Food is there anything better in life than tucking into a rich and varied three-course meal.

However, food might become a rare privilege in a world with a growing population.

More of us means more mouths to feed and yet less and less space to raise and grow our meat and two vets.

So, how do we solve this gastronomic paradox, well science fiction has a simple answer, synthesize it.

Who needs a live animal when you can use a Star Trek replicator to build a stake from scratch. When you could replace your greens with Soylent Green or even tuck into a hearty bowl of snot, that has everything the body needs.

Synthetic food could be good for more than just future food security. It could be a practical solution to feeding inmates in prison, military out in the field, or even interplanetary voyages, not to mention putting an end to animal farming and exploitation.

Sounds pretty worthy, but is it really could we synthesize all our food?

Well, the idea isn't new and in the colorful history of faking food, there have been some pretty fanciful notions. One of the most famous is probably the meal in a pill. The idea goes that you can pop a pill every day to give you all the nutrients, calories, and satisfaction of a full meal. As a concept, it's about as futuristic as they come, but it actually has its roots in the late 19th-century feminist movement. In the lead-up to the 1893 World's Fair, an American suffragette called Mary Elizabeth Lee's suggested the meal and a pill as a way of cutting a woman's ties to the kitchen. Although it was a fairly drastic solution, the idea was an evocative one, and it's been echoed in science fiction and futurist forecasts ever since.

The problem is, even if you are willing to forego the pleasurable taste and texture of real food, there's just simply no way of cramming everything you need into a single pill. Vitamins and minerals, perhaps.

 The perplexing array of supplements in every pharmacy is a testament to that, but when it comes to the 2,000 or so calories, we need to sustain our bodies every day a single pill just can't cut it. In fact, even if the pill was made of pure fat, the most energy-dense stuff then you'd still need to swallow 450 every single day to stay alive, that's one every three minutes or so which is hardly practical. So pills are out of the question and personally, I don't like the idea of missing out on the crunch chew and slower reload of food. So instead, what if we built our food from scratch.

 Doing this would mean building food molecule by molecule, perfectly replicating the look, taste, and texture of any food that you can imagine. But before you get your hopes so, I should warn you that this is virtually impossible. Even though we're living in a world of 3D food printers, where you can squeeze out cheese or chocolate into virtually any shape that you can dream of, actually making that cheese or chocolate in the first place is the real challenge.

Not only would we need to know the precise composition and configuration of every molecule in the food, but we'd need a machine that could instantly assemble those molecules from their constituent atoms, which is even harder than it sounds.

Any large-scale creation of edibles can't afford to turn its back on biology since living things have really cornered the market on molecular assembly, and that's just what current food synthesis research is doing. The trick is to replace large complex organisms like cows with smaller simpler ones like yeast or even just a few cells that can be genetically engineered to give us what we need.

It's called cellular agriculture, and it's surprisingly effective, with one of the most famous examples being laboratory-grown beef burgers. Starting with just a few cows cells you create a stem cell line that's capable of dividing and multiplying indefinitely, add this to a nutrient-rich growth medium in a petri dish and some kind of scaffold to tell it what shape it needs to be and before long you got yourself a bonafide beef burger - the cow slaughter.

The first burger made by this method was completed and eaten in 2013. Since then, all manner of foodstuffs had been grown in a lab, from chicken to milk, seafood, and even egg whites.

So in fact we are pretty close to realizing a sci-fi future of synthesized food, you could say that we're already there since it's technically possible to survive on a cocktail of protein shake, sugar pills, and multivitamin supplements but realistic food substitutes are more of a challenge but one though we are slowly starting to address.

So would you eat food that's been grown in a lab? How else do you think that we can make our own food?

 

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