Is Bacteria The Future Of Farming?

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.”

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 chemicals like lactic acid to make biodegradable plastic bags. But these ideas did not last.

Although VTT is owned by the Finnish state, it is run like a private company. When the price of oil fell in 2014, thanks to a flood of American shale and a decision by OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to keep production high, the economics of second-generation bioethanol suffered. Pitkänen calculated that even if the entirety of Finland’s forest biomass was burned, they’d still need to import oil.

And yet like all good Europeans at that time, the researchers at VTT had great faith that an inundation of cheap, renewable energy from solar and wind was just around the corner. It was around this time that he was reminded of a flurry of research from the 1960s that had focused on using microbes to convert waste into edible proteins. What if we used waste for something other than powering cars, he thought. What if we ate it instead?

The End Of Agriculture

Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed. This means 40% of the planet’s total habitable land is dedicated to animal products, despite the fact that meat, dairy and farmed fish combined provide just 17% of humanity’s calories.

Only a fraction of agricultural land (16%) is used to grow the crops that we eat directly, with an additional 4% for things like biofuels, textiles and tobacco. Just 38% of habitable land is forested, a slice of the pie that continues to shrink, primarily in diverse tropical regions where the greatest number of species live.

We need more forests. They may not quite be the planet’s lungs (most oxygen comes from our oceans), but they are home to many billions of plants, animals, bacteria and fungi whose complex metabolic interactions make up the biosphere with its crucial role in stabilizing the climate. 

As the human population rises, the demand for food will continue to increase. Just as importantly, as incomes continue to rise, people will favor more nutrient-dense foods like fruits and vegetables, oils, meat and dairy (a phenomenon known as Bennett’s Law named after Stanford food economist Merrill K. Bennett).

While it’s clear that meat consumption must be reduced, we also need to do more with the space we currently have. One approach, which Elizabeth Kolbert has written about in The New Yorker, could be to manipulate the surprisingly inefficient chemistry of photosynthesis, boosting yields without requiring more land. Another would be to forgo fields altogether, harnessing the power of microbial fermentation on an “urban farm” that looks, at least from the outside, like a provincial office building.

Protein From Electricity

Solar Foods’ Factory 01 is located on a modern industrial estate in Vantaa, a satellite town about a 10-minute train ride from Helsinki Airport. Inside the building’s jet-black exterior, bundles of polished steel pipes twist and weave above a royal blue epoxy floor, feeding a noxious mix of hydrogen, ammonium, oxygen and carbon dioxide into a series of bioreactors and the silent creatures who dwell inside.

It is in these roughly 53-, 530- and 5,300-gallon tanks that the Finnish food-tech company’s first product is being cultivated: an all-natural ingredient called Solein — a portmanteau of “solar” and “protein” — which I’d been promised would be served to me in a variety of formulations before the day was up.

Technically speaking, Solein is the powdery remains of a hydrogenotroph: an organism that metabolizes molecular hydrogen. Hydrogenotrophs can be found in the soil, in the sea and even in the human gut. Finding a specimen that would work as food, however, was a unique challenge. 

“There were many boxes that had to be ticked,” Pitkänen told me. “Growth, safety, nutrition. All bacteria have mechanisms they use to hide and fight, a kind of chemical warfare. You need to find one that’s a pacifist.”

In 2010, 136 countries signed the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefits Sharing, which aims to prohibit “bioprospecting.” In essence, the agreement was intended to reduce the likelihood that western companies would exploit the genetic resources of poorer nations to make products like medicines or pesticides without compensation. Notably, abstainers included Turkey, Russia and the U.S.

Finland is a signatory, so after Pitkänen and company CEO Pasi Vainikka founded Solar Foods in 2017, they set out in search of candidate microbes close to home (simplest of all would be to screen for organisms on public land, or something close to it, like the sea). After just six months, they found their bacterium in the pewter blue shallows of the Baltic. “In hindsight, maybe we were quite lucky,” Pitkänen told me.

Solein is 65 to 70% protein (the rest is fat, fibers and minerals), contains iron and B vitamins, and can be used to bind, thicken and emulsify other foods, adding body and nutritional bonus points where they may be otherwise lacking (as in many vegan dairy alternatives). Much of the process, after it is “harvested” from the bioreactors, will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in a brewery or on a dairy farm, only here there are no craft beer enthusiasts or cows, just a series of silvery organs that continuously whir and click.

