnes of Solein per year… Based on a lifecycle analysis study*, Solein’s environmental impact is approximately 1% of beef production. Thus, if Solein would replace beef meat in the food system, the three factories enable a greenhouse gas emission reduction as substitution benefit in the order of 10 million tonnes CO2 equivalent per year. This is equivalent to approximately 25% of Finland’s annual emissions in 2023…
* [Footnote]… Life cycle assessments may contain a certain degree of uncertainty.”
Note that it’s just an investment “plan” which is being announced, the actual investment *decision* isn’t expected until 2026.
It’s also notable that, in addition to the “certain degree of uncertainty” which LCAs may have, the calculated emission reductions are based on this big IF:
“if Solein would replace beef meat in the food system”.
Beyond the major issues around consumer preferences, the replacement of beef with Solein powder could turn out to be hampered by the outcome of the EFSA’s risk assessment, which conceivably could give the okay for daily intakes of Solein which provide less protein than than steak or burger-sized portions of meat. Not to mention the protein digestibility issue, which might be relevant.
I think it would be easy to calculate a much higher level of “greenhouse gas emission reductions” if soybeans (instead of Solein) were to replace meat in the food system. With nowhere near the initial investments and ongoing operating costs required for producing bacterial protein.
Well, 50,000 tonnes Solein for a 1 billion EUR investment sounds very bad. Further, 50,000 tonnes on the world stage of protein supply is quite a nothing. Alone soybean import into EU is 20 million tonnes. Meat production (fresh weight) is above 40 million tonnes. 50,000 tonnes make no difference at al. Still a pilot scale compared to total animal protein market, isn’t it?
When it comes to 25% digestibility (compared to eg chicken meat’s 90%) the picture gets really grim. Is the protein value just 12.500 tonnes?
Steve, just want to highlight something peculiar: on the EFSA list of registered feed materials also the following is listed: 12.3.4 ,
Bacterial product rich in polyhydroxybutyrate
Product containing 3-hydroxybutyrate and 3-hydroxyvalerate, produced via fermentation with Cupriavidus necator, and non-viable bacterial protein meal remaining from the producing bacteria and fermentation broth
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32022R1104
As I understand the production strain is modified in order not to produce PHB. Is that so. Somewhere it was mentioned that gene KO was used to get out the PHB producer gen segment. Would EFSA in their novel food assessment consider this as a GMO intervention and propose the even stricter GMO pathway towards Novel Food approval?
A patent application filed by Solar Foods mentions “bacterial strain VTT-E-193585” which was isolated from the shore of the Baltic sea in Finland. Various promotional materials for Solein say that it’s unmodified or non-GMO.
“In a first main aspect, the invention relates to an isolated bacterial strain VTT-E-193585 or a derivative thereof. Strain VTT-E-193585 has been isolated from the seashore of the Baltic sea in Naantali, Finland.”
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2021084159A1/en
However, Solar Foods is reportedly involved in research with the goal to engineer a hydrogen-eating microbe to produce beta-lactoglobulin (whey protein):
“Coined Hydrocow, the research proposal comes from a consortium led by ‘food from air’ innovator Solar Foods in Finland… “Our goal is to engineer a microbe that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen, produced from water using electricity, into beta-lactoglobulin, a major constituent of milk,” explained project lead Solar Foods.”
https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2023/09/06/Milk-made-from-carbon-dioxide-and-electricity-backed-by-EU/
It seems they did a lot of work on the genetics of this strain. Hence it is likely that they used for the final product VTT E-193585 strain after gene knock-out of the PHB gene. Which apparently solved the bulk of the PHB issue, however some secondary pathway remained, since still ca. 3% 3-HB is in the commercial product.
Related reference: Inactivation of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) biosynthesis in ‘Knallgas’ bacterium Xanthobacter sp. SoF1 , https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10349022/
The production strain actually is able to inhabit the human gut at 10e6 level. I wonder how EFSA looks at it: a species that never was isolated from the human gut. If EFSA is too cautious that can be a show-stopper.
Chris, your prudent comment in the public consultation triggered me to dig deeper in this product. I found the following issue with it:
– identitiy of production strain ie species still missing (too novel?)
– polyhydroxy butyrate, why is it in the product, how to eliminate
– GMO or not, is gene knock-out a GMO technology or not
– reason of low digestibility, and tools to improve it
– colonization of the gut by production microbe, non-QPS, risks consequences, how to avoid it
– RNA content high or low? (can cause hyperuricemia, namely)
What is you take on it? (I know you focused on PHB)
Thanks for those comments Peter – interesting. I’m deep in another project at the moment, but hope to come back to the manufactured food debate in due course.
Chris, just a note: on the EFSA list of registered feed materials also the following is listed: 12.3.4 ,
Bacterial product rich in polyhydroxybutyrate
Product containing 3-hydroxybutyrate and 3-hydroxyvalerate, produced via fermentation with Cupriavidus necator, and non-viable bacterial protein meal remaining from the producing bacteria and fermentation broth
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32022R1104
The press release says: “Solar Foods announces an investment plan [990 million euros] for Europe’s single largest [greenhouse gas] emission reduction moonshot project”.
