Making ‘Food Out Of Thin Air’

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

“What if we used waste for something other than powering cars. What if we ate it instead?”

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.

“While it’s clear that meat consumption must be reduced, we also need to do more with the space we currently have.”

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.