After sufficient volumes have been grown, a saffron-yellow liquid is sluiced into a pasteurizer, concentrated in a centrifuge, homogenized and spray-dried. Three large half-ton sacks of the vaguely nutty-scented final product have been placed on wooden pallets in the middle of the factory floor, the output from the system’s commissioning run.

In full flow, the company says a single factory’s production could increase to a maximum of 176 tons per year, generating the same amount of protein from a single bioreactor in a day as milking 300 cows.

Solar Foods isn’t the only company attempting to scale up precision fermentation utilizing feedstocks like methane or hydrogen, both of which are common industrial byproducts. (Most traditional fermented foods, such as beer, bread and kombucha, are fed sugars that must be grown in a field or lactating mammal). The British-Dutch startup Deep Branch, for example, makes protein for fishmeal by plugging 20-foot containers into places on industrial sites where gasses might have otherwise been released into the atmosphere.

The California-based startup Air Protein is setting up a farm in the Bay Area’s San Leandro. Although there are many overlaps between them and Solar Foods, Air Protein is focused on the market for meat alternatives, where Solein is being touted as an ingredient for food companies with existing products. These businesses already have the branding, expertise, and crucially, enough throughput to influence the way the food system works.

“What’s quite boring is it’s a price and volume game,” said Vainikka when we spoke later that day. Vainikka is in his late 40s, peers out through gold-rimmed glasses, and serves up lengthy monologues about business and technological innovation, the result of a career spent researching energy fundamentals from first principles. His background is in chemical engineering and economics, and he led the national Neo-Carbon Energy program at VTT, where he met Pitkänen. “You need huge volumes to have even a small impact on the food system because it’s so big,” he said.

Consider, for example, Hellmann’s mayonnaise or Häagen-Dazs ice cream (owned by Unilever and General Mills, respectively). These are products that have been popular for decades. The companies that profit from them are borderline monopolies, with little incentive but to steer the ship as slowly and safely as possible.

However, should they encounter a way to reduce their climate impact (or boost nutritional value) without causing major changes to their product’s taste or price, these, or any other company, would likely pay attention.

No single novel food, such as a new meal-replacement shake or plant-based patty, is likely to have the impact that an ingredient change in a popular product might have. It may be less visible to the end consumer, but in a sense that’s the whole point. “How we differ is we are a mode of primary production,” Vainikka said. “Like a new wheat, which makes a notable difference in the system, but ultimately disappears inside the food.”

The Taste Test

Since it was almost time for lunch, the tour concluded on the building’s top floor, where a smooth, black, carbon capture machine was quietly scrubbing CO2 from the complex’s HVAC system. (A similar process can extract water from the air, but since water is so abundant in Finland, there’s no need.)

Powered exclusively by renewable energy — at an average rate of 7,000MWh per year, or loosely the equivalent amount to power 2,000 U.S. households — the facility accounts for half of Solein’s production costs and could be rebuilt anywhere, from the Arabian Desert to southern Mongolia.

Both locations would be good options, in fact, given their abundant supply of solar power and trouble growing food using irrigation (or rain), which is central to conventional agriculture. Because renewable energy is often bought 10 or 15 years in advance for a fixed price (using so-called Power Purchase Agreements), harvest volumes are determined according to the price of electricity, with yields unaffected by poor weather.

The atrium at the building’s entrance will soon become an exhibition space and auditorium, with a restaurant serving Solein-infused meals, Vainikka explained. He uses the analogy of electric vehicles, arguing that “those most opposed to EVs were those who never had a test drive.”

On that score, it was time to buckle up. Miikka Manninen, an accomplished young chef with a tawny mustache and impeccable manners, emerged from the test kitchen where he spends his days cooking with Solein, manipulated into an array of different forms inside the company’s laboratories. 

We kicked off with slices of ochre-colored hummus and bread (in which the eggs, milk and olive oil were replaced with Solein, giving it a yellowy hue). This was followed by an appetizer of grilled asparagus on Solein cream cheese, frothed over with a hazelnut foam (in my experience, nothing says expensive food quite like foam).

Ordinarily, the Finns would be knee-deep in asparagus at this time of year, but the week’s unexpected snowfall had pushed back the harvest, meaning the spears still needed to be imported via Denmark. As we ate, I asked Manninen what other chefs thought about his unusual job. 

“A lot of older colleagues were laughing about it, saying I was making space food,” he said. “But others have been interested. For example, I told them I’d been making macarons with Solein, which shouldn’t really work because they’re just eggs and sugar, but they do. Some of them believe me, some don’t.”

