2nd part in series of posts on ‘How to Short Circuit predator Capitalism’s Race to Oblivion’ 1st part here: Endless Electricity
by thefreeonline on 3rd Oct 2023 summary of Regenesis-pdf Ch7 by George Monbiot– Free book download.. REGENESIS
Among the survival strategies of microbes in the soil is the ability to harvest energy in interesting ways. The species Solar Foods ferments draws its energy
neither from photosynthesis nor from products created by other organisms, but from hydrogen. It’s a hydrogen oxygenating bacterium.
The view through a porthole in the fermentation tank, where the brew of Pasi (director of Solar Foods) churned as if in a washing machine, was unpromising: a thin yellow sludge slapping against the glass. But when he extracted some of this primordial soup and piped it onto a heated drum, it began to seem more appetizing: it turned into a golden flour that smelled like scrambled egg.
In a typical year, soybeans, the highest protein crop, occupies 36.5 million hectares of the U.S., an area greater than Italy. The land required to produce the same amount of protein by growing this bacteria is the size of the city of Cleveland, Ohio. In other words, you’d need 1,700 times less land to grow it.
While crop plants take months to grow, the bacteria in these tanks double every three hours. So if you maintain good growth conditions, you can harvest half of them eight times a day, every day of the year. https://doi.org/10.10/enb.2020.0005.
A study in Nature proposes that if destructive activity ceased on just 15 percent of land in some parts of the world, 60 percent of the extinctions that would otherwise happen could be averted and 30 percent of all the carbon dioxide released since the Industrial Revolution could be extracted from the atmosphere.
As the price of solar power falls, Pasi sees the cost of his produce falling within a few years to that of the cheapest available protein on earth (soy). If bacterial protein is widely accepted, for the first time in human history we will have a staple food that did not arise from photosynthesis.
Before examining the potential of microbial fermentation to feed humanity, it’s worth reminding ourselves that people go hungry not because the world lacks food, but because they can’t afford to buy it.
While the international cost of bacterial protein is unlikely to fall far below that of the cheapest soy protein in the near future, it could be more accessible. In many poor nations, people pay a premium for protein, as most food cannot be produced locally. But microbial flour can be generated anywhere with an electricity supply, at roughly the same cost. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-68882/v1.
Ice cream will never be the same again: world’s first Solein® gelato now available to consumers in Singapore
In extreme cases, such as an asteroid strike, massive volcanic eruptions, or nuclear winter, this ‘Precision Fermenttion’ would allow us to keep producing food when farming becomes impossible. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014.11.008.
So what kind of food will these technologies make? Well, once their full potential begins to be realized, the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations. We can identically replace many of the protein and fat-rich foods we eat today, but we need not stop there.
Like the invention of farming, farmfree food could catalyze entirely new diets, impossible to picture in prospect, which could one day become as familiar as such agricultural innovations as bread and cheese. And there are thousands of different microbes that can be brewed by the same method
In the first instance, if it’s deemed acceptable by regulators and customers, Solar Foods expect their product to be bought as a generic ingredient: high-protein flours are already used in bread, pasta, shakes, and many kinds of fast food and ready meals.
But they can also be employed, perhaps more effectively than plant proteins, to supply the booming market for meat substitutes.
New microbial ingredients and 3D printing could make them almost indistinguishable from chicken nuggets, burgers, sausages, and other processed meats. This will land the meat industry with a massive problem.
Because margins are tight, making a profit from animal meat depends on finding a market for as many parts of the carcass as possible: an issue known to insiders as “carcass balancing.” North American beef production exemplifies the problem. As 62 percent of beef demand in the U.S. is for ground meat (the kind that goes into hamburgers and most ready beef meals), the proportion of the carcass that gets minced has risen to match it.[67]
The value of the rest of the corpse—the prime cuts—has fallen as demand has dropped, but cattle still need to be fed to a standard that ensures these cuts are worth buying. This further grinds the margins, making the industry highly vulnerable to disruption.
If even part of the market for ground beef is captured by plant or microbial substitutes, it leaves beef producers with even less balanced sales, and little option but to raise the price of prime cuts to compensate.
As the think tank RethinkX points out, it would take only a small bump to push the industry into a spiral of collapse https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture#food-and-agriculturedownoad.
Various such transitions will be slow at first, then fast. They are likely to reach critical thresholds, beyond which existing systems will tip. In other words, just as the internal dynamics of complex systems can detonate sudden and dangerous regime shifts.. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2020.1870097.
Watch ‘Apocalypse Cow’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxaN77dcCk
These technologies, as they become cheaper, could one day threaten not only animal products but also some of the most damaging plant extracts, such as palm oil, olive oil, and coconut oil. You may be surprised to learn that I’ve
listed these oils in escalating order of destructive impact. (see text pdf)
We are likely to witness a techno-ethical shift, similar to the impact of the contraceptive pill. The pill (and other scientific methods of family planning) that accelerated the liberation of women pill was a sudden revolution for women and men. https://theconversation.com/thecontraceptive-pill-…
As meat is challenged by plant proteins, then plant proteins are challenged by microbial proteins, and as farmfree products become cheaper, better, and healthier than the foods with which they compete, the existence of good alternatives will sharpen our growing disquiet with the treatment of livestock, the destruction of our lifesupport systems, and the pandemics caused by animal farming.
Why should we eat the products of this cruel, dangerous, ecocidal system when we no longer need to? Only when something becomes amendable does it become intolerable.
