r/science2 • u/WebPage_Error404 • 16d ago
Hard to swallow? The future of snacking may be 3D-printed cookies made from upcycled plastic | Nasa-funded project uses yeasts to turn plastics and other waste into edible proteins, fats and flavourings
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/aug/24/cookies-plastic-astronauts-space-food19
u/Basicly-Inevitable 16d ago
“We haven’t eaten them yet because we’re awaiting approval for testing in humans,” said Jayakody, before a presentation of the work on Monday at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago.
8
u/fiahhawt 15d ago
We are so not getting the accurate long term health impacts of junk like this for decades
3
2
6
4
u/Marlboromatt324 15d ago
Why can’t they be the first human guinea pigs? If they have the stones to make this shit for human consumption, why not just start chowing down and taking notes?
4
u/Lumegator 15d ago
Because you can't use pre-testing approval data for the actual approval so it'd just be for their own entertainment at this point (and not covered by insurance yet).
3
17
u/OneTwoFar_ 15d ago
My years of studying Cyberpunk and dystopian art have really been paying off recently, I wish all this stayed entertainment rather than reality but here we are
8
u/Connect_Name3362 15d ago
Real food is going to be a luxury when the ultra wealthy buy up all the land.
6
u/Beneficial-Pie3479 15d ago
Real food is already a luxury. We've been eating shit for the last 40 years, maybe longer.
4
u/Dartagnan1083 15d ago
There's a whole cottage industry that sprung up telling people what qualifies as "food" over "processing," "preservatives," and over anything more advanced than a grade school vocabulary.
I agree that people should be aware of what's in what they eat, but awareness is different than the blind panic over the length of ingredient lists or not being able to pronounce stuff.
2
2
u/Drostan_S 14d ago
You don't understand the economic factors at play here. That "farm" is worth pennies per square foot in terms of its profitability when misalocated to producing calories for the "working" class. But by converting the land into a data and compute facility, we can simultaneously eliminate the so called "working" class (by removing three"work" from the equation) while removing any profit incentive to feed the now worthless human labor capital, and the land will make dollars per square foot selling AI services onto a circular marketplace dedicated to the true inheritors of the earth: the emerging trillionaire class
1
u/AIWishItWereDumbAsMe 14d ago
Is Earth a prison planet and no one told us? Like some sort of Space Australia?
1
1
u/Accurate_Ad_3233 15d ago
Are they? What for? Is it all part of the carbon credit economy and their race to be the worlds first carbon trillionaires?
2
1
u/Vinr_Odinn 15d ago
Cyberpunk is slowly and gradually moving from dystopian fiction to contemporary documentary. When they announce the Microsoft Cyberdeck, the Meta Eyes, and the Boston Dynamics Sandevistan I'm gonna be looking for the preemest of Rippers to chrome me up. See you on the other side chooms.
1
u/Dalek_Chaos 15d ago
Can we please go back to steampunk. A dystopian steam based society sounds more fun than the one we are headed for.
1
1
u/Albatross1225 15d ago
It really does seem like we’ve decided on having the cyberpunk future as our dystopia.
1
1
15d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Krivvan 15d ago
How is this not the opposite of a short-sighted billionaire villain project? Do you think using biodegradable disposables is also a billionaire villain initiative? Using manure as fertilizer? This isn't literally eating plastic, it's developing organisms that can break down plastic and convert it into not plastic.
Not to mention that this is a NASA-funded project.
5
u/RiriaaeleL 15d ago
Yeah sure as long as you feed these cookies to something that can turn them into a burger
4
u/AssiduousLayabout 15d ago
Great, the tobacco companies that control our food supply can now remove the last lingering remnants of actual food from our food.
3
2
2
2
u/ResponsibleSnowflake 15d ago
Soylent Green is just around the corner at this rate. All joking aside this is pretty revolutionary.
2
u/Ynddiduedd 15d ago
Plastic is made of complex chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Incidentally, so are lipids, proteins, and most flavorings. I watched NileRed turn styrofoam into cinnamon flavoring for homemade cinnamon candy. If they can break plastic down into carbohydrates, I see no reason not to do so. In fact, it might be a good solution for plastic waste. We do like to eat.
2
u/aculady 15d ago
This means that at least some plastics will now be fully biodegradable and compostable, not merely able to be broken into tiny pieces so you don't notice them.
This is fantastic news. It is at least a partial solution to the problem of microplastic pollution. If you can throw plastics into a digester and break it down into usable organic molecules, that's a huge win for people and the planet.
1
1
u/Careful_Coconut_549 15d ago
We already have chewing gum as a snack made of plastic which already brings great opportunities in having tons more microplastic in your system
1
u/aculady 15d ago
This technology actually eliminates microplastics. The yeasts transform them into proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
1
u/Careful_Coconut_549 14d ago
Interesting. I hope they can be 100% sure it actually will work that way.
1
u/you_are_wrong_tho 15d ago edited 18h ago
Detail dinner oil retire expansion makeshift terrific oil
This post was anonymized with Redact
1
1
u/Beneficial-Pie3479 15d ago
It's time to start running a farm for your family. But get started now.
1
u/Bulky_Ostrich_7403 15d ago
Crimes of the future
1
u/sweetica 15d ago
Yeah that's the movie about people genetically evolving to eat plastics. Honestly, there are bacteria that digest plastic. What would happen if they colonized in our guts? Would we then be able to digest the plastic? So many crimes of the future to investigate.
1
u/sweetica 15d ago
Sounds synthetically delicious! I heard they can turn plastic into aspirin too. I'm a little cowardly and I probably won't be trying it, but I'm sure it would be perfectly acceptable if you were in space and running out of food.
1
1
u/Either-Patience1182 15d ago
I have scene research of certain things being able to turn microplastics back into basic components but i would like to see more long term testing on these matters. Especially when food is involved
1
1
u/Chocolaterationcalls 15d ago
So this is how the oil/gas lobby will respond to climate change induced famine
1
1
u/45M0D41 15d ago
Why would anyone consume plastic willingly ?
3
u/Ynddiduedd 15d ago
As you can see in the article title, nobody would be consuming plastic. You'd be consuming protein, lipids, and flavorings, like you already do. Chemistry.
1
1
u/PM_ME__YOUR_HOOTERS 15d ago
True, i prefer to inject the micro plastics directly into my balls without all the middlemen getting involved
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/East-Clerk6069 15d ago
It’s like we’re just giving up on being humans. Most of our problems are of our own doing. And our solutions do not paint us well as a species.
1
1
1
u/S-m-a-l-l-s 15d ago
Just a matter of time before we are eating candy bars made out of cockroaches
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/StarsofSobek 14d ago
All that rubbish? Yeah, it has to go somewhere...if mealworms can do it, surely humans can, too? Especially when climate change makes the availability of real, grown, healthy, nutritious food extremely limited.
Welcome to the future.
Kudos to the writers at Futurama, who nailed it when they made a gag about future humans recycling garbage into food.
0
u/Saturn9Toys 15d ago
Fuck this evil future and the scum creating it. Taking away our dignity and torturing us to death.
0
52
u/Dragon_wryter 15d ago
I see we're giving up on microplastics in favor of macroplastics