A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world’s first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.
The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.
This is not uplifting news
Another effort to push ultra processed food as a “perfectly safe” alternative to real whole food.
“Ultra processed” is not a meaningful scientific term. Soy sauce is ultra processed, soy milk, dark chocolate, miso paste, anything pickled, sports drinks with electrolytes, oat milk, anything canned - all of these are ultra processed according to NOVA making the term “ultra processed” entirely meaningless for deciding anything.
I agree there exist some foods in the ultra processed category that could be part of a healthy lifestyle.
However - avoiding ultra processed as a category vastly reduces the burden on the eater about what leads to sustainable health.
Sure we can agree on that but your original claim was “air butter is bad because it’s ultra processed” which is not a sound argument given that you understand ultra processed is not always bad.
I did not say it was bad, I did not venture an opinion on methane butter. I re-read my original comment and I didn’t say it was bad.
I was lamenting the tendency to celebrate the replacement of whole foods with synthetics of unknown impact, and pushing the responsibility of health impacts onto the customers rather then the suppliers.
Its interesting news, it might even be good news, but it does not uplift me, hence my very genuine response to the post.
Dude just try to be a little open minded to a potentially good thing.
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.