Spiritual Blogs

Butter made from thin air!? Yes, you guessed it: It’s this week’s new “food of the future,” and it has the backing of none other than Bill Gates.

“Innovative food tech company Savor has launched the world’s first butter made out of carbon,” explains a recent puff-piece from The Carbon Herald.

“The company, backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, was able to achieve this technological advancement by molecularly constructing fat out of carbon dioxide (CO₂), green hydrogen (GH₂), and methane (CH₄).

“This revolutionary product aims to answer the growing need for sustainable food chain solutions that offer a reliable alternative to agriculture-dependent oils.”

Savor has a 25,000 square foot facility in Batavia, Illinois, where it produces a number of different artificial fats supposed to mimic palm oil, milk fat and cocoa butter, all using a range of “methane- and carbon-dioxide-based inputs.” It aims to produce even more types in the near-future.

The company began its first production run in 2024, and is looking to produce 100kg a week of artificial fat by the middle of this year, with a full commercial facility, producing even larger volumes, planned for 2027.

According to The Carbon Herald, “Its cutting-edge butter product has already been adopted by many Michelin-star restaurants and leading figures from the food industry, signaling a strong interest and demand for more of these alternative goods.”

If “butter” made from carbon is a food of the future, it also has an interesting past—in fact, a rather dirty past—since it’s been made before, and people have already eaten it. (The account that follows is taken from chapter 4 of Chris Van Tulleken’s excellent book, Ultra-Processed People.)

The first ever carbon-butter was called coal-butter, because it was made out of coal. Coal-butter was developed in the 1930s, when Nazi Germany was struggling to achieve autarky—resource-independence—in preparation for what would become World War II.

One serious problem was fuel. Germany has huge reserves of coal, but no oil. German industry and the war machine would need a massive, reliable supply of fuel, one that couldn’t be cut off by a British naval blockade or the denial of access to the Ploesti oilfields of Romania by the Soviet Union.

So German scientists set about finding a way to convert coal into oil, since both are kinds of carbon. Two scientists called Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch found a solution by smashing coal with steam and oxygen to turn it into carbon dioxide and hydrogen, which were then passed over a catalyst to produce liquid fuel.

In the process of solving this problem, Fischer and Tropsch provided a means to solve another one: Germany’s massive demand for edible fat. By the 1930s, Germans were consuming 1.5 million tons of fat a year, but were only able to produce half that amount at home. They had to import huge quantities of linseed oil from South America, soybeans from Asia and whale oil from the Arctic. All of these fat sources would be threatened in the event of a war.

A man called Arthur Imhausen partnered with chemical giant IG Farben and using the Fischer-Tropsch method was able to produce the world’s first completely synthetic edible fat or “Speisefett.”

Speisefett was white, waxy and tasteless—gross, in short—so Imhausen added diacetyl to it, which is used today to give microwaveable popcorn its buttery flavor, and salt. He also added beta-carotene—the stuff that makes carrots orange—so the fat looked more like butter and less like candle-wax. “Coal-butter” was born.

The Nazi leadership, including the Führer himself, were overjoyed. Imhausen, whose mother was a Jew, was awarded “full Aryan” status as a result of his efforts, thanks to lobbying by Hermann Goering.

But there was still a significant hurdle to be overcome. Since the plan was to feed coal-butter to German soldiers, the Nazi leadership wanted to be sure it was actually safe and didn’t impair their battlefield performance in any way.

One of the main sites for the testing of coal-butter was Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where tests were performed on 6,000 inmates over a period of years. The results of the testing were presented at a conference in 1944, in Berlin. A published scientific paper, “Fatty Acid Synthesis and Its Importance for Securing the German Food Supply,” noted that, “Thousands of tests, led by Director Prof. Dr. Flössner, confirmed the high value of synthetic cooking fat and made it the first synthetic food in the world to be approved for human consumption.” The paper neglected to mention where, or upon whom, the testing had been done.

In the end, the fat was only really used by U-boat crews in the final days of the war. Since these men had a life expectancy of about 60 days, any concerns about the long-term safety of coal-butter were beside the point.

