GoKawiilOn the outskirts of Helsinki, a pioneering factory is harvesting natural, scalable proteins all from fermented bacteria. Could this be the future of food?
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.”
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.
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