From NASA to your table: A history of food from thin air

[cheryl]

From NASA to your table: A history of food from thin air - Big Think

A fairly old idea, but a really good one, is about to hit the store shelves.

• The idea of growing food from CO2 dates back to NASA 50 years ago.
• Two companies are bringing high-quality, CO2-derived protein to market.
• CO2-based foods provide an environmentally benign way of producing the protein we need to live.

The idea of making food from little more than thin air— carbon dioxide, actually—is not a new one. NASA was tinkering with the idea in the 1960s as a means of growing food on future long missions. In recent years, as we've come to understand that Earth's resources—land and rainforests chief among them—are limited, interest in the concept has been renewed, with NASA doing new research and two companies racing to market with CO2-derived food products.

The basic mechanism for deriving food from CO2 involves a fairly simple closed-loop system that executes a process over and over in a cyclical manner, producing edible matter along the way. In space, astronauts produce carbon dioxide when they breathe, which is then captured by microbes, which then convert it into a carbon-rich material. The astronauts eat the material, breathe out more CO2, and on and on. On Earth, the CO2 is captured from the atmosphere.