https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0375/10/12/409
This tech turns out huge amounts of HCL and NaOH in concentrated liquid form no gasses involved. This is the holy grail of the chloroalkaline industry.
NaOH can be used to extract proteins from any green plant source, leaves, stalks, cactus pads, agave leaves. You shread it soak it with NaOH then press the liquids out and heat the juice you get the proteins drop out as solids. You just turned inedible material into high quality protein mass.
The left over solids you send to step two. HCL will depolymerize both cellulose and hemicellulose to their original sugars C6 and C5 at nearly 100% sugar yields. We call that food. Every aerobic cell on earth burns C6 glucose which is what cellulose is made of millions of glucose stuck together on links. HCL breaks those links and give back the original sugar the photosynthesis made.
This tech means every plant on earth can be turned into food every other animal can eat. Yes cows can eat grass, actually they cannot their symbiotic bacteria eat grass and produce acetate and protein in the last two stomach chambers that the cows actually eat. This process is less than 10% efficient it’s easy to see the huge piles of cow droppings is nearly all undigested you can still see the original structure of the grass if you pull apart the droppings. It takes 10lbs of feed to 1 lb of total live weight. That’s corn feed it’s closer to 100:1 for grasses and herbaceous matter.
Using bioreactor tech to hydrolysis the same grasses would yield 80% sugars and 20% lignin. Those sugars feed to pigs is 3:1, chickens is 2:1 and fish is 1:1 feed ratios. You could feed those sugars to single cell protein microbes and get a 1:1 ratio at 80% protein content by mass. With all 20 amino acids and the 9 essential ones. Skip the animal all together and just eat the SCP as a powder in breads ,pastas, power bars, liquid shakes ect.
As long as no insects, manure or democrats are involved, I could probably learn to like it, provided that I had a reliable supply of the right spices and could still get ice cream.
As a serious matter, I’d be willing to sample this stuff if it reaches the market. If I liked it, I’d continue to eat it. I don’t object in principle to synthetic foods. I do object in principle to eco cultists trying to impose this by mandates.
How soon do you think we might see a mass market rollout? Are any of these products already out there in specialty stores?