Synthetic foodstuffs

[Sigma Prime]

OK, that's one vote for Soilent Green then. Although I guess that's organic in the end.  I'm not betting on a huge demand for synthetic food anytime soon - Pringles and Kraft Cheese Whiz aside.

Once it's cheaper to artificially synthesize the components of foods than to get them from agricultural sources, the kinds of foodstuffs that they can be used in would become dominant in the market by sheer dint of them having a smaller price-tag. Things like cheese, juice, beer, perhaps even packaged meats could be overtaken entirely by artificially synthesized foodstuffs that offer the same sensations and same nutritinal value. It's not hinged nearly as much on where it comes from as who can give the best taste for the lowest price.

Frankly, I think that this should be encouraged. The nanotech age is here. There is no reason that we shouldn't be able to derive absolutely everything we need from precisely the same air that we breathe. You can even find important minerals like cobalt floating around. Once our techniques were sufficiently advanced, we would no longer have to rely upon agriculture at all for our survival. In time, we'd see it as a relatively crude and dirty means of producing food. It's already crude, dirty, and primitive, and one thing that we are being very slow to realize is that it doesn't have to stay this way. We don't have to grub in the dirt for our survival forever.

As much as I like natural, single-origin foods, I think the planet would be better off if we got most of our foodstuffs from non-agricultural sources.


To keep it topical, this also affects transsexuals who are concerned about this issue. Even alternatives to Premarin such as Estrofem are synthesized from animal cholesterol. On the other hand, if we could synthesize estradiol from totally non-animal and, in time, non-agricultural sources, then vegan ->-bleeped-<-s could still go through transition in perfectly good conscience. On top of that, it would be less money in the pockets of Rural America, which is the main source of opposition to transgendered rights.

[Nicky]

But would it taste as good?

I don't agree with you. Biological compounds and structures are incredibly complicated things and our digestive system is designed to process them. Perhaps there is potential to create synthetic food stuffs that meet our nutritional needs, but I suspect this still would not be sufficient to maintain good health in a human.

Grubbing in the dirt is a fantastic thing and I think you undervalue it, it is a highly advanced process distilled over hundreds of thousands of years. It is our birth right, our heratige as biological creatures. We are part of a ecological system. We are as primative as the plants and animals. I would much rather eat the dirty primative tomatos from my garden, the garden I dug with my own hands and nurtured, than your shiny synthetic souless tomato substitute.

When is the last time you grubbed in the dirt for your food or slaughtered your own animals? Chances are you already don't need to do this for your survival and if you did you would realise what a highly skilled and advanced process it was.

I think the planet would be worse off. What would limit our expansion if food was no longer a limiting factor?

[lisagurl]

Read " Doubt is the Product" Not any of the processed foods are good for your health and long life. The U.S. has let food manufactures put industrial waste in our food so long that we are the most obese and sick people in the world. Natural food without pesticides and chemical fertilizers is much more healthy for you than synthetics.

Read "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

[tekla]

"The Omnivore's Dilemma"

I'll second that choice, very interesting points.

[Sigma Prime]

Grubbing in the dirt is a fantastic thing and I think you undervalue it

I raise most of my own herbs, including a few that you can't find at most supermarkets. When I've got land, I'm going to start rearing free-range chickens for eggs. Most of my diet, though, is ramen noodles. Why? It's cheap, and it's nourishing. You can put in salads, you can put in soups, and I bet you could even make a dessert with it. You can serve it with clams, oysters, shrimp...ramen noodles are a miracle. But you got the wrong girl. I come from a long line of independent farmers. We all became engineers and accountants. We do this junk for fun now, and that's how I prefer to keep it. We've got some cherry tomatoes growing at the back door. They taste like a real tomato should taste: crisp, round, and sweeter than honey. Growing enough food to feed yourself is really easier than falling off a log. We've only been doing it for ten thousand years, and we probably exercised an uncoordinated form of it when we were swinging from the trees by purposely littering the ground below us with half-gnawed pieces of fruit and proceding to fertilize it with our own warm, wet turds. If we hadn't been busy trying to kill each other, we would have been bored stiff.

Read " Doubt is the Product" Not any of the processed foods are good for your health and long life.

The body cannot tell the difference between bacterially synthesized casein and casein that comes from cow's milk if it is literally the same molecule. In time, though, perhaps we can go a step above our reliance upon natural bacteria and learn to synthesize organisms from near-scratch specifically for the purpose of producing certain proteins. We don't even need an actual "living" organism. We would need just enough of a structure that it could successfully produce what we need from it. This would be less risky than dealing with self-replicating organisms that could potentially become pathogenic, see?