We eat with our eyes as much as our stomachs, so I took pictures of each dish as it arrived. For our entrée, Manninen served ravioli made from Solein dough (which he claims is easier to sculpt than regular pasta) along with fried oyster mushrooms and a tarragon buerre blanc sauce. We ended with a dark chocolate cake with Solein ice cream, chunks of blood orange and a Solein-based namelaka, a kind of velvety Japanese ganache.

All of it was delicious, and I doubt I would have guessed that all of it was vegan. If not for the recurrent yellow theme, I definitely wouldn’t have known it featured a novel ingredient inspired by the plight of lonely spacefarers en route to distant planets. 

As I tried to discern what part of the meal’s overall gestalt had been supplied by homogenized bacterial carcasses, I stuck my nose inside a jar containing a sample of the dried powder. I was confronted by a memory of lying on dried dirt on a sunny day but otherwise, I wasn’t really any the wiser.

Tasting Solein was a little like meeting a celebrity. I’ve been following Solar Foods since 2020 when the company was featured in journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot’s documentary, “Apocalypse Cow.” Back then they were making Solein using a pilot process built by Pitkänen in a car garage roughly six miles from Factory 01.

The company’s marketing efforts to date have been impressive. General awareness of the startup is high, at least among people interested in food tech, and it isn’t hard to find detailed answers to questions about the product or process online. “The target is that consumers would know us, even if we’re not selling to them directly,” Pitkänen explained. “We hope it will facilitate discussions with food companies because they are not in a hurry.” 

He paused for a second. “After all, they make food and already have customers, so what is their motive to change?”

From Microbes To Macros

It is not only Big Food that could stymie this new type of farming, or ferming. Last November, Italian agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida boasted that “Italy is the world’s first country safe from the social and economic risks of synthetic food.” He was referring to the country’s ban on cultivated meat — the technique whereby animal cells are grown in bioreactors and fed on a nutrient soup or “culture medium,” hypothetically ending the need for both grazing and animal slaughter. 

The law passed, Lollobrigida claimed, to protect public health and cultural heritage. This despite the fact the EU has yet to approve any cultivated meat products. In fact, cultivated meat is only available for human consumption in Singapore, a city-state whose fears over food security, diverse national palette and efficient bureaucracy has made them the bleeding edge for alimentary innovations. The UK, meanwhile, approved cultivated meat for pets in July. By fabricating a culture war, battling the hypothetical bogeyman of “lab-grown meat,” politicians can claim to be doing something to protect farmers even as farmers’ incomes continue to fall.

In the U.S. this May, Florida and Alabama passed their own iterations of the Italian bill, making it illegal to produce, sell or distribute cultivated meat, thereby strangling a nascent technology to maintain the status quo.

“Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “As some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers,” Democratic Sen. John Fetterman chimed in from across the aisle on X. 

Suffocating valuable research is seldom a good idea, and the U.S. laws do include allowances for university labs and government agencies. In China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of eggs, pork and fish, cultivated meat has been earmarked for R&D funding as part of the country’s 14th Five-Year Plan. By outlawing commercial development of the technology, the U.S. risks falling behind. 

This year, $10.2 billion in direct payments from the federal government is projected to reach the pockets of American farmers (and that’s not including crop insurance, loans, disaster assistance or conservation programs, which in essence pay landowners not to farm their land).

Globally, in many instances, farm subsidies fall as efficiency rises, but the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates they will still reach $1.8 trillion by 2030 if current trends persist. This represents a “multi-billion-dollar opportunity,” the FAO suggests, for policymakers to fund the next generation of farmers and farm technologies, shifting the present bias from outdated, inefficient and harmful farming practices toward healthier end-products that will support climate and sustainable development goals.

Plus, it’s always seemed odd that more libertarian-leaning states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida don’t seem to oppose the large state handouts they receive for beef, soy and field corn (most of which, again, will not be eaten by humans). If the product is so valuable, why not let the market decide what it’s worth?

Solar Foods does not use animal products anywhere in its process. All the same, the new rules outlawing cultivated meat in Europe and the U.S. have not escaped the company’s notice. “I don’t think they’ve realized that this is a once-in-a-century opportunity for those who practice animal-based farming,” the company’s CEO, Pasi Vainikka, told me. “How else can you make parma ham even more premium? It requires that something changes around it to change its status.” 

It isn’t boutique hams and artisan cheeses that cause the lion’s share of climate damage, of course. It’s the high-volume, lower welfare products that could — eventually — be disrupted by alternative proteins such as chickenless eggs or cowless milks.