There are plenty of rapid changes of state in recent history, such as the remarkably swift reduction in smoking; the shift, in nations like the UK and Ireland, away from homophobia; and the #MeToo movement..
To avert systemic environmental collapse, we need systemic economic and social change. Our lives might depend on triggering what scientists call a cascading regime shift.
Our challenge is not to tinker with existing models, but to discover the feedback loops that push them past their tipping points.
Are you horrified by the idea of eating bacteria? If so, I have bad news: you do it with every meal… For thousands of years, we’ve eaten foods that rely for their quality and character on bacterial contamination: cheese, yogurt, fermented fish, and vegetables…. Your enemy’s not just within the gate. It’s you.
I’m not naive about the challenge. I know that proposals of the kind this book makes will be met with bitter resistance.In the European Union and several U.S. states, legislators, lobbied and funded by the meat industry, have sought to suffocate the nascent plant-based milk and meat industries,partly by banning any recognizable names for them.
They’ve tried to prohibit terms like burger and sausage for foods that aren’t made from animals.
If legislators are to insist on food literalism, they should at least be consistent. There is no dinosaur in dinosaur chicken nuggets (and not much chicken). If a vegetarian hot dog is ruled out on the grounds that it contains no meat, the meat version should be ruled out on the grounds that it contains no dog.
Minced meat is meat, but mincemeat isn’t. Nor are sweetmeats, though sweetbreads are. Buffalo wings are an obvious attempt to mess with our
heads. Shepherd’s pie, or so the printed ingredients claim, contains no shepherd. And don’t get me started on jelly babies. https://www.naturalproductsglobal.com/….
The great majority of the world’s people simply can’t afford to eat like the image promoted everywhere in the West : remember that a healthy diet currently costs five times as much as one that is merely adequate in terms of calories.
By attacking plant or microbial meats and milks, the ‘Born Again’ foodies don’t advance the cause of healthy or sustainable food one iota. Instead, they extend the meat corporations’ license to keep selling the cruel, destructive, and unhealthy products the new foods seek to replace, such as burgers, nuggets, and sausages.
Our aim should be to start where people are, to recognize the constraints they face, and develop healthier, cheaper, and less damaging versions of familiar and accepted foods. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-burgers-wont-save-the-planet-butfast-food-might
Of course the fermented Food Revolution needs to be regulated and continually checked. There’s a real danger that this revolution could be captured by big business, creating a system that replicates some of the faults and frailties of the Global Standard Farm.
At the moment, corporations producing protein are consolidating and growing. Those of us who care about human nutrition and the living world should engage with these issues now: not to shut down the new foods, but
to ensure they are used fairly and openly.
There are two useful instruments. The first is strong antitrust laws. The second instrument is the restraint of intellectual property rights. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-080315-015136.
The wide diffusion of these technologies introduces an intriguing opportunity. While it is impossible to feed the world with local agriculture, for the reasons I explained in chapter 5, it is possible to meet the world’s need for protein and fat with local farmfree foods.
If we prevent their capture by large corporations, the new fermentation brewing could be used by local businesses to serve local markets. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest… As some of the world’s poorest nations are rich in ambient energy—the sunlight that strikes them —they could produce the new foods cheaply.
Microbial protein horrifies some of those who demand food sovereignty and food justice. But it could deliver both more effectively than farming does.
These are all political choices. These are systems created by humans, which can be improved by humans.
The Counter-Agricultural Revolution will be extremely disruptive. Not only many livestock farmers, but workers employed in slaughterhouses and packing plants will lose their jobs.
We should not mourn a sector with a long and disgraceful record of industrial injuries, starvation wages, and the exploitation of migrant workers.
But we should demand effective government support for those who will need to find work elsewhere. RethinkX proposes what should be a universal rule: “Protect people, not companies or legacy industries.”
The transition is likely to happen, however fiercely the defenders of the old dispensation resist it: it appears to possess an inexorable economic logic. Our task is to ensure that the process is both swift and just.
Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon
The new industries that will take the place of livestock farming and meatpacking are likely to employ large numbers. We should demand that they do so on better terms.
Changing our sources of protein and fat unlocks the possibility of rewilding on such a tremendous scale that we could create Serengetis on every continent. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0432.
Unlike the original Serengeti, these ecosystems could and should continue to be richly habited by the people who live there today, who could flourish in a new, nature-based economy..https://s3.eu-west2.amazonaws….pdf.
As forests, steppes, savannas, wetlands, mangroves, kelp forests, and sea floors recover, they will draw down carbon dioxide on a massive scale.
While rewilding, even of this magnitude, cannot counteract our industrial emissions, and needs to happen alongside the decarbonization of our economies, it could absorb enough carbon from the atmosphere to help prevent planetary catastrophe. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb2824. /// https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01026-8 ///https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1719685115.///
In fact, stopping climate breakdown might be impossible without a mass restoration of the living world.
Related
Free book download.. REGENESIS
#RePlanet Campaign: – Green Protein Breweries to cut Animal Farming – #RebootFood November 18, 2022
Vendana Shiva: How Big Capital is Hijacking desperate Climate/Biosphere Defense for obscene profits November 22, 2022
#RePlanet Campaign: – Green Protein Breweries to cut Animal Farming – #RebootFood
Intro to Regenesis: How to Feed the World and Stop Devouring the Planet 2023
Solar Foods, from just air and water, COULD save the planet November 9, 2018
RethinkX Blog – Reports on Innovations across Industry
The Free 
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