Natural food without pesticides and chemical fertilizers is much more healthy for you than synthetics.

Then you come down with botulism, and you die.

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Regulation/Organic-food-trend-increases-pathogen-risk

Larger pathogen risk. The so-called benefits of "natural foods" are dubious and mostly mythology. On the other hand, our food would be a lot safer if we could develop pesticides/fungicides/etc. that are less likely to cause harm to the human body or, for that matter, the overall environment.

By the way, if you want to feel healthy and lose a ton of weight, eat a lot of rice and seafood. A LOT of it, and make it up spicy enough to ionize your entire palate. Capsaicin's awesome for your health, so throw those Thai peppers on there, BAM! Throw in some cinnamon; it's undervalued in savory foods, and it's fabulous for your health. Oh, and drink coffee. Coffee is very very good for you. Drink it stiff and black, regular and not decaf. Besides that, eat chocolate, and be merry. Huzzah!

[finewine]

I don't have any problem with the idea of synthetic food in principle, although I agree that there's a huge problem with processing and application.

To address the specific point of food synthesis, the satisfaction of taste is a huge issue.  Nobody wants to chow down on a fistful of vitamin & protein pills washed down with a thimble of lipids.

While it sounds nice to shovel grass into the nanotech molecular alchemy chamber and have a nice slab of steak come out the other side, it's not going to work like that.  However, the work being done on artificial pork is closer to how it would probably end up being...

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/71201

[Mister]

You've started a topic that fits perfectly into my most recent grocery shopping find.

Here's what i want you to do- go to the grocery store and buy Hagen Daas' vanilla ice cream and the vanilla from their Just Five line.  Taste them.  Which one is significantly more delicious?  The one without the synthetic ->-bleeped-<-.

[tekla]

>>>>>>> lost the idea right after synthetic beer was pitched. 

[lisagurl]

Part of the problem is science does not know and has not figured out the quantum mechanics of the biological effects of life both food and humans. So no processed molecule is the same as the natural one it is only the surface that we understand.

[Miniar]

The more processed, and more artificial, a foodstuff gets, the worse effect it appears to have on our general health.
The current foods may be "crude and dirty" in origin, but that's just what the human body is and needs to survive.

[finewine]

Part of the problem is science does not know and has not figured out the quantum mechanics of the biological effects of life both food and humans.

Ok I'll bite   What sort of hypothetical "quantum mechanical biological effects" do you imagine there might be?

Perhaps you can know how fast the "chicken" nugget is travelling through your duodenal tract, or you can know how heavy it is...but you can't know both at the same time?  Or is it more to do with strangeness, spin and flavour?

So no processed molecule is the same as the natural one it is only the surface that we understand.

What is the difference between a natural molecule of H2O and one made in the lab at either the macro or quantum mechanical level?

I'm not defending processed food here just railing against pseudoscientific gobbledegook

[lisagurl]

Ok I'll bite   What sort of hypothetical "quantum mechanical biological effects" do you imagine there might be?

How far can you trace the origin of thought? The brain creates thought below the level of the water molecule.

[finewine]

How far can you trace the origin of thought? The brain creates thought below the level of the water molecule.

Does it really?  What evidence to you have to support that conclusion?  Oh and "you can't prove it doesn't" is *not* evidence.  That's a logical fallacy known as the "argument from ignorance".  Not that this has anything to do with substantiating your earlier statement on quantum mechanical biological effects, by the way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to pick a fight and certainly I'm not trying to have a pop at you personally. The synthetic/processed food issue can be emotive and there's enough FUD thrown about already (from both sides of the debate).

Let's try and uncover the facts, then draw conclusions from them - rather than start with a conclusion and try to find the facts to support it.

[lisagurl]

The fact is that there is not any evidence that synthetic food made from synthetic molecules has equal effect on the body. So far many synthetic foods that have been approved for lack of evidence have shown 20 years later that they are health risks. Not because they know the cause but because they has the statistics showing it. Many things science does not know including quantum mechanics which might hold answers.

When these questions are asked some respond with because God made it that way. Facts are sometimes hard to come buy but when health is concerned it is better to error on the safe side than go with things you do not have absolute evidence. The fact that the made made H2O molecule looks like a duck, but does it always act like a duck is still in doubt.

[finewine]

There's no such thing as absolute evidence.  Many scientific theories have been experimentally verified countless times but they are still called theories because there's always a finite possibility that they could be wrong and the exception hasn't been found yet.