“In the age of social media, self-expression has reached the level of a human need, and food is part of self-expression,” Vainikka continued. “Cellular agriculture will favor products with the greatest cultural heritage because these things represent something for the people. The frequency of a specific type of meat must be reduced, but the quality and price point can go up.”

For now, Solar Foods’ main priority is getting Solein into the hands of potential customers. The ingredient received regulatory approval in Singapore in 2022. According to Solar Foods, U.S. approval is expected before Christmas this year, with the EU and UK to follow in 2025 (another staff member informed me that two years after submitting their safety dossier to the EU, nobody had even opened it).

The product’s success will be essential to the long-term future of the business, but even if it fails, the company’s achievements to date are significant. Solar Foods has designed a new way to farm proteins that decouples food production from the need for vast areas of land. It is by no means a silver bullet — but it’s a start. Of course, the financial burden of getting this far has been hefty and might not have happened anywhere else in the world.

Finland emerged from World War II facing abject poverty. In the 1960s and ‘70s, its industry was dominated by fields like wood processing, mining and shipbuilding, which relied on huge, expensive machines owned by the state or big business. The economy diversified in the ‘80s and ‘90s, first into electronics and later, software startups, which have lower capital expenditure requirements and the potential for far greater returns. “Solar Foods is closer to pulp, paper and other industries where bigger is better,” Pitkänen told me earlier that day. “This is difficult for venture capitalists. They don’t want to buy steel.”

All the same, Solar Foods has raised about 43 million euros ($47 million) in equity, with a further 30 million euros ($32 million) coming from development loans, the Finnish climate fund, and a 34-million-euro ($36.7 million) grant from a European Commission initiative to expand hydrogen technologies. Earlier this year they hired a chief financial officer and announced their intention to go public on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. Their proof of concept has likely inspired precision fermentation startups elsewhere, such as Amsterdam’s Farmless and Berlin’s Legendairy Foods. As the ecosystem continues to develop, more risk-averse investors will likely come forward.

Historically, agricultural tools have been adapted to meet environmental pressures. In the Middle Ages, windmills intended to grind grain were used to drain low-lying land so that farming could expand. In the 1960s, when famine was a global concern, innovative seed breeding techniques led to enormous surpluses that would have previously been unthinkable.

Could the bioreactor become the plow of the 21st century, a newly ubiquitous tool better suited to the changing climate on Earth? Could microbes come to play a far more central role in food production than they already do? As is always the case in the history of technology, the long-term future remains opaque, hostage to contingencies like knowledge, resources and cultural will.

There is a pressing need to distinguish between the ethics of eating meat as an individual versus the ethics of state-supported megafarms.

What one person chooses to consume will remain a drop in the ocean as long as the system that decides how foods are produced remains intact. Yet even if supermarket aisles barely seem to alter from year to year, changes to ingredients happen all the time, driven most often by the need to improve margins, but also by new technologies and new conditions, from shifting geopolitical alliances to a changing climate.

Precision fermentation could be one of the many tools our moment requires. Thinking back to the NASA studies of the 1960s, conceived at a time when interplanetary space travel seemed inevitable, I asked Vainikka if he had been a fan of sci-fi as a kid. “Not at all,” he said, without skipping a beat.

He told me his thinking had been influenced by a 2014 visit from philosophers at Finland’s Futures Research Center, back when he and Pitkänen were still at VTT. This group had encouraged the practice of “mental time travel” among the program’s engineers, helping them to speculate on how the coming flows of cheap, renewable energy might transform society in unexpected ways. The residue of those early workshops is visible everywhere at the Solar Foods factory, where one of the futures they imagined has become reality.

Standing there, it all seemed simple, an engineering problem like any other. But food and nutrition are some of our most potent sources of disagreements, ideologies, dogmas and closely guarded beliefs, a reality that must be negotiated both by governments and in our private lives. (I thought back to Pitkänen’s Pepsi, which he referred to as “poison” but still preferred over coffee, as well as the idiosyncrasies of my own diet.) Listening to Vainikka as he described designing a menu for an astronaut, I was seduced by how uncannily straightforward it all sounded. Perhaps suspiciously so.

“An analogy with space travel is useful in thinking about what food represents,” he said. “When you’re planning a diet for an astronaut, you grow herbs, leaves and cherry tomatoes for psychological reasons. Then you need your calorie backbone underneath. You need certain minerals, amino acids and vitamins for your brain to work, and it needs to be nutritionally complete.”

“The food is compiled in reverse based on these three things,” he told me. “The same applies on planet Earth.”