A California-based startup called Savor has figured out a unique way to make a butter alternative that doesn’t involve livestock, plants, or even displacing land. Their butter is produced from synthetic fat made using carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.
so what i don’t get is how any margarine could have the same flavour as butter without adding in some sort of protein and presumably a bit of sweetener, considering that butter is fat/milk protein/milk sugar (lactose)…
You can obviously get close enough (i mostly eat margarine), the non-fat content of butter is very small after all, but still surely you have to add those things to get that extra kick of flavour that butter has?
Margarine is dangarous, it contain high amount of trans fat. Try to avoid it
where on earth did you get that nonsense from? the swedish food safety agency explicitly says that modern margarine contains basically no trans fat at all, and the primary source of trans fat is diary products
Ok ok you don’t need this attitude. I wasn’t aware of the 2018 FDA ban on trans fat.
This isn’t margarine. Margarine is made from hydrogenated vegetable oil. This process allegedly creates the same hydrocarbon chain fatty acids found in butter.
Wait. So a “butter star” is possible?
Once one is discovered, there will be a NASA mission to bake a gigantic loaf of bread and launch it at the butter star.
The problem with making carbon into butter is it will just be released once someone eats it and burns off the calories. BUT, I think you can make soap from just about any oil. So you could turn carbon from the air into fake butter, turn that fake butter into soap, and then store the soap in caves, solving any potential soap shortages for the next several millennia while also solving the climate crisis.
Butter is already made from carbon. They’re creating the same hydrocarbon chains that are in the fatty acids that butter is comprised of, just without the cow.
Also, for anyone who thinks that carbon bound up in fatty acid chains in butter is released back into the atmosphere through metabolism, I will direct your attention to the population US Midwest and Great Plains. These people have been proving that you can effectively sequester butter for many decades.
To be honest, people probably cause more environmental damage from releasing methane after eating butter. Lol
Yo this would be great for some actual proper carbon sequestration. Make some butter from the air and pump it back down into the wells.
So I have limitations with videos, but the argument that capturing carbon is costs more energy than it took to put into the air is valid as long as we’re still dumping carbon in the air. But, we have to stop putting carbon in the air and we have to start taking it out again.
completely agree with you, but until the whole world stops dumping it in the air (classic) carbon capture is worthless. I’m interested if this thing of making butter can be worth it, because you’re not just removing CO2, you are also making something that would have required farming a cow, which is much more resource intensive.
I guess we’ll need some studies done on the topic
I love it when foodstuffs get put in scarequotes.