I’m not here to do the standard reductio ad Hitlerum. I don’t think butter made from carbon is bad because Hitler made it and thought it was great. It’s just a story you ought to be aware of.

My real problem with Savor’s carbon-butter is twofold. It’s a lie, like so many other fake foods that claim equivalence with time-honored natural products. Even worse, we don’t have any idea what eating it will actually do to us, nor are we likely to before it’s released onto the general market—unless something changes drastically in the way all these novel foods are licensed and regulated.

Let’s start with the first objection. Virtually all new “foods of the future,” whether we’re talking about lab-grown meat or milk or plant-based burgers, claim some kind of equivalence in nutritional terms with the foods they’re designed to replace.

Earlier this year, I wrote an op-ed for The Epoch Times about lab-grown milk, which was being touted by Forbes as “replicating the nutrition, taste, and texture of traditional dairy.” This is an absurd claim, I wrote.

The simple truth is, we know very little—actually, next to nothing—about the compounds that are in our food and what they do to us, good and bad. This makes replicating natural foods a fool’s errand. We can’t do it even if we want to.

This ignorance was highlighted in a 2020 scientific paper by Albert-László Barabási of the Harvard Medical School, in which he coined the term “nutritional dark matter” to describe the thousands upon thousands of food compounds that are reckoned to be in food but about which there are no scientific data at all. The vast majority don’t even have names.

“Our understand of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components,” Barabási explains.

You simply can’t replicate butter if you don’t know what butter is.

And we don’t know what butter is.

Yes, if you’re making fake butter, you can match the macronutrient profile—protein, carbohydrates, fat—and you might even be able to match some of the vitamin profile too, but that’s just the tip of the nutritional iceberg, and what’s under the water may matter even more than what’s above it.

Here’s an example. A mid-century experiment showed that liver contains an substance that provided a tremendous boost of endurance for rats when they were made to swim to exhaustion. The scientists who conducted the experiment did various tests to try and identify the substance, and were able to show, at least, that it definitely wasn’t one of the b-vitamins, but otherwise they had no idea. Stumped. They knew it was there, but they just didn’t know what it was.

This is why I’ve consistently argued that fake foods should not be allowed to be called “meat,” “milk,” “eggs,” “cheese, “yoghurt” or any other label associated with real food. If you’re being told your “plant-based eggs” are eggs, you’re being lied to—and why should companies be allowed to lie about their products to consumers?

The second problem: We just don’t know what eating these foods does to our bodies. Again, this is a more general problem with novel foods being introduced to the market.

Novel foods are cleared for sale without any kind of thorough safety testing, because the general attitude of the regulators is “safe until proven otherwise.” This is just as true for food additives or novel chemicals used in industry. Unless a product has immediate, catastrophic effects on health that appear during the limited testing that is done, we’re left to wait years or even decades for their harmful effects to become known, by which point establishing causality is far more difficult and massive vested interests—hills of money—stand in the way of doing so.

I’ve written at length about the potential problems associated with eating lab-grown meat, which is made using “immortalized cell lines.” Immortalized cell lines are, in important ways, functionally the same as cancers, and in fact, many of the most important immortalized cell lines used in modern medicine are taken from cancer samples, such as the HeLa line, which began as a sample taken from an African American woman’s uterine tumor in the 1950s. Humans have no history of eating animal cells that are functionally the same as cancers—and nobody can tell you otherwise.

Humans also have no history of eating butter that’s made from coal or any other type of carbon. There’s some Nazi safety data, of course, but even that’s equivocal. After the war, British intelligence discovered other data the Nazi scientists had tried to hide. A series of animal tests showed that chronic consumption of synthetic fat caused severe kidney problems and even decalcified bones. Dogs simply refused to eat it.

We have no reason to believe carbon-butter is safe for human consumption. Unfortunately, the necessary testing to establish this with certainty won’t be done, unless something changes at the FDA—and obviously it should.

Lab-grown meat and plant-based meat have already been approved for consumption by the FDA, without any long-term feeding studies. Indeed, the safety data for these products is always, without fail, provided by the companies that make them, an obvious conflict of interest.

