Is Bacteria The Future Of Farming?

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Making ‘Food Out Of Thin Air’

On the outskirts of Helsinki, a pioneering factory is harvesting natural, scalable proteins all from fermented bacteria. Could this be the future of food?

Jim Linear for Noema Magazine

Credits

Philip Maughan is a writer and researcher based in London.

VANTAA, Finland — It’s not easy to breathe in outer space. To keep crew members on the International Space Station alive, electrolysis is used to split water from the space shuttle’s fuel cells, astronaut perspiration and urine, into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is then filtered back into the cabin, while the hydrogen is either vented into space or combined with carbon dioxide the crew exhales to make more water.

If only it were so simple on Earth.

In 1964, two biochemists presented a paper at a national convention of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which proposed a use for the leftover hydrogen. The paper, which emerged from a NASA contract, described a process in which residual hydrogen could be transformed by an unusual bacterium from the genus formerly known as Hydrogenomonas. The organism would take not just the hydrogen, but also CO2 and excreted urea, and use them to grow a “bacterial substance” that was “high in protein” and held “all the essential amino acids”; a potential food source spacefarers one day might come to relish on long voyages between the stars.

Sixty years later and this approach to making food in a closed environment has yet to appear on the ISS. Instead, the crew’s diet mainly consists of dehydrated or refrigerated food, replenished every 90 days by deliveries from Earth, along with a few veggies grown in orbit under artificial light.

But the 1964 proposal lives on, and has found an unexpected home in Finland, where conditions for producing food are, if not quite as extreme as the near-vacuum of low-Earth orbit, still relatively undesirable. The weather this year was no exception.

In late April I visited a newly completed factory inspired by the 1964 paper, a roughly 3,200-square-foot tangle of pipes, tanks and cables. The company that built it, Solar Foods, is a Finnish food tech startup known for claiming to make “food out of thin air.” Outside the factory lay melting snow from a recent late-season storm that Solar Foods co-founder and chief technology officer Juha-Pekka Pitkänen assured me was “totally unheard of.”

Pitkänen wears thick translucent spectacles and has a full beard and ruddy complexion. He sipped Pepsi from a glass as I attempted to warm up with a mug of coffee in the facility’s conference room. “It’s not supposed to snow this late into the spring,” he added. “But we are used to the idea that life is not necessarily so easy. We are open to new ideas.” Behind the beard, I detected a little smirk. “That’s one of the reasons the farmers here are not throwing stones at us.”

Solar Foods’ newly completed factory is a roughly 3,200-square-foot tangle of pipes, tanks and cables. (Philip Maughan/Noema Magazine)

Pitkänen grew up about 250 miles north of Helsinki, in a smallish mining town called Siilinjärvi. His father, Jukka Pitkänen, was employed by Kemira, former owners of the town’s mine, one of western Europe’s largest open pit phosphate quarries.

The younger Pitkänen grew up learning about chemistry from his father but felt unable to ignore the damage wrought by the 20th century’s way of doing business. Though he wasn’t sure what exactly, he was determined to invest his energy into “something sustainable,” and studied bioprocess engineering in Helsinki before joining the Finnish molecular biology startup Medicel Oy in 2001.

After the Human Genome Project published a “working draft” of the human genome in 2000, software companies saw a potential gold mine in the grand task of cataloging nature, and began setting up a range of databases, ready to be populated with reams of biological data. During his time at Medicel, Pitkänen developed automated systems intended to speed up the process. (“This was the optimism of the new millennium,” he told me. “Genome sequencing will become affordable and biology will be solved,” and yet, “it’s a quarter of a century later and we still don’t fully understand how even the simplest cells work.”)

Much of the Finnish startup scene in the 2000s was funded by wealth created during the rise of Nokia, but as the company lost market share to Apple and Google after 2006, sources of seed capital began drying up. After leaving Medicel in 2007, Pitkänen transferred to Finland’s state-owned technical research institute, VTT, the equivalent of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the U.S. or Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany, where a team was focused on novel uses for the country’s abundant forest biomass.

Ideas included using industrial byproducts like sawdust and wood chips to extract sugars that could fuel cars or be turned into...