Get the latest tech news
Food Without Agriculture
The agricultural production of food comes with substantial greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on the environment. Dietary fats, a staple of human diet, might be produced chemosynthetically with a fraction of the detrimental effects on the environment.
The prodigious quantities of food produced by global agriculture entail correspondingly vast areas of land unavailable to natural ecosystems 1, 2, 3, water resources used and polluted 4, 5, and greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted to the atmosphere 3, 6. By contrast, bioenzymatic techniques offer exquisite mechanisms for installing position-specific functional groups but can operate only in the limited range of process conditions in which life exists—mild temperatures and aqueous environments in which not all feedstocks are soluble. Among these various pathways, we focus on fats in particular because: (1) they are among the simplest nutrients to synthesize thermochemically (that is, achiral and simply structured, compatible with large-scale soap-making and polymer chemistry techniques), (2) they are the only macronutrient successfully synthesized at scale in the past (although not today 26), (3) they serve as gustatorily undifferentiated ‘baseload calories’ in many foods and (4) oilcrops such as soy and palm have an enormous environmental footprint globally (for example, >300 Mha or ~7% of agricultural land and 2.89 Gt CO 2-eq or ~20% of annual greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land-use change in recent years 3).
Or read this on Hacker News