The Small Farm Future Blog

Saving the world from bad ideas: the continuing failure of food ecomodernism

Posted on June 30, 2026 | 1 Comment

This week sees a more personal anniversary for me than the Brexit celebrations/recriminations last time: it’s three years since I published my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. In it, I criticised the idea that factory-produced bacterial food could be a realistic and significant ‘farm free’ alternative to food from agricultural land, as touted by George Monbiot in his book about the food system, Regenesis. I also criticised various other aspects of George’s takes on the food system, and briefly set out an agrarian localist alternative – not, for the most part, a vision I especially want to see, but one that I think will probably be necessary as a least-bad way of extricating ourselves from the present meta-crisis.

There’ve been a few developments in the factory-food sector since Saying NO… was published, so an anniversary update on these details seems apposite. Meanwhile, George hasn’t taken kindly to my book, making various derogatory comments about me – most recently in this podcast with Mark Lynas. Mark is a co-author of The Ecomodernist Manifesto and an associate of George’s from the Reboot Food campaign of the organisation formerly known as RePlanet, which has been supported financially by the hedge fund Quadrature Capital, via its Quadrature Climate Foundation.

In the pod, George characterises my position as “to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve”. He adds “I mean, I’m paraphrasing”. That ‘paraphrase’ is doing an awful lot of creative work, so I’d like to put on record a more accurate statement of where I’d like the rest of the world to go and what I’d like to let them do there. Especially because the podcast is called ‘Saving the World from Bad Ideas’, and I want to explain why the world needs saving from the bad ideas of George and his fellow ecomodernists.¹

So, this essay is an anniversary reflection on Saying NO… in three parts:

(1) What have we learned in the last three years about factory-made bacterial food as a means – invoking the subtitle of George’s book – of “feeding the world without devouring the planet”?

(2) What has been happening in the corporate biotech sector around bacterial food?

(3) What can we learn from Mark and George’s recent podcast discussion about ecomodernist politics, from two of its prominent voices?

1. Factory-produced bacterial protein: an unrealistic mass food source

Let’s begin on the more technical side of things with a quick review of what factory-based bacterial food production involves.

Electricity from so-called ‘renewable’ sources (or ‘rebuildable’ as Nate Hagens more plausibly calls them) is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is fed to bacteria in reactor tanks, resulting ultimately in a high-protein powder made from the dried bacterial mass. The electricity has to come from rebuildables rather than fossil fuels if the technology isn’t just going to be another big carbon dump into the atmosphere. As well as the hydrogen and oxygen, other necessary inputs are tap water (25 tonnes per tonne of protein produced), ammonia (237kg per tonne) and ‘minerals’ (87kg per tonne). The process also creates liquid waste (around 20 tonnes per tonne of protein, if I’ve understood the data presentation correctly) with various contaminants which require wastewater treatment and diposal.²

The main purported advantage of this technology is that in theory it has a lower land footprint than farmed sources of protein, with the implication that this ‘spares’ land for nature and biodiversity that would otherwise be required for farming. Whether it does have a lower footprint in practice, and whether technologies that are land-sparing in theory actually do spare land for nature are matters I won’t pursue here, but the answers aren’t clear cut.

A disadvantage of the technology is that it uses huge amounts of supplied electrical energy. Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.

In Regenesis George claimed that the process used 16.7kWh of electrical energy to produce 1kg of bacterial protein, and calculated that on this basis the global population’s protein needs could be met with about 11 percent of total electricity supply (of all kinds – fossil and non-fossil)³. But this seemed to me wrong. I calculated a figure of 65.3kWh/kg using the best data available to me at the time in the research literature.⁴ Although George doubled down on the accuracy of his calculation, a definitive figure of 69.3 kWh/kg later emerged, based on industry data from the people who devised the process – more than four times the electricity consumption George claimed.² Running his calculations again with the new definitive figure (and updating it to global population and electrical energy generation figures for 2024⁵) yields these results:

• To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used 33 percent of total global generated electricity
• To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy – (104 percent)

I must note that these energy requirements relate only to the cost of getting from inputs to outputs in the factory, not the total energy cost of the whole process. And they relate only to the protein component of the diet, which is less demanding of energetic input to meet dietary needs than food energy (calorific foods).

