Re: [DIYbio] How difficult would it be to make a super food?

Supposing you didn't need it to be your calorie source as well as your vitamin/protein/micro-nutrient source, you could. If you needed to use it as a calorie source, you may run into toxicity issues from eating the same thing over and over.

Take for instance, Soylent (^). In Beta testing of the product, the creator of Soylent overdoes himself on Potassium due to an imbalance in the formula. If you wanted to eat just one thing for the rest of your life, you would have to get the micro-nutrient and vitamin levels spot on to avoid poisoning yourself with, say, arsenic or cyanide. 

An idea like this is great for space travel - providing a nutrient source that can be made by consuming light weight materials that are cheap and easy to use as "padding" like hay or grass or blue-corn meal if you want to use mushrooms. And at the same time avoiding the "just add water" idea - when water is going to be the most difficult thing to get up there. 

Ideally, you could make something like a fungi that would consume high density polymers (like oil) that may be found on distant planet that can then convert previously un-usable materials (Mars dirt, oil, rocket fuel, etc.) into food. 

*See - The Martian

-SG

On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 11:45 AM, Skyler Gordon <skg...@gmail.com> wrote:

Magnificent idea!

Does it need to have sufficient calories to support the human system? As in - do you want to design it to be the only thing a person has to eat or merely an addition to some calorie-heavy meal?

-SG

On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 11:30 AM, Cory J. Geesaman <co...@geesaman.com> wrote:

This is more just mental masturbation than anything, but does anyone have an ideas on how much work would be required to make a food that hits all the appropriate daily values of everything (essential vitamins included) for a Human from a single source, say a mushroom?  Are all the metabolic pathways and associated enzymes and genes known already for the synthesis of each of the essential vitamins?  Would those pathways compete with each other negatively, or would they more or less work in parallel without stepping on eachother's toes?  Mushrooms are kind of arbitrary, and I know I've heard potatoes are close, but are there other things that don't require direct sunlight and aren't animals?  (Again, this is just a curiosity, I don't want to paint myself as some kind of vegan.)

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