Asimov’s 1953 novel Caves of Steel featured food grown in vats by genetically modified yeast. It took awhile, but that’s here.

Cargill’s new product is an example of synthetic biology, a form of genetic engineering that uses modified organisms to manufacture compounds that would never be produced naturally. What makes EverSweet taste sweet is not stevia; it is a compound produced by a bioengineered yeast…

Ingredients that are being replaced or are likely to be exchanged for products made through synthetic biology include vanilla, saffron, coconut oil, patchouli, olive squalene, and rose oil. Indeed, the world’s largest cosmetics, flavor, and fragrance companies are hoping that synthetic biology will help them replace more than 200 natural botanical extracts.

This particular article is most worried about large food and chemical corporations replacing products formerly produced by small farmers. That’s a shame. It also talks about the growing backlash from the anti-GMO crowd. But the fact is, the backlash is probably growing because the technology has reached commercial viability. There may be a silver lining – if we are worried about ultimately hitting photosynthetic limits on food production, this may be a way around it. I think yeast will eat pretty much anything organic – mine like barley and honey, but I suspect you could feed them garbage, sewage, etc. in a severely resource constrained world. The dark cloud to the silver lining is always that if you remove one constraint, your ecological footprint will tend to keep growing until you encounter another one. The people in the caves of steel weren’t doing all that well as I recall.