The press release also says: “Thus, if Solein would replace beef meat in the food system, the three factories enable a greenhouse gas emission reduction as substitution benefit in the order of 10 million tonnes CO2 equivalent per year.
My comment (above) was: “I think it would be easy to calculate a much higher level of ‘greenhouse gas emission reductions’ if soybeans (instead of Solein) were to replace [beef] meat in the food system.”
Where’s my evidence? It was easy to find, it’s in the very same study cited by Solar Foods as support for the company’s claims.
[Järviö, N., Maljanen, N.-L., Kobayashi, Y., Ryynänen, T., & Tuomisto, H. L. (2021). An attributional life cycle assessment of microbial protein production: A case study on using hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria. Science of The Total Environment, 776, 145764.]
That source (Järviö et al., 2021) is a study specifically comparing Solein microbial protein (MP) to meat and plant protein, according to the Solar Foods website:
“In her latest study, Järviö and her team researched the environmental impact and life cycle of food production, comparing the impact of growing cattle, peas, nuts and Solein, Solar Foods’ microbial protein.”
https://solarfoods.com/the-vicious-circle-of-protein/
Here are four relevant quotes from that study. The first two quotes are evidence that soybeans would provide a higher level of GHG reductions than Solein would. The third and fourth quotes are evidence that this higher level of GHG reductions for soybeans is not just higher, it’s *much* higher than for Solein (depending on one’s definition of “much”).
1. “For the plant-based proteins that were included, peas had a lower GWP compared to MP produced in the FAEM scenario.” (Järviö et al., 2021)
Thus, peas had a lower GWP (Global Warming Potential) than Solein produced using the Finnish average electricity mix! Soybeans have an even lower GWP than peas, but they aren’t mentioned right here because they are only considered as animal feed in this study. (The study’s other scenario FHE uses 100% Finnish hydropower electricity.)
Will the Solar Foods new factories be truly Solar powered? Or will they have 100% hydropower electricity, as in the most favourable study scenario? Or will they just be hooked up to the grid? It looks like Solein will actually be made with grid electricity. Page 41 of the Investments Plan (linked below) talks about “…a new power line enabling Solar Foods an access to the electricity grid”!
2. “However, only soybean meal and rapeseed cake had a lower GWP when MP is produced with conditions in the FHE scenario.” (Järviö et al., 2021)
Thus, even in the FHE scenario (using 100% Finnish hydropower electricity), the study found that soybean meal had a lower GWP than Solein!
But I did some digging and found evidence that the proposed new factories from Solar Foods won’t be using 100% hydropower, nor 100% renewable energy (of any type), so the actual GWP for Solein would thus be even higher than the result for the FHE scenario.
3. “As electricity consumption contributed most to the environmental impact of MP production, the choice and availability of the electricity sources will influence results.” (Järviö et al., 2021)
Thus, if Solar Foods’ claims were based on impact figures for 100% hydropower, but if the Solein factories aren’t actually powered by 100% hydropower or 100% renewable sources, then the claims would be incorrect.
4. “The biggest difference between the current study and the only previously published LCA study of MP available (Sillman et al., 2020) is the electricity requirement. Whereas this study assumed an electricity requirement of 18 kWh per 1 kg product produced, Sillman et al. (2020) estimated 10.96 kWh per 1 kg product produced.” (Järviö et al., 2021)
Repeated for emphasis:
“this study assumed an electricity requirement of 18 kWh per 1 kg product produced”
This assumption is clearly too low! We now know that the assumed 18 kWh/kg of Solein (which corresponds to 28 kWh per kg of protein) is less than half of the actual electricity requirement, as confirmed by the recent Nature (dot com) paper about Solar Foods’ process which was linked earlier.
Since the electricity consumption is said to be the largest contributor to the environmental impact of Solein production, then doubling (or more) the study’s assumed electricity consumption would significantly increase the study’s reported environmental impacts for Solein. So the study’s results clearly underestimate Solein’s impacts, including its Global Warming Potential.
Thus, whatever GWP advantages that peas and soybeans had over Solein in the study, the actual advantages will be even greater. And this ranking of emissions, from page 58 of the Investments Plan, is clearly incorrect when soybeans are considered:
Emissions (kgs of CO2 equivalent per kg of protein)
…Beef 200 kg
…Plants 5 kg
…Solein 1 kg
With soybeans representing the plants category, Plants should be at the bottom of the emissions list, with plant protein having a lower GWP than Solein bacterial protein.
https://investors.solarfoods.com/files/documents/Investments%20Plan%20and%20Impact%20for%20Industrial%20Scale%20Solein%C3%82%C2%AE%20Production_March%202025-compressed.pdf
Solein’s GHG reduction per kg protein is impressing. Though that will not sell the product. The gaps on the way to commercialization are huge, some of them very deep pitfalls…
Just a note: Solar powered in Finland all year through??
Peter wrote “Solein’s GHG reduction per kg protein is impressing.”
