Homaru Cantu on the next revolution in food:
We’ve been trying to incorporate food from the green world, and started growing microalgae. You can get 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of algae per acre. It can be grown in salt or fresh water, in a whole variety of temperatures. It increases the food supply rather than depleting it, and it’s a net energy gain. For $300 we built a photobioreactor that produced 15 gallons of food per month. The idea was to take algae, process it into sushi and fuel, and deliver it it in a truck running on algae biofuel. And we’re just a bunch of chefs. If we can figure this out, I don’t know why others can’t. Algae is the perfect food plant. It doubles cell mass every twelve hours, depending on the strain. The Japanese have a long lifespan in part because they eat different forms of algae.