My thought was "I doubt you can make fat only with hydrogen and carbon", but fats/lipids are literally hydrocarbons. Adding other elements changes the taste, so it isn't necessary to have mammals anywhere in the production chain.

Very interesting and probably not the first time this is/has been done. It seems quite obvious.

the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.

Yeah, never heard that one before. Weird how every non-whatever replacement foodstuff tastes just like the original... literally 0% of the time.

It's a synthetic saturated fat, so basically a synthetic margarine. Butter is made from milk. So the headline should read "[...] makes 'margarine' out of water and CO2", but everybody hates margarine, so I get why they chose butter instead.

Sounds like margarine with more chances to shit myself

Interesting way to get fat alternatives, people are already used to eating fake butter regularly, so it probably wouldn't take much to add this to our diet.

The biggest question which is barely alluded to in the article is cost. If it can't compete with mass produced butter at cost and scale then it'll just be another "alternative" which is good but not as big.

They also mention that they compared emissions and land use but give no aspect of what synthetic processes are used (I'd assume they at least have provisional patents on the "how to" already).

During WW2, due to the food shortage, Germans did this using the carbon from coal... The process is old and known.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter

Let's see if the process can be made more efficient this time. Allegedly, the product was virtually indistinguishable from butter.

Computer! Butter! Room temp!

Fat and oil production from animal and plant-based sources are collectively responsible for about 3.5 billion tons of CO2

You cannot be serious that animal-based and plant-based are grouped in this figure. Plant-based is likely close to carbon-neutral, and only not net-negative, because of transport, cooling etc., which will also be necessary for this artificially created fat...

If this were to take off France and the US South by themselves could eat us out of climate change in a matter of months

If it tastes and spreads like a tub of Land o Lakes then I'll probably try it. I don't care where the hell it comes from as long as it tastes correct.

Don't want to be a hater but doesn't this basically create fat without nutrients? It feels like this is reinventing margarine albeit in a cool way.

Is it as bad for your health as hydrogenated oils?