When Leah Lizarondo learned that every year more than 40% of America’s…
Fixing Food 2, Ep. 1: Food from the Air
- Description
- Reviews
- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
Lisa Dyson is the founder and CEO of Air Protein, a company driven by ambitions almost as vast as space itself. As the 4th African American woman ever to earn a doctorate in physics, Lisa is well-equipped to take on its extraordinary mission: to create food from pure elements of the air.
Building on a NASA project from the 1970s and a decade of their own research, Lisa and her team have invented an entirely new process that makes meat, bread, pasta and eggs from the air. The process doesn't require any arable land, is carbon negative and produces healthy food that tastes good in just hours. It seems like magic.
The film follows the team at work in their large research lab and processing plant. Carbon, oxygen and water are mixed with cultures and fermented, young food scientists finesse pasta textures, the chef makes the first beef tacos and Lisa tastes Air Protein bread for the first time. The plant is preparing to manufacture at scale, but there are still huge challenges ahead. It's not easy, but, as Lisa says, with climate change intensifying so rapidly, “The need to act is only getting more important and more urgent.”
Citation
Main credits
Williams, Sue (screenwriter)
Williams, Sue (film director)
Williams, Sue (film producer)
Other credits
Editor, Christina Kelly; director of photography, Jerry Risius; score, Carmen Borgia.
Distributor subjects
Food; Climate Change; Science and Technology; Business; ChemistryKeywords
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- [Announcer] Ten, nine.
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Ignition sequence starts.
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Six, five, four, three,
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two, one, zero.
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All engine running.
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Lift off.
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We have a lift off.
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32 minutes past the hour.
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Lift off on Apollo 11.
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[upbeat instrumental music]
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- [Lisa] Imagine that you're
on a trip to a distant planet.
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So you're in a spacecraft,
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and you have to figure
out how to feed yourself
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and the rest of your crew.
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One idea is to take a packet of seeds
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that can grow using elements
of the air, water, and energy,
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and that can grow really fast,
in a matter of hours.
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It's a way of making food
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that doesn't require any
arable land whatsoever.
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You can grow food anywhere, anytime,
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rain or shine, day or night.
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[upbeat electronic music]
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- [Speaker 1] The way we
farm today will not sustain
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human civilization as we know it.
[00:01:00.06]
- [Speaker 2] There's not
gonna be enough water.
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And there's not gonna be enough land.
[00:01:06.04]
- [Speaker 1] We are
never going to replace
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traditional agriculture,
but we sure can innovate.
[00:01:13.04]
- [Speaker 3] We can learn
how to at least pivot
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and to work with this changing world.
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[dynamic music continues]
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[wind howling]
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- Being a scientist, thinking
about climate science,
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is why I do many of the things that I do.
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[somber music]
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I was one of the many people
who went to New Orleans
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after Hurricane Katrina hit.
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My mother's family's from Louisiana,
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so I went to Louisiana a lot as a kid.
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Very fond memories.
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But going back to Louisiana in 2005
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was a very different story.
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And just seeing the devastation
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that this weather event created,
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that had a huge impact.
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That got me interested in trying
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to be a part of the solution.
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[helicopter buzzing]
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[somber music continues]
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We really looked at the biggest problem,
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and the biggest opportunity,
which is alternative meat.
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Replacements for beef,
chicken, pork, et cetera.
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And we asked the question, we
said, if we can solve this,
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if we can make something
like a meat alternative
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that tastes good, then we can,
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you know, solve many problems.
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And we need to do it in a
way that uses much less land,
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that does not lead to deforestation,
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that doesn't emit as much of
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the greenhouse gas emissions that we have.
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[ambient electronic music]
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NASA started working
on the technical piece,
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but didn't finish.
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And that's what takes the longest,
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is figuring out the science,
doing all the research,
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the studies, the scale-up work.
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Well this is very exciting.
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It's for our air protein beef
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to be infused with Mexican flavors.
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- It's easy to flavor.
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It can be pushed into
barbecues, into pork dish.
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- We're making food in a whole new way.
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Food that is highly nutritious.
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Our initial protein ingredients
have 80% protein content
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with all of the essential amino acids,
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then rich in vitamins and minerals.
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What did you think when
I first asked you that,
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you know, if we can make meat from air?
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- I first thought of the
structure, the texture of meat.
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How it feels like when you bite into it,
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how it tastes, the smell.
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And then how do I create that in the lab?
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Taking the powder that we have,
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the ingredient that we made from air,
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and putting that into these various forms,
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so that when we eat
it, it feels like meat.
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It tastes like meat.
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- Yeah, there you go.
- Just dive right in?
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- [Christopher] One bite.
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- There was an element of magic.
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There was an element of science.
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There's an element of mystery
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and history that we all put in.
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- The texture.
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- The texture of the
protein is really nice.
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- Yeah.
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- Perfect for meat taco,
coming from a Mexican.
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- Our process is a new
type of fermentation.
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And fermentation makes beer,
makes wine, makes yogurt,
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makes cheese, and now
it makes air protein.
