23. The Nutrition Transition 🔗

I’m seeing an interesting parallel between my work gigs on energy transition stuff (fossil fuels + combustion tech to renewables+electricity tech) and personal life efforts to gradually move to a plant-based diet. Cc @vegan @RyanBethencourt

I’m not vegan. I’m what airlines call ovo-lacto vegetarian, gradually substituting lower-cruelty products into lifestyle. Rarely buy milk anymore. Oat/soy/almond work well enough. But still on yogurt, cheese for some uses. Free-range eggs only and starting to swap in Just Egg.

Factory farming really is like the oil industry in many ways, and going plant-based is like going renewables-based. But the trick to energy transitions is to switch all the energy end uses to electrified devices. What’s the equivalent in food? Plantization.

Switching from an IC engine to an electric motor is about reinventing the application around the electricity stack. This is like inventing an egg substitute. The application is egg-like culinary function (like cars are transport function).

Developing a plant-based protein that can scramble like an egg is like developing a battery with the power-to-weight ratio and capacity characteristics needed for cars. In the latter case, Li-ion was the revolution. Here, perhaps Just Egg’s mung-bean isolate is lead-acid stage

I think we’ll see a Nutrition Transition starting in about 20-50 years that will eventually be as huge as the ongoing Energy Transition. More sustainable and cruelty-free stack (with smaller resource footprint) with 10x better economics and quality of life that’s equal or better.

Tons of nutrition transition tech in the pipeline that works better and better for plant-based functional substitution. Plus of course lab-grown meat too. And on the human side, who knows... gene editing to change our digestion system.

Natural meat need not vanish. It might end up in about a century or two as a minor “special experience” technology, like tourist attraction steam engines or horse riding, or in the future, IC-engine cars. Natural meat will be a “stunt” food like say ostrich eggs today.

I don’t really think of nutrition and food in a culturally essentialist way. As far as food is concerned, humans might as well be robots. We just need a supply that does the job and has a sensory UX our brain expects and enjoys. Valued cultural experiences can be ported.

And in more extreme environments (Mars colonies, seasteads) this will be primary feasible approach: rebase the nutrition stack on the lowest complexity biology we can possibly compile it down to. Why stop at complex plants. Can go down to algae. Maybe even non-living feedstocks.

Meat-eaters today are attached to their steaks, but we vegetarians are equally attached to apples and beans and lettuce. There is no reason artificial apples and beans can’t be made that mimic the experience with increasing fidelity the way vegan burgers are mimicking meat ones.

Ultimately, the only limit is fundamental physics. It’s all atoms and joules. The soylent guys have the right idea, just 50 years too soon, and with a really poor “food UX.” I’d like reasonable simulations of apples and eggs, not nutritionally sufficient mush.

And why stop at simulations of natural foods? What’s so natural about potato chips anyway? It’s a process combining oil from one plant, tubers from another, and salt, to produce crisp discs that have no analogue in nature. Yet we love them (especially when marketed “all natural”)

Walk down any grocery store aisle: a vast proportion of foods on sale are very far from “natural”. Even produce. Modern carrots, bananas, oranges are hundreds of generations of careful breeding away from natural ancestors. And we’re not even talking GMOs (which I’m all for).

But once you let go “natural” aesthetics, there is an unlimited universe of food experiences that can be crafted that have no historic roots in traditional culinary practices or “nature.” We can go as far from nature in food as we’ve gone in art from naturalism to modernism.

Sure there are dangers to “authoritarian high modernist” food tech that “legibilizes” food and culinary traditions, but that didn’t stop evolution in any other technology. You just manage the risks along the way. Can’t make vegan omelets without breaking some vegan eggs.

Accept there will be weird accidents etc. Like the famous Olean “anal leakage” episode. Notice btw how much “unnatural” weirdness we accept to look good/lose weight. Why not to avoid cruelty? Is one less suffering animal a fundamentally different goal than a hairless six-pack?

Every tech weathers risks as it evolves. Collapsing bridges crashing planes, exploding rockets, driverless cars crashing in weird ways, experimental drugs that cause birth defects. The Nutrition Transition will have it’s share of such risks. But the goal is worthwhile.

When it comes to the mind/consciousness, I’m a bit of a vitalist. When it comes to food, I’m not. Food is just another physics/chemistry basedy sensory modality field that just needs more engineering and software to simulate than visual fields through VR/AR.

Here’s to the Nutrition Transition, a cruelty-free world, and Simulated Food Reality (SFR). We should be at Star Trek level food replicators from raw atoms and joules by 2234 if we get going now.