I completely agree that we should be open to all possibilities and indeed it may be that an apparent pattern of adverse effects could demand further research etc..

However, even though there is a mathematical uncertainty, that doesn't mean it's sensible to seriously entertain every crackpot theory out there unless there's at least some amount of empirical evidence to warrant further analysis.

After all, I cannot prove that Bertrand Russell's teapot does not exist.  There's a vanishingly small but finite possibility that there really is a teapot orbiting the Earth.  It's obviously silly to assume it is there, just because it might be.  Now, if someone looking out the window of the ISS spots something teapot shaped drifting by, well...we will have to re-evaluate the teapot hypothesis.

Similarly, one could assert that there is some quantum mechanical oddity with synthetic food but it's highly unlikely.   It's far more probable that any adverse side effects are caused by something at the much larger biological scale.  Talking about QM in the current unqualified context seems, to me, to be a complete non-sequitur.  Reminds me a bit of Star Trek pseudoscience..."let's confine the molecules in an annular containment field and saturate it with 500 isorads by bleeding some antimatter from the engines" etc..

QM is extremely complex, full of uncertainties and isn't fully understood by even the best experts in the field.  Most of the time it gets mentioned, it's accompanied by the rich, funky aroma of bovine excrement...because it's only ever used as a bamboozling smoke-screen for woo.

[lisagurl]

it's accompanied by the rich, funky aroma of bovine excrement...because it's only ever used as a bamboozling smoke-screen for woo.

It sounds like the food industry.

[Nicky]

I raise most of my own herbs, including a few that you can't find at most supermarkets. When I've got land, I'm going to start rearing free-range chickens for eggs. Most of my diet, though, is ramen noodles. Why? It's cheap, and it's nourishing. You can put in salads, you can put in soups, and I bet you could even make a dessert with it. You can serve it with clams, oysters, shrimp...ramen noodles are a miracle. But you got the wrong girl. I come from a long line of independent farmers. We all became engineers and accountants. We do this junk for fun now, and that's how I prefer to keep it. We've got some cherry tomatoes growing at the back door. They taste like a real tomato should taste: crisp, round, and sweeter than honey. Growing enough food to feed yourself is really easier than falling off a log. We've only been doing it for ten thousand years, and we probably exercised an uncoordinated form of it when we were swinging from the trees by purposely littering the ground below us with half-gnawed pieces of fruit and proceding to fertilize it with our own warm, wet turds. If we hadn't been busy trying to kill each other, we would have been bored stiff.

I think we agree here. I was meaning the actual process of plants and animals growing and interacting was something that was not a primative thing. I don't think being part of that is a crude thing either.

Ever thought of keeping bees? Bee keeping is awsome.

[Sigma Prime]

The fact is

Just speaking from personal experience, I find that the sort of people who use this phrasing have a propensity for exercising a highly consequentialist philosophy regarding what actually constitutes honorable behavior.

there is not any evidence that synthetic food made from synthetic molecules has equal effect on the body.

If you are uninclined to believe that two identical molecules will be metabolized identically by the human body, based simply upon their origin, then I doubt you have any inclination to reconsider your views under any circumstances whatsoever, no matter the quantity or quality of compelling evidence you were actually confronted with.

So far many synthetic foods that have been approved for lack of evidence have shown 20 years later that they are health risks.

I take it you believe that we can resolve this issue by spending less money on the testing and development of these products. In fact, I don't think that you are likely to approve of anything that wasn't grown from a pile of manure, no matter how thoroughly it has been tested.

Many things science does not know including quantum mechanics which might hold answers.

Pseudoscience. How...obscene. I am disgusted beyond measure.

Well, no sense in throwing good money after bad. Where magical thinking appears, it's time to resort to the loud, braying horse-laugh advised by Mencken. Syllogisms are wasted under the circumstances, and I will not waste any energy on them. Lisa, you are being ridiculous. Please, unless you actually have a solid premise for bringing quantum physics into the discussion, which I doubt you do, then please refrain from attempting to use this subject matter as a part of your arguments. I doubt you are even aware, without referencing the subject, of how most synthetic proteins are actually made.
Post Merge: July 07, 2009, 09:42:56 PM

How far can you trace the origin of thought? The brain creates thought below the level of the water molecule.

Okay, this is probably the most utterly ludicrous statement that I have ever seen on a forum.

