George joins the microbial food future

I mentioned last year that I had not been able to track down the (I think) RN Science Show in which it was claimed that the future of cheap, bulk food to feed the masses was going to come from vats of microbially sourced protein.   Not the (way over-hyped) meat grown from meat cells, but from the right kind of bacteria, which is then processed into food.

Well, it seems George Monbiot has got excited about this idea too, as he explains in this article in (where else?) The Guardian.      It starts:

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

Here's a BCC article on the same company.   The only thing that sounds a bit unnecessarily complicated - they say they will use hydrogen make from electrolysis of water as part of the feed to the bacteria.   Hence they need cheap (renewable) electricity for this to make environmental sense. 

Can't they do more with - I don't know, I'm just guessing here - GM algae, or something that doesn't need the hydrogen?