Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates

It is neither plant or animal based, the chemical composition is claimed to be like butter, so it is even less margarine than it is butter. Margarine is hardened plant oil or technically it can also be made from animal fat. So this is neither margarine or butter, it is synthetic butter, since it synthesized chemically, rather than made by the traditional more natural method.

But yes capitalism indeed. Why try to help the world if you can't make money on it? 🙄

Yes, this has nothing to do with butter.

Don't say the m-word, it makes milk boys nervous

proprietary process

Where the carbon is replaced with butter.

"Soylent Green is people!"

Bring me the corpse starch

Yes, they aren't trying to make an alternative butter substitute as I understand it. They're trying to make real butter via a purely chemically synthetic process.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).

This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.

I shall add some potassium and market it as buttOCK

I don't get it, what do you mean?

but also in this case we already have perfectly fucking fine margerine, if you splurge on slightly more expensive (which is still like half the fucking price of butter) stuff it'll taste pretty damn close to butter so long as you're not doing a side by side comparison.

He's also on the Eipstein list.

Typically there are minor 'impurities' that make the 'real' thing taste different.
Vanillin, for example, is very easy to produce chemically, which is good, because growing and harvesting it naturally is very difficult, but it's missing a lot of the compounds which add subtle yet important taste and smell to the natural stuff.

That’s what I’m thinking. For example, there are milk proteins in butter that undergo the Maillard reaction to produce different flavors. Will this product have the same proteins?

Especially tea

I'm watching you, Dent

I'm pretty sure the point is to reduce reliance on diary products and therefore livestock farming, a major source of global warming.

This is also my reservation about this type of thing.

Must own stock, like his 'philanthropist' medicine scam.

Did you eat your butter quota today? Do your part!

So, can we turn the garbage patch into butter?

“Other assorted stuff”? The palm oil probably isn’t great, of course it’s simple existence is causing the intentional destruction of important forests and it, and the people who use it, can fuck right off, but otherwise I dunno, that doesn’t sound like the end of the world.

So, it's probably more healthy then, with unsaturated fatty acids?

I think health on cheese a pretty low bar to beat tho

Gates or Trump?

Bill is likely going to patent the hell out of it and sell it to poor countries by bribing the politicians, like always.

if by backing it they meant funding it, I guess it might help them

Yes, but made in a factory instead of a cow.

Whatever 'slop water' means in their process, they are probably only storing it because they treat it instead of sending it straight down the sewer

Dude just try to be a little open minded to a potentially good thing.

The entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint.

Idunno, did you read the process? Also, butter is arguably a processed food anyways. They're synthesizing real fat molecules. My understanding is that it is chemically, truly fat.

We're on the eve of what future generations may refer to as "The Great Hunger." The worst impact of climate change won't be rising sea levels. It will be Biblical scale famines from multiple simultaneous bread basket failures. On our current path, we are likely to lose 2-10% of the total human population due to famine over the next 20-30 years. Having a way to grow bulk sustenance cheaply, in a way that is immune from the disruptions of the weather? That is a technology we desperately need right now. I agree that UPFs are not ideal. But this and similar synthetic foods could prevent what is likely to be the greatest famine in human history.