If Solein bacterial protein powder is compared to beef, with no consideration of the existing alternatives to beef protein, then yes, the GHG reduction per kg protein seems impressive. But how many people are really going to give up their steaks to instead eat an equivalent amount of bacterial protein powder (made from a PHB plastic-producing strain of bacteria)? And it remains to be seen whether the EFSA will even approve the use of Solein for a daily full meal-sized portion of protein.
It would be more appropriate to compare Solein to other types of protein powder, or to food crops like soybeans, in which case Solein’s GHG reductions could disappear, with Solein production causing more GHG emissions than soybean production (see Järviö et al., 2021).
To be clear, this ranking of emissions, from page 58 of the Solar Foods Investments Plan, is clearly incorrect when soybeans are considered separately (similar to how Solein bacterial protein is considered separately from the broad category of microbial protein):
Emissions (kgs of CO2 equivalent per kg of protein)
… Beef 200 kg
… Plants 5 kg
… Solein 1 kg
Below is what I think that ranking should be, if we use the actual numbers from the same source study which Solar Foods cited (Järviö et al., 2021), showing Soybean meal as the clear ‘winner’ :
Emissions (kgs of CO2 equivalent per kg of protein)
… Beef ………………… 204 kg
… Solein (FAEM) …. 13 kg with Finnish average electricity mix
… Solein (FHE) ……. 1.6 kg with 100% Finnish Hydro power
… Soybean meal …. 1.1 kg (which is 31% less GHG emissions than Solein FHE)
(Järviö et al., 2021, Tables 11 and 12 in Appendix A, SI1)
Those emissions numbers for Solein cover quite a large range (1.6 to 13 kg), depending on the electricity sources. They show that the GHG emissions for Solein could range from 45% higher to 11 times (1081%) higher than for Soybean meal. (And those numbers for Solein are clearly an underestimate of the actual GHG emissions, since the study assumed an electricity consumption for manufacturing Solein which turned out to be less than half the actual electricity consumption for the process, as discussed in an earlier comment.)
So what will the electricity source be for making Solein? It apparently won’t be 100% Finnish Hydropower, since the Solar Foods factories will be connected to the grid in Finland (as mentioned in an earlier comment). The most recent statistics (2024) for Finland’s electricity by energy source shows Hydropower is only 17.1% of the total. Solar is only 1.4% (less than Coal). Nuclear power is the largest component at 37.6%. (Nuclear Foods instead of Solar Foods?) Renewable energy sources (wind, hydro, biomass, solar) are 53.9% of the total, not 100%.
[from: Electricity by energy source and net imports 2024, page 9
https://energia.fi/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Electricity-Year-2024_20250115.pdf%5D
It’s also surprising to see that Finland is still a net importer of electricity, meaning they don’t produce enough electricity to cover their current demand (without considering all the additional electricity required for the planned Solein bacterial protein factories).
And even if Finland built more hydropower plants to supply Solar Food with 100% hydroelectricity, the study cited by Solar Foods (Järviö et al., 2021) would still support this claim of a hypothetical startup soybean farmer: “If soybean meal would replace Solein in the food system, the soybean farms enable a greenhouse gas emission reduction as substitution benefit…”
According to that same study (Järviö et al., 2021), as with Soybean meal, the GHG emissions for Peas are also much less than the GHC emissions for Solein in the FAEM scenario (with the Finnish average electricity mix).
3 vs 13
Peas — 3 kgs of CO2 equivalent per kg of protein
Solein (FAEM) — 13 kgs of CO2 equivalent per kg of protein
Fixed link from earlier comment:
https://energia.fi/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Electricity-Year-2024_20250115.pdf
All this comparison of industrially-produced proteins is interesting, but I’m curious about how, say, homegrown, non-mechanised, low-input products compare. I haven’t grown soybeans yet (broad beans are more sensible in this climate, though I do have some seed for soybeans that are less daylength-sensitive that I might try this summer), but I’m sure it’s quite possible to do with zero fossil emissions, because people did it with zero fossil inputs for hundreds, if not thousands,of years.
Livestock get more complicated in terms of greenhouse gases because of methane, and they definitely require more land than beans do but, crucially, sheep and cattle tend towards being able to eat plants that grow in places where arable farming is less viable. Fossil fuels give us the option of forcing some land into temporary viability with relatively low labour but that’s a very silly way to farm.
And just as the lines get blurry between my gardening and foraging, I suspect the lines get blurry between managing sheep or cattle, and managing a hunting ground with deer or bison. (And if we use fossil energy to produce bacterially-generated proteins in an effort to do land-sparing and re-wilding, we are going to end up with an increase in the size of the deer herd — unless we either take up venison consumption, or allow wolves to keep numbers in check.)
We use fossil fuels to replace human and animal labour, and partially uncoupling labour from calorie production and transport has changed our economic relationships with one another (which we must navigate for our survival); I’m sure I don’t need to explain here how the overly financialised debt-based model of farming leaves many farmers with little choice other than to practice extractive methods of agriculture just to stay in business, or how that leads to an oversupply of cheap grains that are used in CAFOs to produce cheap meat.
To opt out of this extractive paradigm and produce some of our own food, and participate in locally-oriented markets is difficult, but in practice there is still an awful lot of food produced this way, particularly in areas where mechanised agriculture makes less sense.
