Plastic cookies: $60 a kilo and still untasted

Plastic cookies: $60 a kilo and still untasted

Can you eat a water bottle? The technical answer is yes, though the process costs more than a tasting menu. A team at Southern Illinois University Carbondale has used CRISPR to reprogram yeast strains so they digest PET — the plastic found in bottles, packaging and clothing — and turn it into proteins, fats and flavor compounds that are then 3D-printed in the shape of Greek letters. They call the result µBites. It smells good, they say. Nobody has tasted it yet.

The research did not come out of a food lab, but from NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, a program to produce food on long missions to Mars. There the math changes: if shipping supplies is prohibitively expensive, turning waste into nutrients stops being an eccentricity.

How a bottle becomes a cookie

The process starts with oxidative hydrothermal dissolution: heat, water and oxygen break PET down into smaller compounds. The modified yeast metabolizes them and produces proteins, fats and acids. Fibers, starch and sweeteners are then added to give the mixture texture and flavor. According to microbiologist Lahiru Jayakody, the aroma is «pleasant and welcoming», like that of a real cookie. The same strain also converts plant biomass into vanilla flavoring.

The problem is not the chemistry. It's the bill.

$60 a kilo: the price that sinks the invention

Producing a kilo of these cookies currently costs about $60, according to figures published by The Guardian. Any conventional food is infinitely cheaper. And that's where the story falls apart: if the goal was to feed the masses, the price excludes them from the outset.

The skepticism is not only about cost. Jason Hallett, a researcher at Imperial College London, put it bluntly: 400 million tons of plastic waste are generated every year, and they are not going to be turned into cookies. «We are not going to eat plastic cookies», he declared. His conclusion is that the system is neither commercially viable nor a solution to the plastic crisis.

Soylent Green and the precedent nobody wants to repeat

The cultural reference appeared on its own. Soylent Green (1973) imagined an overcrowded New York in 2022 where the elite controlled a processed food with a secret ingredient. The parallel with cookies made from waste did not go unnoticed: dystopian fiction had already explored this territory.

So had literature. John Scalzi's Old Man's War describes a humanity that stopped burning oil to make food because there were no livestock or crops left. The difference is that in the novel there was no alternative. Here there is.

The real niche: Mars, not the supermarket

The sensible use of this technology is not in the shopping cart. It's on a spacecraft. On missions lasting months or years, the amount of food that can be launched from Earth is limited, and a system that recycles waste and biomass into edible nutrients makes operational sense. On Earth, the problem is different: there is too much plastic and too little will to manage it.

The researchers are still waiting for university approval to taste the cookies. It smells good, they insist. Whether anyone actually eats them is another matter.