A couple of news items just in, relating to my recent critiques of manufactured food. Apologies for harping back to this theme, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the unfolding story. At the end, I’ll cast forward to new themes.
So, this recent article is another rather starry-eyed piece heralding the bright future for Solein, the protein powder manufactured from bacteria by the Finnish company Solar Foods. What’s interesting about it is that it gives a few facts and figures about the company’s production processes, presumably derived from the company itself, which corroborate figures I provided in my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
The article suggests that Solar Foods’ new factory can produce a maximum of 160 tonnes of Solein annually, and that it uses an average 7,000 MWh of electricity to do so. Assuming a top-end figure of 70 percent digestible protein content (there are reasons to think the true figure is less), that translates to this calculation:
7,000,000 kWh / 160,000 kg / 0.7 = 62.5 kWh per kg protein
This is pretty close to the 65.3 kWh/kg that I calculated in Saying NO… and nearly four times more than the 16.7 kWh/kg figure that George Monbiot gave in his influential book Regenesis that promoted the method.
It’s clear that the 62.5 kWh/kg figure only covers some of the energy costs of the process. It excludes, for example, the energy needed to capture and supply carbon dioxide to the process – as well as, presumably, other inputs and infrastructure costs. It also involves dividing an average by a maximum figure. So all in all the 62.5 kWh/kg figure is certainly an underestimate, but it sets a floor for the prodigious energy costs of the process.
I’d already shown that the 16.7 figure was wrong, but this new article is the final nail in the coffin. It’d be nice to see that figure retracted – alas, that’s out of my hands. Given the basically non-existent ‘transition’ into clean energy outlined in my previous post which is failing to meet even existing needs for energy, the vast increase in renewable electricity generation that would be required to fund the additional energy demands of manufactured food if it’s to play any major part in a sustainable future makes this technology a non-starter as a mass food approach.
Another issue with that type of bacterial protein powder that I barely touched on in Saying NO… is its worryingly high content of a bioplastic known as PHB, which can break down in the gut into a pharmacologically active compound known as hydroxybutyrate, with potential applications reported for the treatment of narcolepsy, alcohol addiction withdrawal syndrome, cationic and chronic schizophrenia, chronic brain syndrome, atypical psychoses, drug addiction withdrawal, circulatory collapse, Parkinson’s disease, cancer, radiation exposure, and various other neuropharmacological diseases. All of which could be good news, but not necessarily if you’re ingesting it in quantity on a regular basis as a food and a major source of dietary protein.
But alas technical unfeasibility and uncertain health effects rarely seem to be a bar to popular acclaim about the latest saviour technologies. Even the august environmentalist organisation Greenpeace appears to have jumped on the bacterial bandwagon. True, it’s in the context of exposing livestock industry lobbying against manufactured food, which is fair enough. But whereas Greenpeace has stood up to biotech boosterism and advocated for community-based and agroecological approaches around issues like Vitamin A Deficiency, it seems to have sided in this instance with one corporate claim against another, and swallowed something of a tall tale about microbial food and energy futures.
Part of the hype around microbial food focuses on the notion that it provides a substitute for meat. One of the problems with this view is that there are already perfectly good alt-meat products available based on soy and other legumes. The land footprint of the microbial product is possibly less, but that has to be weighed against its huge energy footprint, plus the numerous additional costs – environmental and otherwise – in the extended, materials-heavy supply chain fuelling microbial alt-meat factories. The trophic inefficiency arguments against eating meat find an exact parallel in arguments against eating microbial alt-meat.
It seems to me that what really gets microbial alt-meat proponents excited is the possibilities of the technology to do away with farming – what some herald as a ‘Counter-Agricultural Revolution’. It’s easy to see why food corporations like this idea, because it greatly increases their already considerable powers to monopolize production, but harder on the face of it to see why anyone else finds this appealing. I think the answer is that our contemporary civilisation has become so alienated from the idea that humans should make their livelihood, as other species do, by participating as ecological protagonists in the economy of nature, as “plain members and citizens of biotic communities” in Aldo Leopold’s famous phrase, that pursuing purportedly nature-free or land footprint-free food production so that more land can supposedly be ‘left for nature’ has become appealing.
I’ve already written plenty about the numerous problems with this line of argument, and I won’t repeat it here. Instead, I’ll just comment on the way the debate plays into corporate hands. Bruce wrote on this site “My worry is that the pushback against lab grown meat will be used to defend some of worst current practice” and I agree that’s very likely to be the case. When you push against meat industry interests for a biotech approach that so clearly doesn’t stack up on numerous grounds it’s a gift to those meat industry interests. Likewise, the horror show of the global meat industry is a gift to alt-meat synbio interests. Often those two respective interests have much the same money behind them – another case of the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ game that neoliberal capital plays so well.
What goes missing in this is the pro-nature and pro-human case for local agroecological farming, which can encompass mixed farming and pastoralism – including at commercial levels – that isn’t representative of ‘the meat industry’. It saddens me that a lot of thoughtful and hardworking but increasingly demoralised farmers get tarred with this ‘industry’ brush by people who too easily and indiscriminately buy into global discourse about the need for reducing meat. However true that might be (and, well, it’s quite complicated…) it’s rarely true that local agroecological systems with livestock components – or, for that matter, with grain components – replicate the failings of ‘meat industry’ or ‘arable industry’ systems. We need these farmers. I wish public narratives around farming were less full of scorn, less indiscriminate in their targets, and less starry-eyed about fanciful biotech alternatives.
It’s possible to do low-energy agroecological farming without livestock – it’s just that it’s usually a bit less efficient and it involves more human or machine labour (if the latter, then arguments about its greater sustainability pretty much go out of the window). But I’m all in favour of people giving different systems a go and seeing what works. Generally, I think low-energy agroecological systems will settle on the mixed farming approaches that preceded fossil-fuelled modernity in most populous places, and the pastoralist approaches that preceded it in most unpopulous places. But who knows? Maybe there will be something new under the stock-free sun.
Anyway, the real parting of the ways is not between stock-free and mixed/pastoralist agriculture, but between corporate agriculture (above all, big arable, but also big meat and big alt-meat) and local, non-corporate, community-oriented agriculture. I think this needs continuous emphasis and repetition, lest the ecomodernist public-to-corporate money pipeline and its associated clearance rewilding approach further erodes the possibilities for future sustainability.
Current reading: Philip Loring Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology …which is kind of a propos to the above. Loring writes “…it is indeed possible for us to coexist with the rest of the natural world, to restore the damage we’ve caused. We do this not through self-quarantine, by leaving nature alone. We achieve this by integrating our lives and destinies with those of the species, landscapes and seascapes around us.” (p.26). Loring’s remarks on ecomodernism are heavy hitting, equating it with white supremacism. So far, needless to say, I haven’t found myself in full agreement with everything he writes, but I’m with him on the need ultimately to integrate our lives and destinies with the surrounding biota, and to avoid what he calls ‘self-quarantine’ – which I believe is the direction the manufactured food narrative is taking us. How, alternatively, to better integrate our lives and destinies with our surroundings is the focus of my future projects.