I must note too that efforts to decarbonize the global economy rest heavily on renewable/rebuildable electricity, which will be needed to power almost everything if we expect life to continue along present lines – including things currently energised more efficiently by fossil fuels. We will need renewable electricity for transport, mining, construction, cement, plastics, fertilizer, metals, data centres and so on. Agriculture is the only major sector that at present is significantly energised directly by zero cost and zero carbon sunlight. Yet just at the time when we need renewable electricity to do the heavy lifting of the global economy, advocates of bacterial food for mass nutrition are effectively implying we should use all current renewable electricity, and more, for food production that can otherwise be energised directly by sunlight.

Finally on the technical side of things, a recent study comparing the digestibility of pea protein with the Solein® protein that George advocates for in Regenesis found that while the former exhibited near complete digestion, the digestibility of Solein® protein was in the range of 58-68 percent. That suggests the effective energy cost of Solein® in terms of its digestible component is even higher than the figures I cited above.⁶

So – if you think there will be abundant, cheap, low-carbon electricity available in the future at levels so far beyond present generation that it can meet not only all the growing needs for electricity in every other sector but also replace the free, zero-carbon energy from sunlight used in farming, then maybe factory-produced protein will be feasible as a mass food technology. But I see no grounds at present for such fantastically cornucopian assumptions.

2. Corporate musical chairs

It seems that investors don’t either. In 2025, invested capital in the alternative protein fermentation sector fell to only 56 percent  the 2024 level. The whole ‘food from thin air’ thing always seemed like a voguish attempt by small tech startups to attract venture capital through greenwash rather than a well-informed approach to addressing ecological and social problems in the food system. Unfortunately, it bamboozled a lot of people who ought to have known better. As is the way with fashion, things have now moved on to new fads like AI, with equally questionable food system benefits. (I can’t help noticing that George’s more recent food system ventures involve AI-heavy work funded via Jeff Bezos’s money to help verify soil carbon markets – I discuss this further here).

Despite the feeding-the-world rhetoric that’s surrounded the bacterial food industry, the only product so far on the market I’m aware of containing Solein® is a dietary supplement drink called Planta® marketed in the USA at a price of $49.99 for sachets containing 500g of protein (not all of which is from Solein®). This seems about as far removed as you can get from addressing global food needs, but it’s in keeping with the company’s priorities for “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States, implementation of a concept sales model, [and] increasing product price points”.

It seems that the motivation for starting Solein® manufacture was always about realizing its business potential, according to an interview with one of its manufacturer’s co-founders. Well, it’s a jungle out there in the present global economy. I’ve had to make my own compromises with that, so I don’t begrudge the company trying to make a profit. At present, its shares are trading at less than half their initial stock market price, but if they can turn things around by boosting sales of products like Planta® I don’t particularly have a problem with that.

What I do have a problem with is the notion that such products have a significant place in addressing global food needs and are therefore deserving of public subsidy (such as the EU’s €50 million Horizon funding). I consider this a poor use of public money and of precious time in the face of enormous global inequalities and systemic crises – a bad idea from which the world needs saving. When supposedly left-leaning journalists climb aboard the greenwash train, writing that such business ventures are “a gift to the world, which arrives just as we need it most” and which will somehow avoid the usual industrial scale-up pressures so that it can be “used by local businesses to serve local markets” (Regenesis, p.209) the bad idea takes flight. Inevitably, plans are already afoot to scale up Solein® production in a new factory with the hope of increasing earnings and starting to turn a profit.

Elsewhere, the rollout of Solein® has been even slower. In the UK, the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes reported in February 2026 that information gaps were still present on nutritional and toxicological information for Solein®, putting their review on hold until the manufacturer “returns with the data required to assure safety”. In the European Union, the European Food Safety Authority has repeatedly requested more toxicological information about the product, and to date has delayed their risk assessment until the additional data is received. Perhaps this arm of the EU is saving the world from a bad idea that another arm is funding?

So far, the story of novel proteins that George heralded in Regenesis has been one of stalling investment, boutique products, negative profits, industrial scale up, regulatory delay and speculative public subsidy. It certainly hasn’t been about “feeding the world without devouring the planet”. Let’s hope there’s somewhere to sit down when the music stops. The signs aren’t hopeful.

3. Techno-nostalgia, white saviours and missing politics

So much for the technical update. I’ll now make a few comments on George’s remarks in his ‘bad ideas’ podcast.