We haven’t yet escaped the “problem” of requiring land in order to grow food. Electrically-generated proteins strike me not as a genuine attempt to reduce emissions from food production (without reverting to higher human and animal labour), but to reduce land dependency: to uncouple food production not only from labour but also from landholding. The only obvious way for this to be profitable in terms of the product itself is for electricity prices to be very low; the only obvious way for it to involve fewer greenhouse gas emissions than soybeans is for that electricity to be emission-free or at least extremely low in emissions.
But if you look at what is possible in a given area of land another income stream becomes available: you purchase, say, 100 acres of forest, build a Solein plant on one acre of it, clear-cut the other 99 acres for a quick cash boost, and then get more funding for “re-wilding” or maybe carbon credits for planting trees for the pulp industry (maybe after a few decades of soybean farming first). Or maybe you buy up exhausted, overgrazed pasture and do something similar. Or maybe you do this on a smaller piece of brownbelt land and build a new suburb and charge rent on all those homes. The bacterial protein plant is just one more part of a diversified rent-seeking portfolio, a sort of hedge against the possibility that electricity becomes cheap enough for it to be viable at scale.
What none of these schemes will do is immediately reduce the area of land given to producing animal protein or livestock feed. At best, bacterial whey protein powder takes its place beside the conventional stuff (itself an industrial product of oversupply due to over-financialisation, or at least a much less pleasant option than cheese and yoghurt for dealing with seasonal fluctuations in milk production), and some people who want their arms to look bulgy in their shirts buy it. I’m definitely not convinced that this will change the underlying economic conditions that lead to overproduction of meat in the first place; it really isn’t a big enough lever, and so far it seems to use the same finance model.
Allotment waiting lists in the UK are still pretty high, and many places in the world don’t even have allotments on the same basis that we have them here. I know that small-scale growing isn’t always low in greenhouse gas emissions, but again: people have been growing food without fossil inputs for literally thousands of years, so it can probably be done. I wonder whether a better way to change diet-related emissions might be letting everyone who wants to have access to some land on which they can grow some beans and spuds and squashes, without the pressure to sell their produce (and compete with extraction-based markets). Our grocery bills have certainly fallen since I started. I don’t do a lot of comparison of, say, runner beans Vs soup peas to figure out which will get me more protein, though: I just grow lots and lots of different food, and assume it mostly comes out in the wash, given that some years are better for some crops than others.
Is Finland a major pea producer?
Kathryn wrote, “the only obvious way for [electrically-generated proteins] to involve fewer greenhouse gas emissions than soybeans is for that electricity to be emission-free or at least extremely low in emissions.”
That looks like a dead end.
Solein made with 100% hydropower was already shown to have higher GHG emissions than soybeans, per kilogram of protein (without even going into the digestibility issue).
Then what about 100% Solar PV, or 100% Nuclear, or 100% Wind, or 100% Geothermal electricity?
Solein produced by *any* of those electricity sources was found to have *higher* GHG emissions than soybeans (soy meal) in that same study cited by Solar Foods. (Järviö et al., 2021)
Emissions (kgs of CO2 equivalent per kg of protein)
… Beef ……………..… 204 kg
… Solein (FAEM) … 13 kg with Finnish average electricity mix
… Solein (PV) ……. 3.4 kg with 100% Solar PV electricity (Morocco)
… Solein (Geo) …. 2.6 kg with 100% Geothermal electricity (Iceland)
… Solein (Wind) .. 1.8 kg with 100% Finnish Wind electricity
… Solein (FHE) .…. 1.6 kg with 100% Finnish Hydro power
… Solein (Nuc) …… 1.5 kg with 100% Finnish Nuclear power
… Soybean meal … 1.1 kg
(Järviö et al., 2021, from Sensitivity Analysis in Appendix A, SI2, converted to per kg of protein)
Soybean meal was shown to have less GHG emissions (per kg of protein) than Solein, no matter what energy source scenario was used for making the Solein. And peas were shown to have less GHG emissions (per kg of protein) than Solein made with the 100% Solar PV electricity scenario.
Peter asked about pea production in Finland, and this reply wouldn’t post earlier, so I’m trying again with a disabled link.
There’s more pea production in Finland, on a per-capita basis, than in the UK, and this article says it’s rapidly increasing.
“Last year, the pea harvest exceeded 100,000 tons. Most of it consisted of feed peas at about 90,000 tons. The production of feed peas started to grow rapidly seven years ago – and has increased sevenfold in seven years. At the same time, the food pea harvest has almost doubled.”
dailyfinland[dot]fi/business/41896/Finland-sees-poor-rye-harvest-bumper-production-of-oat-pea
As to Finnish peas, thanks and duely noted, Steve. I guess peas are also high on purines though.
Steve, you may add that all comparison should be made on digestible protein content. Solein’s digestibility is around one third of that of beef. This is a further ignored variable of the equation…
Looking good!
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/801710/finding-lights-in-a-dark-age-by-chris-smaje/
There’s a line in the book “Saying NO…” where Chris suggests that since farmed food requires much less money (and other resources) than manufactured foods, the money saved could be spent on better uses such as nature conservation.
