Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.
There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.
We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.
There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.
The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.
For a real world example sugar was first synthesized in 1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis
Carbohydrate synthesis is also a well studied field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis
Many vitamin additives today are artifical. And of course artificial flavoring has vast commercial adoption. In the case of McDonald's french fries this was used to dramatically reduce the amount of saturated fat while maintaining the beef flavor - they are no longer deep fried in beef talow.
We can't yet recreate the texture of a pepper, but we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life. Organic chemistry is a rich field of study.
Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned.
> we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life
That is a low bar - being capable at any cost to synthesis a smoothie with 'the necessities of life' including growth? good health? You didnt even reference that.
The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.
Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.
2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1
The short wikipedia article on Elemental diets, summarizes a handfull from more recent years:
> Many patients are unable to tolerate the taste, even if the diet is flavoured, and choose to receive it through intragastric administration.[2] Possible nausea and diarrhea can result from the high sugar content which can also complicate hyperglycaemia in patients with pre-existing diabetes.[2] As a result of suppression of healthy bacteria, via a loss of bacterial food source, prolonged use of an elemental diet elevates the risk of developing clostridium difficile infection/colonisation.[6]
Food safety should not be presumed on theoretical basis, only a long history of consumption can reliably evidence it.
My claim was "they do fine" which, in the context of the question, doesn't mean "there are no side effects".
When a family friend had to have his spleen removed, it put him at somewhat higher risk of infection for the rest of their life, but in the context of him having emergency surgery for a ruptured spleen everyone knew what "he's going to be fine" meant.
> I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population".
I don't think it's ridiculous to worry about in principle. If fact, I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it. But I do think it's basically ridiculous to worry about any particular disease or diet doing it (except possibly maliciously engineered diseases). Diseases and diet changes just never have the extreme mortality rates you'd need to threaten the species.
From intuition and lack of ever coming across news of an alternative capabilty, I strongly suspect that besides salts and water most of the materials found in medical "elemental" diets ( carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, amino acids, etc) are refined and processed extracts of natural, oops.. grown;) ingredients.
This product guide partially confirms my intuition [1] :
>" Modified cornstarch and maltodextrin derived from corn are two commonly used ingredients in elemental diets. Physicians’ Elemental Diet instead contains tapioca maltodextrin and no modified cornstarch. "
[1] http://data.integrativepro.com/product-literature/info/physi...
...
>I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it.
Not enough influential people do for sure, or of less absolute but much less unlikely threats. Oh well, we made it this far, not all bad, at least there is much room for improvement.
> that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
Technically speaking, they are not chemically identical. They are in certain contexts chemically equivalent, subject to 'trace' contamination, bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant. Synthesis can produce materials which are purer (as in simpler) than grown, but it is prohibitively difficult to achieve an exact, indistinguishable configuration of biologically generated materials.
It could be common to regard this distinction between identity and equivalence as pedantic, yet it is wrong and unscientific - the difference in meaning between these terms has categorical consequences to deduction. Loose claims of chemical identity, gloze over the theoretical component of equivalence - which is subject to change. Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes, until they became common knowledge around the 90s. Differentiating phenotypes in chemical terms surely involves advanced notation which I expect neither of us are familiar with. For sure homeopathy is a fanciful placebo based therapy, but even pure chemically speaking "simple" H2O carries perplexing detail at the molecular level[1] Whatever might be theoretically insignificant or not, is subject to ongoing insight and discovery.
Are there specific plausible possibilities in nutritionally required molecules that you are referring to here, or is this just a "no one knows for sure" argument?
> Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes
Did anyone ever actually point to a container of prions and mistakenly describe them as chemically identical? When I said "chemically identical", I did not merely mean the amino acid sequence.
Like, we have x-ray diffraction for this stuff. There is a reason vitamin supplements work to correct vitamin deficiencies. There is just not much room for unknown unknowns here.
We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong. That was my primary goal because it contradicted my other main comment, but I hope you can take that information in, and perhaps think about what lead you to that mistaken confidence. The elemental diet is not fully synthetic - it is mostly grown...
> they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
That object > "they" it doesnt exist yet. It's aspiration, an ideal, supposedly attainable with help from x-ray diffraction and whatever else you might think of, but its not real yet.
As an abstract concept you can talk about fully synthetic food that is chemically identical to food which can only currently be produced with essential and substantial use of non-designed, non-fully comprehended biological entities (lifeforms). What definitely "no one knows for sure" is that humans are capable of arranging that. It might be possible in a few decades time, with help from AI to take care of all of the biological intricacies which are too complicated for humans to grasp.
> Are there specific plausible possibilities
Its about recognizing the likelihood of important surprises - which can not be specified but which the situation is more than complicated enough to continue throwing up, as can be noted many times in the history of modern science. And the importance of not exaggerating the extents of current technological capabilities and understanding. Yes modern capabilities are dazzling and exciting, but still far from sufficient to get presumptuous about natures complexity.
No, we just didn't find citations.
It sounds like you're more interested in proving me wrong, and giving a well-worn lecture about scientific modesty, than in telling me something new, so I don't think there's much to be gained from continuing.
Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.
Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops:
https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies
You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.
> ...corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed...
In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)
It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.
It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.
a biologist sees that and thinks "wow, a plant only needs 3-6% of the solar energy available to them to thrive!" #perspectives
- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.
- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).
- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.
So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.
Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.