Butter is a key ingredient in many of the dishes and desserts we are enjoying over the holidays.
This Christmas season, Big Tech billionaire Bill Gates is backing a project that will inject more chemicals into our daily lives. This time, it is not vaccines.
He plans to offer us cow-free butter.
A company in Batavia, Illinois is making butter in a way you’ve never seen before. No animals, no plants, no oils; this butter is made from carbon.The sustainability-focused approach has the blessing and backing of Bill Gates.It looks, smells and tastes like the butter we all know, but it’s made without the farmland, fertilizers or emissions tied to the typical process.This unprecedented process is happening at the facilities of Savor in an industrial park in the suburbs west of Chicago.
As someone who has an advanced degree in chemistry, I laughed out loud when I read it was “carbon-free butter. Butter is made out of hydrocarbons. It also includes essential vitamins and minerals as well.
The lipid fraction of butter mainly consists of triacylglycerols (98%) and small quantities of monoacylglycerols and diacylglycerols, glycolipids, ether lipids and free fatty acids. Phospholipids and sterols (see Fact sheet FAPC-196 Lipid Glossary) may also be present.Over 66% of the fatty acids in butter are saturated (Table 2). One tablespoon of regular and whipped butter have about 0.4 grams and 0.3 grams of poly-unsaturated fatty acids, respectively. The %DV of cholesterol in regular and whipped butters is 10% and 7%, respectively.Butter does not contain significant amount of trans fat, less than 0.50 grams in 1 tablespoon (see fact sheet FAPC 133) , but it contains substantial amounts of fat-soluble vitamins A and E and small amounts of calcium, phosphorus, vitamin K and D. Presence of carotene, vitamin A, and other fat-soluble pigments contribute to the color of butter.
So everyone is already ingesting delicious “bovine” carbon already.
Gates made some big promises related to the product.
Commenting on Savor’s work, Bill Gates wrote on his blog, “The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does. And most important, it tastes really good—like the real thing, because chemically it is.”He added, “The big challenge is to drive down the price so that products like Savor’s become affordable to the masses—either the same cost as animal fats or less.”Savor’s 25,000-square-foot pilot facility in Batavia, Illinois, called SavorWorks1, serves as the production center for the novel carbon-based butter.The company’s CO2-source agnostic technology uses methane- and carbon dioxide-derived inputs from numerous origins to produce a wide range of fats, like palm oil, milkfat, and cocoa butter, with an ambition to tap into more fats in the future.
Given the response to this news, this butter is likely to go the way of “Beyond Meat”…which has seen its sales plunge as consumers want more natural foods free from laboratory manipulations.
And, as I have noted before, cows already conveniently convert carbon into a form that is readily digestible to humans. The Biogenic Cycle: It is real and it is spectacular.
Cows are already part of environmental sustainability.
Or, to put it more succinctly: Cows eating grass is the Earth.
I wish you a very Merry Christmas, with sugar plums and as much real butter-laden foods as you can eat.
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