This inspired me to do some some back-of-envelope calculations to see just how many hectares of British land could be purchased for nature conservation and ‘re-wilding’, using the money saved by farming food instead of manufacturing bacterial protein.
*Spoiler: The farming scenario would result in around twice the number of hectares conserved, compared to the bacterial protein option.*
With calculations based on the results of the Leger (et al.) study discussed in “Saying NO…”, one hectare of PV panels could be used to power a bacterial protein factory in the UK producing roughly 11 times the protein yield from one hectare of peas, per year (using UK-specific data for insolation and dried pea yields).
It would thus take 11 hectares of farmland to produce the same amount of protein as the electricity from 1 hectare of PV panels (if nothing else was produced on the farm during the year, and ignoring the other inputs required for bacterial protein production).
Thus, 10 hectares of UK farmland could in theory be taken out of production and ‘re-wilded’, for each hectare of PV panels used to make bacterial protein in the UK. This seems to be the basic concept behind George Monbiot’s argument for land sparing and re-wilding (presented here as a ‘steel man’ instead of ‘straw man’ argument.)
However, that 1 hectare of PV panels would cost around 440,000 pounds (based on a US$540,000/ha cost, but it could be higher in the UK), plus around 10,000 pounds for purchasing the 1 hectare of land (if cheap pasture), for a subtotal of 450,000 pounds. Adding the costs for buying the farmland to be taken out of production (10 hectares at 22,000 pounds/ha) results in a total of 670,000 pounds. (The grand total, not considered here, would include the bacterial protein factory costs, and replacement costs after 25 years, etc.)
Thus, the bacterial protein scenario spends 670,000 pounds to ‘spare’ 10 hectares of farmland.
For the farming scenario, that same 670,000 pounds would purchase 30 hectares of farmland (at the same 22,000 pounds/ha), and use 11 of those hectares to make the same amount of protein, with 19 hectares left over. Those 19 hectares of unused farmland could be re-wilded, if desired.
Thus, the farming scenario would result in around twice the number of hectares conserved (19 vs. 10) as the bacterial protein option.
Again, this is slanted in favor of the bacterial protein scenario, as it only considers the cost of the PV ‘solar farm’ electricity source (leaving out the bacterial factory costs), and it only looks at initial capital costs for the ‘solar farm’ (leaving out the recurring equipment replacement costs every 25 years or so), and it disregards the annual operating costs (per kg of food produced) which are higher for bacterial protein, and it doesn’t consider the calories and other food values for the peas.
This turns George’s rationale on its head, even when we leave out the recurring capital costs and extra operating costs which could otherwise buy even more land for re-wilding.
Moreover, growing soybeans in the UK could in theory yield more protein per acre than peas, and spare even more land in the farming scenario.
“Soybean Is Likely to Be a Viable Crop in the UK”
https://www.agflow.com/agricultural-markets-news/soybean-is-likely-to-be-a-viable-crop-in-the-uk/
In my opinion, ‘re-wilding’ can be done more efficiently and effectively, if it’s what’s really desired, instead of falling for the hype and relying on the greenwashed schemes of venture capitalists and other profit-takers.
A recent lawsuit was filed by a couple nonprofits against Perfect Day, maker of a “precision fermentation” synthetic whey product called “ProFerm” that’s reportedly not-so-precisely fermented:
“ProFerm is only 13.4% cow’s whey protein.
86.6% of ProFerm proteins are fungal proteins.
ProFerm contained 93 fungal compounds not found in cow’s whey.
The fungal proteins and compounds are unknown to science, have never been part of the human diet, and are by-products of the GMOs used in the fermentation process.”
The nonprofits are not seeking money damages, instead they are hoping for something like an injunction against unlawful trade practices, since they say “ProFerm and products made from it are not even remotely similar to cow’s whey or milk.”
~~~~~~~~~~
“Nonprofits GMO/Toxin Free USA and Organic Consumers Association filed a lawsuit against Perfect Day, Inc., alleging material omissions and deceptive marketing of its genetically engineered synthetic “dairy” product, ProFerm.”
“The product, ProFerm, is a bioengineered “whey protein” used by brands such as Bored Cow Animal-Free Dairy Milk and Myprotein Whey Forward Animal Free Protein. ProFerm is made using synthetic biology (synbio) genetic engineering. The industry describes the process as “precision fermentation.”
“Perfect Day and brand partners market ProFerm as safe, sustainable, identical to cow-derived whey protein, capable of creating milk identical to cow’s milk including its nutritional profile, and free from GMOs.”
“Health Research Institute (HRI), an accredited, public-interest laboratory, analyzed ProFerm and a related product, along with certified-biodynamic and certified-organic whole cow’s milk.”
“HRI’s findings illustrate that…”
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gmotoxin-free-usa-sues-perfect-day-alleging-misleading-claims-about-animal-free-dairy-302430785.html
That ProFerm synthetic “whey” is used in “Bored Cow Animal-Free Dairy Milk”, from the company “Tomorrow Farms”, with a retail price in the US of $7.99 for 44 fl oz.
