Coal - It's what's for dinner!

[Diamond_Dog]

(If you’re a cow) ….

Chinese scientists have developed a cost-effective method of converting coal into protein, which they say could feed livestock much more efficiently than natural plants, while using a tiny fraction of the land.

According to Our World in Data, grazing land for livestock and farming land for animal feed production combine to take up an astonishing 40 million square kilometers (15.4 million square miles) of land. That's well over a quarter of the Earth's entire dry land area, and nearly 40% of the land defined as "habitable."

This is one of the reasons the meat-heavy Western diet is under fire as environmentally unsustainable; growing plants to feed animals makes wretchedly inefficient use of land, which could otherwise be left as forest or used for other purposes.

One solution is moving toward lab-grown meat – but another may be to start producing protein for livestock feed using other methods. This would be a particular boon to China. According to Biotech researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the country is currently forced to import around 80% of its protein raw materials in the form of soybeans and the like – and that's a serious food security issue for the nation.

More

https://newatlas.com/science/coal-protein-feed/

I think I’ll just reduce my meat consumption….

[intrepidity]

1. The how

The CAS team's process works something like this: firstly, coal is transformed into methanol via gasification – a technique that can now be executed with near-zero carbon emissions. That methanol is then fed to a special strain of Pichia pastoris yeast, which ferments the methanol to produce a single-cell protein complete with a range of amino acids, vitamins, inorganic salts, fats and carbohydrates. The resulting organism is much richer in protein than plants are, and it can be used to partially replace fish, soybeans, meat and skimmed milk in a range of animal feeds.

[twodogsbarking]

2. These were called "depression plants".

https://sciencing.com/grow-flowers-coal-4926807.html