This includes various statements that I have heard from pro-lifers, who ritualistically attempt to prove that a fetus has thoughts in its head at the exact moment of conception using sketchy evidence that certain parts of its brain tend to light up at around the same period of development at which it is theoretically possible to remove it from the uterus and sustain it for the remainder of its prenatal development using sophisticated life support.

I have actually studied the human the brain very extensively, Lisa. The brain is essentially a binary machine. That is to say, either a synapse actually fires, or it does not. It is literally all or nothing. The only sense in which the brain is not a binary machine rests in the internal state of any given neuron. A neuron, my dear, is a sophisticated organism in its own right. In fact, every single one of the 100 billion neurons in your brain is at least subtly unique. For this particularly obvious reason, it would be a complete waste of time to actually reconstruct the human brain as a computer program. Nonetheless, the human brain is essentially a binary machine, just like any information system that we have ever constructed. Thought does not occur at this level at all, though. A single coherent thought requires a number of rather messy and often cumbersome interactions between quite a few million neurons. In fact, the workings of the human brain are quite impressively inexact.

[lisagurl]

The brain is essentially a binary machine

Read " Out of our Heads" by Alva Noe     Perhaps the philosophy that we are machines does not take in account we and our brains are part of our environment. That we think outside our heads. Perhaps all the fMRI and scans are not telling the whole story. What we do not know can and will hurt us.

[Sigma Prime]

Read " Out of our Heads" by Alva Noe

Umm, no. For one thing, he tends to state that the human brain is considered in modern neuroscience to be a calculating machine, which is an outright lie. I bet he couldn't tell you what the nucleus accumbens does without pulling out a reference book.

Perhaps the philosophy that we are machines does not take in account we and our brains are part of our environment.

Incorrect. In fact, you are lying, but I already expected that. Mechanistic notions of human thought necessarily regard our unique personalities as the impact of environmental stimuli upon the development of mind. In fact, it is almost universally accepted in modern neuroscience that the human mind does not appear a priori. Next.

Perhaps all the fMRI and scans are not telling the whole story.

Neither are you! In fact, you're telling nothing but a story! I think I'll stick to PubMed, thanks. It's actually intended to be informative.

What we do not know can and will hurt us.

Fear-mongering. Yeah, Lisa. This makes you more believable. Riiiiiiiiiight.

Although it is not the kind of "truth" you had in mind, there actually is a great deal of truth in this statement. What we don't know can hurt us. More funding is needed in the area of scientific research that studies the actual effects that the foods we consume can have on our bodies. In the future, hopefully we'll have foods that are not as hard on the body as proteins like casein. Incompletely metabolized casein, which is found in curd derived from cow's milk, can result in so-called "casomorphins," which are opiate-like compounds which may agitate conditions related to autism. They may also be responsible for fast-food addiction, but this is presently unclear. Frankly, I think that we should begin making our cheeses from a protein that is easier for our bodies to metabolize, and perhaps we should do away with casein entirely once we have discovered a viable substitute that doesn't taste like boiled woodpulp.

Gluten, which is the main protein found in wheat (there are varying types of this protein), can be even worse in this respect. It's also capable of breaking down into opiate-like compounds, but it also has the effect of increasing appetite. It's possible that gluten, especially the type found in wheat, is one of the major culprits in human obesity. Gluten is also responsible for various inflammatory conditions, including coeliac disease. Perhaps wheat should be the first thing that we strike out of our diet and replace with a viable synthetic.

It would be better for our health in the long-run to rely on proteins that have been tailored to rest easy in our digestive system and to metabolize as completely as possible. This would help us avoid these kinds of problems. The kinds of foods that we have been using as dietary staples for centuries may be subtly poisoning us due to our over-reliance on them in modern times, and we could pave a better way.

The fact is that people like easy food. Things like protein bars and energy drinks are selling, and they are selling well. People are in a hurry, and they're often not really keen on taking the time to choose a "diverse" or "healthy" diet. The only sensible approach is to follow the natural course of human behavior: when they reach for something like a protein supplement or a power shake, let's try to make it a little bit more likely that they are nourishing themselves rather than slowly poisoning their bodies. Besides, this sort of behavior is ironically a lot more natural to human behavior: we are apes. Our behavior is adapted for an arboreal existence in which we prefer to keep our food within easy reach, where we can consume it as our appetites demand. The snack machine diet and the fast-food diet may be killing us, but this is a more comfortable mode of behavior for us for a reason. We can't permanently alter the natural course of our behavior, but we can try to put more beneficial things in those places where we seek easy, satisfying, quickly attainable food.