“Ingredients: water, sugar, whey protein (from fermentation), sunflower oil, less than 1% of…”
https://www.target.com/p/bored-cow-animal-free-dairy-milk-strawberry-4pk-44oz/-/A-89919226
I recently went to a closeout grocery retailer, and saw those Bored Cow products on the shelf, marked down from $7.99 to $0.99 (99 cents).
Today I tried to find the Bored Cow and Tomorrow Farms websites, but those sites seem to be shut down.
“Perfect Day would not say which brands are currently on the market using its whey protein from fermentation apart from Strive Freemilk, and would not comment on rumors that two of the best-known brands featuring the ingredient—Brave Robot ice cream and Bored Cow milk—are being discontinued.”
“Perfect Day has raised almost $900 million from backers including Temasek and Horizons Ventures since it was founded in 2014, and is under intense pressure to deliver.”
“Perfect Day is understood to be relying on inventory to supply existing customers such as Strive FreeMilk before a new fermentation facility in India run with its joint venture partner Zydus Lifesciences comes online in 2026.”
(Strive FreeMilk retails in the US for around $16 per gallon, and has similar main ingredients as Bored Cow: water, “animal-free whey protein”, sunflower oil, sugar, etc.)
“Perfect Day buries legal hatchet with co-manufacturer; searches for new CEO”
https://agfundernews.com/exclusive-perfect-day-buries-legal-hatchet-with-co-manufacturer-searches-for-new-ceo
“The fungal proteins and compounds are unknown to science…”
Novel proteins ? What could go wrong with that ?!
An update about Solar Foods’ application for novel food authorisation of bacterial protein powder in the EU:
The deadline for the EFSA’s food safety “Risk Assessment” has been extended even further into the future, and is now slated to be finished by 22 December 2025. (Previously, a November deadline was listed for the “Risk Assessment”, after having been extended multiple times since an earlier deadline of February 2025.)
https://open.efsa.europa.eu/question/EFSA-Q-2022-00140
As explained in a Forbes article (linked in a comment above), the EFSA’s “Risk Assessment” is only the first part of the approval process in the EU. The second part is the “risk management phase”, involving representatives of all EU member states and requiring a supermajority agreement.
Here’s an article (published 29 January 2024) which explains the EU’s regulatory process for evaluating the bacterial protein powder manufactured by Solar Foods. Some quotes:
~~~~~~~~~~
‘In the European Union, novel food approval is a three-step process. “Companies that want to sell novel foods must submit a dossier to the European Commission, which does a suitability test for the substance using a basic set of requirement,” Wolfgang Gelbmann, a scientific officer in the novel foods team of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), tells The Parliament.’
“Once the Commission is satisfied, EFSA is invited to do a risk assessment of the substance,” he adds. “After a maximum of nine months, EFSA must publish a decision and the Commission has a further seven months to decide if the product should be made commercially available.”
~~~~~~~~~~
https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/food-microbial-protein-solein-agriculture
Thus, the EFSA has a maximum of 9 months to complete the risk assessment, not counting the “clock stop” periods when they are awaiting more information from Solar Foods. The EC then has an additional 7 months to make the final decision of whether the bacterial protein powder should be approved for sale.
From that same 2024 article:
~~~~~~~~~~
‘Solar Foods is hoping to get an opinion from EFSA in 2024 which, if positive, could mean approval for Solein to be sold in the EU in 2025.’
~~~~~~~~~~
The latest setback could delay the EC decision until the second half of 2026 (7 months after the EFSA’s current Risk Assessment Deadline of December 22, 2025), and of course the decision could be negative. Behind all the hype and optimism, the real situation appears to be a bit uncertain.
Yesterday (16 July), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) added about 6 more months to their “Risk Assessment” timeline for Solar Foods bacterial protein powder Solein®. The timeline for the EFSA’s “Risk Assessment” of Solein has now been extended to 13 June 2026 (after having been previously extended multiple times in 2025, from February to December).
This further delay is evidently due to the EFSA needing more data from Solar Foods on a number of topics including “Compositional data”, “Toxicological information”, and “Genotoxicity”.
(See “Additional data request… Requested on: 16/07/2025”.)
https://open.efsa.europa.eu/question/EFSA-Q-2022-00140
As explained in articles linked in earlier comments, after the Risk Assessment from the EFSA, the European Commission then has an additional 7 months to make the decision about whether or not the bacterial protein powder is approved for sale in the EU.
An article from 2024 in The Parliament (linked in a comment above) says “Solar Foods is hoping to get an opinion from EFSA in 2024 which, if positive, could mean approval for Solein to be sold in the EU in 2025.” However, the latest timeline update means that the EC approval for Solein might not happen until 2027 (mid-June 2026 plus seven months), assuming a satisfactory Risk Assessment (which remains to be seen).
Thanks for that report, Steve. It does make you wonder why the risk assessment is taking so long – maybe there’s something a bit risky about this product!
“Breaking: Gas fermentation ‘protein from air’ startup Arkeon files for insolvency”
Based in Vienna, “Arkeon is one of a small, but high-profile group of startups attempting to decouple food production from agricultural land via gas fermentation, using gases instead of purified sugars to feed microbes.”
