Today in the best sauce:

I do not envy them this task. Huh? Who? What task? Settle down. I know you're not going to read the article, so I'll just explain. The who is an advocacy group called Reboot Food and the nigh on impossible task they've set themselves is to convince the world to stop eating animal products and instead switch to precision fermented proteins. Yikes.

"Our special today is a live, cultured bacteria, fermented in a stainless
steal vat and then genetically modified to imitate the flavor of pork belly.
I highly recommend it. It's carbon friendly and technically edible."

-Servers of the future, with their work cut out for them

"Wow, you can really taste the suffering!"

-Some barbarian

So first of all, let me say that I think this is a noble cause. It's going to sound like I'm making fun of them and I'm not. Ok, I am a little, but I also think they're right. Reboot Food's deal isn't just the ethical issues having to do with raising thinking, feeling animals for the sole purpose of killing and eating them like a bunch of Bronze Age barbarians, but also the environmental impact which, according to a statistic linked in the article, is responsible for 14.5% to 16.5% of greenhouse gasses.

Fortunately, zero people in the world care
about the feelings or well-being of bacteria.

But what the actual are fermented proteins? Well get this, they're bacteria. Which is horrifying. But the guy in Reboot Food's video (graphically) makes the case that it's way less gross than what we do to animals and, by extension, the environment. And when I parenthetically say graphically, I mean it. Like, go watch their video, but just...just be warned. Anyway, a huge portion of the Earth's surface is given over to animal farming and according to Reboot Food, if we switched from animal products to yeasts and bacteria, we could produce the same amount of protein in a space three quarters the size of London.

I predict that precision fermented
bacteria will soon replace sausage in the
 expression "how the sausage is made."

Yeah, I guess they're British, so London necessarily is their go-to reference for scale. Regardless, switching would mean that millions of acres could be returned to things like carbon-absorbant forests, so it's a win-win. Unless you're into eating things that taste good. Probably. The "precision" in precision fermenting refers to the idea that the cultures being grown are programed--like, genetically--to be biologically similar to the food being imitated. I don't follow all the science, but it sounds like the idea is that vat-grown microbial meat will taste like the real thing.

At least according to an advocacy group who've tasked themselves with convincing us to eat it. And why would they lie? Am I skeptical? Sure, but given the sun-blasted hellscape the planet is rapidly becoming, cutting emission 16.5% would be a huge help. I mean, right now rich people flying around on private jets account for 2.5% of CO2. And even if this stuff doesn't taste exactly like a hamburger or whatever, they do say avoiding a catastrophic climate crisis is the best sauce. Huh? Who says that? Look, I don't know, what do you want from me? I'm justing putting words together here.

And if the fermented protein doesn't work out, I feel like there's an "eat the rich"
argument to be made that would solve the climate as well as number of other problems.