Ten thousand years ago, the first domestication of plants and animals marked a pivotal point in human history. For the very first time, humans began breeding plants and animals to eat and put to work. These were wild macro-organisms, ranging from cows and sheep to wheat and barley. Humans no longer hunted and gathered their food, but began controlling its production, selecting the best traits and conditions for growing these organisms and thereby, albeit unintentionally, altering their natural evolution. An often-overlooked component of this first domestication is the vital role microorganisms played. Micro-organisms exist naturally within macro-organisms, breaking down nutrient inputs to build useful outputs. For example, micro-organisms in the digestive tract of a cow help produce the protein and amino acids it needs to live and grow. Not only, then, were humans unintentionally manipulating the evolution of macro-organisms, but micro-organisms as well.
One thousand or so years later, humans were manipulating micro-organisms in a more direct way through early experiments in fermentation. Within controlled environments such as ceramic pots and wooden barrels, humans slowly discovered how to make many staple foods such as bread and cheese, how to preserve fruits and vegetables, and how to produce alcoholic drinks. Humans were now able, in the most rudimentary way, to control the production of food. For thousands of years, the model of food production remained largely unchanged, based on the lessons learned during the first domestication. Today, we stand on the cusp of the next great revolution in food production. New technologies allow us to manipulate micro-organisms to a far greater degree than our ancestors could possibly have imagined. We can now unplug micro-organisms entirely from macro-organisms and harness them directly as superior and more efficient units of nutrient production. This is the second domestication of plants and animals. The first domestication allowed us to master macro-organisms. The second will allow us to master micro-organisms.
A New System of Production In the biological sense, food is simply packages of nutrients, such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. Of these, proteins – the large molecules that are needed by all cells to function properly – are the most important. They are, quite literally, the building blocks of life. Macro-organisms produce these packages, but to access the individual nutrients within them requires further processing, which adds additional cost (and diminishes nutritional quality). Single molecules within these packages are, therefore, the hardest and most expensive to extract.
However, micro-organisms produce these individual nutrients directly. Domestication of micro-organisms, therefore, allows us simply to bypass the macro-organisms we currently grow to produce food and access the individual nutrients directly. By doing this, we can build up food from these nutrients to the exact specifications we need, rather than breaking down macro-organisms to access them. We can replace an extravagantly inefficient system that requires enormous quantities of inputs and produces huge amounts of waste with one that is precise, targeted, and tractable. More than that, by moving production to the molecular level, the number of nutrients we can produce is no longer constrained by the plant or animal kingdoms.
While nature provides us with millions of unique proteins, for example, we consume just a fraction of these because they are too difficult or too expensive to extract from macro-organisms. In the new system of production, not only do these proteins become instantly accessible, but millions more that do not even exist today. Free to design molecules to any specification we desire, the only constraint will be the confines of the human imagination. Each ingredient will serve a specific purpose, allowing us to create foods with the exact attributes we desire in terms of nutritional profile, structure, taste, texture, and functional qualities. Virtually limitless inputs will, therefore, spawn virtually limitless outputs. So bountiful and inexpensive will these proteins be that they will disrupt not just the food and agriculture industries but healthcare, cosmetics, and materials. They will underpin a new production system that represents a profound shift in how we conceptualize, design, and manufacture products across all these sectors. We will be able to design and customize individual molecules to build up products to precise specifications instead of breaking them down from animals, plants, or petroleum.
We will, in short, move from a system of scarcity to one of abundance. From a system of extraction to one of creation.
Source RethinkX-think Tank
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