What we can say with certainty is that the broader trend in diet represented by the creation of carbon-butter—the replacement of the real whole foods our ancestors ate with factory-made processed food—has been a disaster for human health on an unprecedented scale. It was a disaster from the very beginning, as Weston A. Price showed in his groundbreaking book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), a book I firmly believe is the most important book on nutrition ever written.

The march of processed food has only continued since the 1930s, producing newer, more heavily manufactured varieties with new additives and ingredients, from high-fructose corn syrup to red dye 40. We are further from the diets we should be eating than at any point in our 200,000-year history as modern humans.

Today, the average person in the US or a comparable Western nation gets the majority of their calories from processed food. If we look at children specifically, the figures are even more shocking. In the UK, children aged two to five, get around two-thirds of their daily calories from processed food.

But carbon-butter isn’t even a processed food. Calling it a processed food or even an ultra-processed food implies there was some food there to begin with—a food to be played with and perverted, but food all the same.

But carbon-butter is made with carbon-dioxide, hydrogen and methane, none of which is food unless you’re a plant or a micro-organism. Carbon-butter is, as the Nazi scientists proclaimed, a fully synthetic food. And as far as I’m concerned, that means it isn’t food at all.

I’ll be completely frank with you: I don’t fancy Savor’s chances much. “Foods of the future” come and go. We’ve had the whole plant-based meat fad, which simply collapsed. It doesn’t matter the size of the company. Even “big beasts” like Impossible and Beyond Meat, into which billions of dollars have been poured, are sinking faster than the Edmund Fitzgerald, for the simple fact that nobody wants to buy them. Everybody knows the product is inferior to the real thing. It doesn’t taste or look as good, and barely anybody believes it’s better for you either.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager Savor won’t ever produce its fake butter at scale, and if it does, it won’t for long.

But that doesn’t mean the agenda that’s given us these twisted products is going anywhere. It isn’t.

New startups appear every week offering cell-cultured meat, plant-based alternatives, “precision fermentation” (using microbes to “brew” foods) and other innovations; the world’s biggest food producers are re-aligning their operations and rebranding themselves as “protein” producers, rather than meat or dairy concerns; governments continue to float the possibility of carbon taxes—even “carbon rationing”—for the most polluting consumer goods, including red meat and animal products; and the entire medical establishment, media, celebrities, captains of industry, and NGOs including the UN promote “plant-based lifestyles” as new, hip, healthy and, most of all, ethical.

All of this being done in the name of fighting climate change, improving our health and ensuring a global population projected to reach 10 billion by 2050 can be fed “fairly,” but the main beneficiaries will be corporations and governments, who will have even greater control over the food supply and the way we live.

This threat will persist so long as the insane climate-change scam goes unchallenged, nutritional science is corrupted by corporate interests, and Westerners are blackmailed into believing it’s their obligation to support uncontrolled population growth in the rest of the world forever.

Ultimately, what’s needed to fight this political agenda is another political agenda: one that asserts our basic rights, as human beings with particular nutritional needs, to real high-quality food, especially animal foods.

We’ve seen intimations of what such a counter-agenda might look like in Italy, where the government has banned lab-grown meat and the adulteration of flour with insect-meal, and we’ve seen them in Florida too, where Governor DeSantis has made it illegal to produce or sell lab-grown meat. Other US states are now following suit. Good.

Free marketers will piss and moan about “government intervention” and “overstep” and “Big Brother,” and claim the market must be allowed to decide, but the truth is, the plant-based agenda or whatever you want to call it—if you’re feeling nostalgic, why not call it “the Great Reset”?—isn’t about what you, the ordinary consumer, want. It’s supposed to happen whether consumers like it or not, and despite their preferences, which are already well established. You can’t fight carbon taxes and artificial scarcity with free choice.

It might not be carbon-butter you’re eating in 20 years, but it will be something else unholy. In fact, your entire diet will be unrecognizable if the globalist plan for food is realized. Which is why the time to speak up and to fight back is now, before it’s too late. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services, there’s simply no excuse. He knows what’s going on as well as anybody—certainly as well as I do.

It’s time for action.