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And it will make more things.
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So if you're dealing with yogurt,
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your agricultural input is milk.
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Same with cheese.
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In our case, what we actually feed it,
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the elements that make up those inputs.
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So milk is made up of
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen.
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We feed it those elements.
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So here we have where it all begins.
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[upbeat electronic music]
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- These serve as cultures to grow out
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larger lots of material,
that which we can then refine
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and purify to produce
protein-rich ingredients.
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And it really comes down to, you know,
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this culture being the
start of the process,
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going through multiple refining steps.
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- [Filmmaker] Just so that I understand,
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in these little beakers
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are the microbes to
which you add hydrogen,
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oxygen, carbon dioxide.
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And you mix it all around,
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and you can make pasta, or meat, or bread.
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Is that...?
- In a nutshell.
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That's it.
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All right, yeah.
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So now we're gonna transfer our cultures
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to a controlled growth environment
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to propagate this culture.
[00:06:10.04]
- [Filmmaker] So how long
will they stay in there?
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- Anywhere from 24 to 72 hours,
depending on the culture.
[00:06:20.04]
And at that time they're ready
to go into a larger reactor.
[00:06:23.09]
[upbeat electronic continues]
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- I have to tell you
that I'm super excited.
[00:06:37.02]
I haven't tasted the
air protein bread yet.
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I love the way it looks.
[00:06:42.08]
We're continuously fine-tuning
and refining recipes,
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'cause that's what you have to do.
[00:06:48.00]
You have your ingredient,
now you have to mix it
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with other ingredients,
and get your final recipe.
[00:06:52.05]
So that's an ongoing process.
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Okay.
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Air protein bread.
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- Cheers.
- Cheers.
[00:07:02.00]
- That's very good.
- Thank you.
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- Everyone loves food.
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I love food as a very
applicable, relatable science.
[00:07:09.01]
- I've always been interested in food,
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and I've also been interested
in kind of all aspects
[00:07:14.02]
of science, chemistry,
microbiology, engineering.
[00:07:16.08]
- I was watching, like, a
Domino's commercial actually,
[00:07:19.03]
about a new sauce that
they were unveiling.
[00:07:22.06]
And was like, who does that?
[00:07:26.06]
So, Googled "food science,"
quite literally,
[00:07:30.04]
and discovered it's a field.
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- Most of it is chemistry, yeah.
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- Doing food science that has, like,
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a larger purpose is interesting to me.
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- So I'm gonna make air protein egg.
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This is air protein.
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I'm gonna put the water in now.
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[upbeat instrumental music]
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Air protein egg is
similar with egg in pasta
[00:07:52.01]
because it has the
emulsification properties,
[00:07:54.04]
and also, like, water-holding and binding.
[00:07:56.06]
So it helps the dough come
together pretty nicely.
[00:08:00.06]
[upbeat music continues]
[00:08:04.01]
[machine whirs]
[00:08:07.02]
Gonna make a nest here.
[00:08:13.05]
So I'm gonna measure the
firmness of the pasta.
[00:08:16.02]
I'm gonna lay down the pasta right here.
[00:08:18.07]
We wanna be consistent and we want for--
[00:08:21.02]
We want the pasta to
hold up during boiling
[00:08:23.09]
so it doesn't, like, mush when you eat it.
[00:08:26.02]
[dramatic orchestral music]
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- Hey Lisa, how are you?
[00:08:36.03]
- It's really busy this morning.
[00:08:37.03]
- Yeah, it is, it is.
[00:08:38.08]
- [Lisa] Bring me up to speed.
[00:08:39.07]
What's happening?
[00:08:40.05]
- They're prepping the
micronutrients, if you will,
[00:08:42.07]
that the fermentation requires.
[00:08:44.09]
So that's being prepped.
[00:08:47.00]
Basically just final
checkouts of all the systems.
[00:08:50.00]
- There's a huge food security benefit
[00:08:52.05]
to this way of making food,
[00:08:55.01]
and you can make it in a matter of hours.
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You don't have to wait
for the right season.
[00:08:59.03]
96 hours later, your
system is fully producing.
[00:09:09.05]
- [Neil] That's one small step for man,
[00:09:13.00]
one giant leap for mankind.
[00:09:16.02]
- We stand on the shoulders
of the NASA scientists
[00:09:18.08]
who thought up this idea
[00:09:20.09]
of making nutrients from
elements of the air.
[00:09:24.00]
[ambient electronic music]
[00:09:26.04]
We face lots of scientific
and engineering challenges.
[00:09:31.05]
It's not easy, but
we're seeing the effects
[00:09:33.09]
of climate change now.
[00:09:35.04]
And the need to act is only getting
[00:09:40.03]
more important and more urgent.
[00:09:43.05]
[ambient music continues]
[00:09:50.01]
[upbeat electronic music]
[00:09:53.05]
Distributor: Bullfrog Films
Length: 10 minutes
Date: 2024
Genre: Expository
Language: English
Grade: 7-12, College, Adults
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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