Since 2012, over 99 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies have indicated that humans are the driving force behind current climate change. Exactly 0 percent of these papers have suggested butter as a plausible solution.
But, hey, why should that stop anyone from trying, right?
Savor is a California-based startup company that is bypassing the agricultural side of things and developed a thermochemical process to pull excess carbon from the environment and use it to make butter.
No, seriously!
According to its own marketing, this carbon dioxide-derived butter boasts a rich flavor profile to “drool over.” But how the hell is it possible to spread a colorless gas onto a piece of toast? In actuality, it’s because the colorless gas gets converted to fat molecules.
While the Savor recipe for making lab butter is proprietary, the science likely looks a little something like this (in the simplest way possible):
1) Carbon dioxide is pulled from the air (virtually any other environmental carbon source can be used, but in this example, the scientists elected for a greenhouse gas). In this process, carbon dioxide is being exploited for its carbon atoms. Scientists use these carbon atoms a bit like Legos, disassembling one molecular structure to build another.
They want to go from this (carbon dioxide — one carbon atom linked to two oxygen atoms):
To eventually this (a long chain of carbons linked together, and part of the structure that ultimately forms the molecular building blocks of fats):
2) Chemical processing and heat are applied to the freshly harvested carbon source (in Savor’s lab, probably through a nifty bit of chemistry called a “Fischer-Tropsch synthesis”), which ultimately yields a liquid slurry of hydrocarbons. At this stage, the would-be butter resembles something chemically closer to gasoline than anything you’d see on the breakfast table.
3) With more chemical reactions, and the addition of a little oxygen, this fossil fuel-ish mixture is converted into fatty acids and, ultimately, a source of fat to be tweaked into butter.
While currently speculative, the fatty acid makeup of Savor’s butter is likely to be different from traditional sources. Dairy butter is composed of a variety of fatty acids, including saturated fats like palmitic and stearic acids, monounsaturated fats like oleic acid, and small amounts of polyunsaturated fats. By contrast, the process of creating synthetic butter may yield a more homogenous mixture of molecules.
So, while the resulting product is designed to mimic the taste and texture of dairy butter, it may be chemically less complex than the natural variety. And perhaps better for the climate? According to Environmental Protection Agency in 2022, livestock account for about 2.19 percent of total carbon emissions in the United States — a percentage that decreased from its 2021 value.
@savorfoods Hi:) We are working on making the best butter ever. We use an agriculture-free process and are excited to share our progress as we develop it and try it out in a lot of tasty recipes🤩 #buttertok #buttermaking #butter #butterrecipe #bestbutter ♬ Background Music(815729) – Pavel
If this sounds like something from science fiction, coal-derived margarine was actually manufactured as early as the 1940s in effort to feed weary ground troops in Germany. So, while we’ve had the chemical know-how for a while, these non-agricultural sources of fats still have not been widely adopted.
Currently, Savor’s lab butter is undergoing regulatory review before it can be made available to consumers — things like safety and appropriate labeling are of paramount importance here. As with all new technological developments, much of the future of this product will be dependent upon its scalability. While Savor’s founders hope to reduce the carbon footprint associated with agriculture butter, one has to wonder what laboratory infrastructure would have to be created to fulfill America’s 2 billion-pound butter consumption. Regardless, the startup has garnered significant attention and investment, including backing from Bill Gates and other venture capital firms.
Recently, I saw a woman wearing a T-shit that said, “Life is too short for fake butter or fake people.” I guess we shall see.
Leah Elson is an American scientist, author, and public science communicator. She has two pit bulls and sixty eight houseplants.
