Solar Foods - food from thin air

‘Food from thin air.’ Sounds very exciting doesn’t it? Like we’re living in some kind of Star Trek wonderland where everything’s powered by glowing blue cubes and public transport is functional. But here it is: Solar Foods’ Soylein. Originally invented by NASA and the Soviets to keep astronauts ticking along up there, and now brought to market by some clever Finns. Makes the whole ‘Spaceship Earth’ thing a whole lot more tangible. And it couldn’t have come at a better time: at the precise moment the mothership's air conditioning systems are being destroyed at record speed by loggers and cattle ranchers, some heroic scientists show up just in time to sever the sobering connection between population growth and land use. It's possible, guys! We can eat spaceman food and rewild the planet! Maybe?

Well, first of all: what is it? Soylein is a microbe found in nature, which can be fed on hydrogen, oxygen, CO₂ and a few other chemical additives like ammonia to create a protein-rich, neutral-tasting foodstuff similar to soy. The great thing is that the hydrogen and oxygen particles can be created using electrolysis, leaving us with the power to effectively turn electricity into food. The environmental prospects look rosy. A recent study into the feasibility of creating Soylein using solar power found that its production uses a tenth of the land needed for the soy bean to provide the same amount of protein, and half the land needed by rice paddies to offer the same amount of calories. As these technologies improve, who knows how efficient food production could become?

But will people buy it? The fact that Soylein comes from a microbe rather than a plant might put some people off. Although people have been eating yoghurt cultures for a long time, kimchi and kombucha are gaining in popularity, and anyone who's had a bluish-green smoothie from a supermarket has probably ingested spirulina, so the normalisation of edible bacteria is well underway. And the taste? "Neutral, with a hint of umami." A blank canvas, then. And judging by the success of the Impossible Burger, This Isn't Bacon and Quorn Chicken Nuggets, the technology of turning miscellaneous protein mush into convincing meat substitutes is advancing rapidly and it probably won't be long until they can wrangle Soylein into something delicious and juicy. The only problems I can foretell are the reactionary forces of cultural meat-obsession (I can hear Jeremy Clarkson sneering at consumers of this newfangled space slime already) and the name (surely they could have picked something that doesn't sound like Soylent Green). Oh, and it won't fulfil our vitamin and micronutrient requirements, for which we'll have to keep around those boring old organic vegetable farms. Other than that... "Replicator, make me a ham sandwich!"

Of course, the law of unintended consequences is unavoidable. A lot of this cheap new protein might just be fed to more and more cows, leading to more methane production and hastening the antibiotic apocalypse. But that's where we come in, ethical consumers buying the innovative protein thing before it can find its way into a cow's mouth.