However, “Arkeon’s journey has come to an end…”
https://agfundernews.com/breaking-gas-fermentation-protein-from-air-startup-arkeon-files-for-insolvency-every-failure-teaches-us-something-new
“After 7+ years” and millions in funding (including a reported $18 million raised in July 2024), a manufacturer of bacterial protein “calls it quits”.
“NovoNutrients is one of a small group of startups attempting to decouple food production from agricultural land via gas fermentation, using gases instead of purified sugars to feed microbes that produce protein.”
“California-based gas fermentation company NovoNutrients has entered the Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (ABC) process, which serves as an alternative to bankruptcy. The move follows news that Austrian ‘protein from air’ startup Arkeon has filed for insolvency.”
https://agfundernews.com/gas-fermentation-startup-novonutrients-calls-it-quits-seeks-buyer-for-assets-the-technologys-potential-remains-unchanged
Protein from fermentation was hyped by George Monbiot in articles and in his book Regenesis, but perceptions of its promise seem to be trending sharply downward. Fermentation protein investments have fallen from $1.8 billion in 2021, to $651 million in 2024, to $148 million in the first half of 2025, to less than $3 million in the second quarter of 2025, according to this article:
Alternative Protein Funding Down by 50% in the First Half of 2025
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/alternative-protein-investent-decline-q2-2025-funding/
Speaking of raising capital (or not) for fermentation protein ventures, I think it’s interesting that Solar Foods did a “direct listing” of their shares (at Nasdaq Helsinki in 2024), instead of the typical listing via an IPO.
According to Nasdaq dot com, a direct listing allows existing shareholders (like early stage investors) to “cash out”, with “unrestricted liquidity”, by selling shares to the public in a process that doesn’t raise capital for the company. Whereas an IPO provides “restricted liquidity” to existing shareholders while raising capital for the company.
“When a company decides to go public, there are typically existing shareholders including founders, employees, and various early stage investors. Both an IPO and a direct listing enable these investors to cash out.”
“Typically, a company will list securities on a national securities exchange to provide restricted liquidity to existing shareholders and to raise capital via an Initial Public Offering (IPO). A direct listing, however, provides unrestricted liquidity to existing shareholders and the company does not concurrently issue securities to public investors to raise capital.
https://www.nasdaq.com/solutions/listings/markets/americas/ways-to-list/direct
The unaudited half-year report (January-June 2025) for Solar Foods was published on 14 August and reveals these snippets:
1. More than a full year after their new factory (touted as having 160-tons annual capacity) became operational, Solar Foods’ reported revenue (aka sales) remains “EUR 0 million (0).” The detailed report does show a revenue of 14,131 euros for the first half of 2025. I wonder how many tons (or kg) of protein have they successfully produced, with such low revenue?
2. Meanwhile, their “cash and cash equivalents” at the end of June 2025 was 12.7 Million euros, down from 24.2 Million euros at the end of June 2024. (The cash on hand was helped by a grant of 4.3 Million euros received in 2025, reported as “other operating income”.)
3. Solar Foods’ reported expenses during the first half of 2025 included 2.8 Million euros for personnel, 4.7 Million euros for “depreciation and amortization”, and 4.2 Million euros for “other operating expenses” during the 6-month period. My subtotal of these three major expense categories is 11.7 Million euros for six months (or 7.0 Million euros for 6 months of personnel and other operating expenses, excluding depreciation and amortization).
4. Solar Foods’ total liabilities of 20.9 Million euros (at the end of June 2025) includes 18.2 Million euros for “loans from credit institutions”.
5. Furthermore…
“At the end of the financial year, unaudited grant settlements include a possible repayment liability corresponding to the amount of the grant received of EUR 19,160,386 (situation on 30 June 2025).”
6. Moreover…
“The company is dependent on external financing and needs significantly more equity and debt financing.”
“Future profitability requires full utilization of the capacity of the planned production plant.”
“It is uncertain whether the company can obtain the necessary financing, and any additional financing may change the company’s ownership.”
“The company’s ability to obtain financing depends on many factors, and there is no certainty that funding will be available on reasonable terms or at all.”
7. And a final note on “the company’s ability to continue as a going concern”…
“The company has a financing agreement with one lender that includes covenant terms related to minimum liquidity and gearing. The covenant agreement entitles the lender to call in the loan or amend the loan terms if the specific conditions are not met.”
“Management assesses the adequacy of financing and compliance with the covenant terms from a going concern perspective and for planning purposes, using a cash flow forecast. According to management’s assessment, without additional financing, one or more covenants may be breached in Q2 2026, which could lead to early repayment of the loan. This may raise substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
“To address the situation, the company is in ongoing negotiations with various parties regarding additional financing and is also preparing a potential cost-saving plan to be implemented in early 2026. In management’s view, these measures will ensure compliance with the covenant terms for at least the next 12 months from the reporting date.”
Refer to the report for the rest of the numbers, full quotes, etc.
https://investors.solarfoods.com/files/documents/Solar%20Foods%20half-year%20report%202025.pdf
On the date this report was published, the share price for Solar Foods dropped 2.99% in a single day of trading (according to Investing dot com).