In the pod, George divides environmental philosophy into three parts and namechecks me as representative of what he calls ‘green social nostalgia’. He doesn’t justify this, except by saying that I want to ‘re-peasantise’ the world. In fact I argue against this on p.147 of my book, but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input. This might look in some ways a bit like old-time agrarianisms, but it’s a fallacy to think that a low-energy future involves turning the clock back to the past just because of a shared low-energy agrarianism. As I wrote in Saying NO… “people are going to have to invent agrarian localisms anew” (p.147).

In fact, I think it’s the ecomodernists like Mark Lynas and George who are the nostalgic ones. Their thinking involves what Anthony Galluzzo nicely calls “an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century”⁷ – a yearning for the time when it was genuinely possible to believe that modern high-energy technologies were an unalloyed force for good. Oh for those happy days when we thought we could solve the major human problems technologically with no downsides, before the disillusioning shadow of nuclear apocalypse, novel chemical pollution, social dislocation and ecocide darkened the dream. Perhaps it’s this nostalgia for the innocent days of tech solutionism that leads George to cling on to ventures like bacterial protein which are manifestly inadequate to current food system problems.

Let’s turn now to George’s “to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve” characterisation of my position, which he justifies with two remarks. The first is a partial quotation from Saying NO… in which I refer to “the mysteries and passions” that animate people’s life projects more than secondary goals like cheapness and familiarity of the kind that (eco)modernist managerialism emphasises (p.139). George wilfully misrepresents this as an absurd and repugnant argument that well-off people like me should follow our passions at the expense of the suffering and hunger of others – not a position that a good faith interpretation of my writings can sustain. Quite simply, George defames me and demeans himself with such word-twisting. There’s little need to dwell further on such low stuff, but I’ll come back shortly to why George’s own pursuit of mystery and passion is imperilling the rest of the world.

The second remark is more interesting. George mentions that I describe cities as human feedlots, which he finds objectionable (you can find similar characterisations in the writings of ecologists like Andy McGuire and William Rees). The analogy is biophysical, not moral or pejorative. To remain healthy, the people in a large and crowded modern city – just like the livestock in a large and crowded modern feedlot – require water, food and other inputs to be imported from large hinterlands (nowadays global in scale) and for wastes to be exported, all at high energetic and infrastructural costs. I don’t believe it will be feasible to keep paying those costs in many cities in the future, which makes me seriously worried about the prospects for the people living in them.

So while George – again I think in a wilful misrepresentation – portrays me as someone who thinks people should be forced out of cities due to my prior ideological commitments to ruralism and agrarianism, the truth is that in an ideal world I’d like people to be able to live wherever they want (this includes the many people, often from the ranks of the rural poor, who don’t especially want to live or work in cities, but don’t have much choice). However, in our non-ideal biophysical reality, present levels of urbanism are unlikely to be sustainable without cheap fossil fuels, and the human cost of that could be horrific unless we address it urgently. By talking over me and people like me who are expressing such fears, I think it’s George who’s fanning the flames of mass death. Particularly since he won’t correct a clear numerical error in his writing that makes his touted solution seem more plausible than it really is. This is more than intellectual bad faith – it’s dangerous.

Incidentally, Mark Lynas remarked on the podcast that feedlots are a more efficient way of producing meat than extensive farming. That may be true at the high levels of energetic and material throughput of the current meat industry, but a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput. This isn’t advanced-level economics, but Mark and George’s failure to understand such things – their focus on ‘secondary goals’ like efficiency – betrays an ignorance about food system dynamics that stalks ecomodernism (or ‘green pragmatism’ – it’s interesting to see George reverting to the terminology of his onetime antagonist, Stewart Brand). George’s analysis in Regenesis and in his later pushbacks against me are full of such basic intellectual errors about the food system. Painfully in relation to someone I once admired for political courage and journalistic integrity, I’ve come to see George as just another media voice clamouring for attention without intellectual or ethical seriousness – but alas with a powerful platform to reach people and cause harm.

Moving from intellectual errors to more ad hominem attacks, George makes an issue of my race and gender in his ‘let them starve’ remarks (“privileged white men, living out their mysteries and passions while saying, well, to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve”).

Now, like George, I’m unquestionably a white man who was born into a lot of unearned privilege, albeit not quite as much as him. Generally, I try to avoid playing competitive games with other white guys about who cares more for underprivileged others, because nobody comes out of it looking good. But I’ve got to say it takes some nerve for George to call me out on this when the substance of his book involves explaining how a handful of white folks are solving the world’s food problems, while he gives no significant space or consideration to the millions of small farmers the world over who might have something to say about it too. Scholars of agrarian societies in the Global South have likewise challenged George and the elite techno-utopian politics he speaks for, as it reshapes rural lives and landscapes from afar without regard to local consequences.⁸

In this sense, I think I was wrong to imply in Saying NO… that ecomodernism focuses on secondary managerialist goals like the efficiency of feedlots without speaking to the mysteries and passions of what animates life. A mystery and a passion that seems to animate the life of a lot of the privileged white men who embrace ecomodernism is a belief in the ever-growing ability of high-energy high-tech emerging from rich countries to redeem all of humanity – ‘progress’ as the master narrative of the modern. It’s a mystery to this particular privileged white man as to why so many of my kind, like George, are so passionately committed to this mysterious belief system – for example in evidence-light advocacy for bacterial protein as a mass food solution. My guess is that it replicates the sense of power and control that such men are accustomed to exercising, deploying it to feelgood ends without fundamentally challenging their apical social position.

There’s a sentence in Regenesis that I keep coming back to. With the advent of factory-produced bacterial food, George says, “Indigenous people could reclaim and restore their land” (p.189). Initially, I missed the underlying claim involved in saying this, perhaps due to my own white privilege. But George seems to be implying here that Indigenous people lost their lands because in the past these lands were needed in quantity by colonising white people for the production of food, using inefficient, old-time, extensive methods. Yet now, he implies, the new and purportedly more efficient food technologies devised by white guys in the labs and factories of the Global North happily allow Indigenous people to claim their lands back. You’d be hard pushed to efface the politics of colonial and postcolonial power and land-grabbing more glibly.

Which brings me back finally to politics. I’ve noticed an uptick in the tendency of supposedly left-wing commentators like George to invoke the spectre of the far right in relation to agrarian and rural politics, sometimes thoughtfully and with good reason, but often in a kind of kneejerk way that smears any kind of ruralism with the ‘far right’ association.

Meanwhile, I sense a growing convergence of most forms of ‘progressive’ politics into a kind of mushy centrist techno-liberalism newly anxious to roll over, paws up, for a tickle from corporate interests. This is the only way I can understand George’s recent involvement in projects supported by the likes of Quadrature Capital and the Bezos Earth Fund, along with his business-as-usual geopolitics.

The alternative to this isn’t ‘the far right’ but a range of citizen-focused politics like agrarian populism, distributism and civic republicanism that badly need excavating, as I’ve tried to do in my writing. You can write op-eds fulminating against neoliberalism and corporate malfeasance all you like, but if you implicitly support that modus operandi in the food system and in other aspects of contemporary political life, those fulminations are worse than useless.

Various people have said to me it’s a shame that George and I are at loggerheads over the food system, since ultimately we’re on the same side. But here’s where I do agree with the parting of the ways that George articulates on the podcast, albeit not with how he characterizes them: I think his position is a charter for an ineffectual disaster techno-capitalism that will lead to wealth for a few and misery for many. That’s why I think George is now a politically dangerous operator, and why – three years ago – I wrote Saying NO… I haven’t seen anything from him or from the wider corporate world of manufactured proteins since then to suggest otherwise.

Notes

1. George has disavowed the ‘ecomodernist’ tag, although he creeps ever closer to it. But as I argue later in this piece, his definition of it as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change” aptly encapsulates his current positions.
2. Fasihi, M. et al. 2025. Global potential of sustainable single-cell protein based on variable renewable energy. Nature Communications 16 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56364-1.
3. Monbiot, G. 2022. Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, p.190.
4. Smaje, C. 2023. Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future p.38. See also https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Energy-Costs-of-Bacterial-Food-Oct-24.pdf.
5. Population and energy data for 2024 respectively from the World Development Indicators, https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators and the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy, https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review. I use electricity generation rather than consumption figures in this calculation.
6. Caliscan, C. et al. 2026. Techno-functional and nutritional evaluation of Solein single-cell protein and its application in non-dairy yoghurt alternatives. Food Research International 229 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2026.118467.
7. Anthony Galluzzo. 2024. Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, p.9.
8. Paprocki, K. and J. McCarthy. 2024. ‘The agrarian question of climate change’. Progress in Human Geography 48, https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241269701.