180 to 210 euros per kg of protein, in a best case scenario?
Doing some rough calculations, I’ll assume a simplified best case scenario whereby Solar Foods is already producing its factory capacity of 160 metric tons of Solein annually (or 80,000 kg for the first 6 months of 2025), and all the company’s reported personnel and operating expenses are divided by this maximum production amount to get a cost per kg.
7.0 Million euros was reportedly spent for 6 months of personnel and other operating expenses, excluding depreciation and amortization. Dividing this by 80,000 kg results in:
87.5 euros per kg of Solein.
109 euros per kg of protein, if the Solein is 80% protein.
125 euros per kg of protein, if the Solein is 70% protein.
…for this simplified best case scenario (full capacity), which excludes the depreciation and amortization costs (of equipment, facilities, etc.) that would add 73 to 84 more euros to the above cost per kg of protein produced, if my calculations are correct.
Research published in the British Food Journal found that only 54% of consumers surveyed would be “willing to try” bacterial protein, while a significantly higher 70% and 71% would be willing to try protein sources made from fungi and algae, respectively.
https://www.emerald.com/bfj/article-abstract/doi/10.1108/BFJ-10-2024-1095/1249162/Feeding-the-future-consumer-willingness-to-try
No wonder Solar Foods seems to be downplaying the fact that their Solein® protein is bacterial protein. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I didn’t find the word “bacteria” mentioned at all in their presentation document or their website page on the science behind Solein. Instead of bacteria, they call it “microorganisms” and “Solein cells”. The euphemistic references to “Solein cells” seem to avoid or obscure the fact that Solein consists of a dried bacterial slurry mass of the whole cells of bacteria (not just the digestible parts).
A recent headline:
“Solar Foods Oyj updates operating model of Factory 02 and specifies financing needs”
Solar Foods is doing “pre-engineering” of their envisioned Factory 02, with “a design capacity of 6.4 annual kilotons” for phase 2 of this future factory, “which means a total [Factory 02 capital expenditure] investment of EUR 182 million” for the estimated completion of phase 2 by 2030.
As part of this EUR 182 million capital expenditure for Factory 02, Solar Foods is estimating they will obtain EUR 89 million from IPCEI grants. “The company is currently exploring implementation options with the government for utilising the remaining grant notification for the Factory 02 project.” (Individuals who own shares in Solar Foods, which are bought and sold via the NASDAQ stock market, must be happy to see government funding paying towards the company’s capital expenditures.)
After scaling up to this Factory 02 by 2030, with its phase 2 annual production capacity of 6.4 million kg, Solar Foods estimates that their company’s internal costs per kg of product (Solein bacterial protein powder) will decrease to EUR 11.6 per kg, which converts to approximately US$6.10 per pound (cost to the manufacturer).
Those costs per kilogram are based on Solar Foods’ assumption that the price of electricity will be only 40 euros per MWH in 2030 (which is only 0.04 euros per kWh).
The company’s estimated future income is based on an average selling price of EUR 17.0 per kg, which converts to approximately US$8.95 per pound, for Solein bacterial protein powder.
Without even considering the digestibility of bacterial protein, Solein has less total protein content than its would-be competitor, soy protein isolate (which typically has 90% protein), yet the soy protein isolate can evidently be purchased in the US for a lower price per kg than the internal costs which Solar Foods estimates it will pay per kilogram of Solein (for their production and other costs).
For example, “this Soy Protein Isolate is a Non-GMO Vegetable 90% Protein Powder with no additives of any kind” and the wholesale price is only US$5.78 per pound for a 1,000 kg order, including the shipping costs for customers within the US. This converts to approximately EUR 11.0 per kg.
bulkfoods dot com/pure-protein-powders/soy-protein-isolate.html#/size-44-lb-case
So this *wholesale price* (including shipping to US addresses) for Soy Protein Isolate is only around EUR 11.0 per kg (the cost to produce the soy protein is presumably less), while Solar Foods estimates that it will be able to get its *internal costs* for Solein down to EUR 11.6 per kg (by 2030, if they can obtain electricity for only EUR 0.04 per kWh). Solar Foods’ internal costs per kg of Solein would thus be higher than the wholesale selling price of Soy Protein Isolate for this example (which was the first result of my online search).
How will the novel food Solein bacterial protein powder (still undergoing an extended risk assessment in the EU), with an average selling price of EUR 17.0 per kg (according to Solar Foods financial statements), be able to successfully compete with Soy Protein Isolate which is currently priced around EUR 11.0 per kg in the US (including shipping)?
~~~~~~~~~~
https://mfn.se/ind/a/solar-foods/inside-information-solar-foods-oyj-updates-operating-model-of-factory-02-and-specifies-financing-needs-ca0fec5b
“The income statement estimates are based on the following assumptions:
“Price of electricity €40 / MWh
“Production cost €6.5 / kg
“Other costs €4.6 / kg
“Depreciation (20 years) €0.5 / kg
“Average selling price €17.0 / kg
“Company-level EBIT €5.4 / kg”