Article What you eat is sunlight. Scientists want to cut out the middleman.

[C C]

https://bigthink.com/science-tech/everyt...middleman/

KEY POINTS: For centuries, thinkers across science, philosophy, and fiction have imagined ways humans could tap the Sun’s energy more directly — cutting out the middleman of the food chain. Scientists and startups are now beginning to bring that vision to life, using electricity, microbes, and inorganic inputs to make food without farms or animals. If it works, this shift could reshape how we eat — shrinking our environmental footprint and loosening our dependence on killing other living things to survive... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

Ultimately, everything we animals eat is a product of photosynthesis. One way or another, sunlight fuels the growth of our food (or our food’s food) before it fuels us.

"The Sun, each second, transforms four million tons of itself into light, giving itself over to become energy that we, with every meal, partake of. For four million years, humans have been feasting on star energy stored in the form of wheat or reindeer."---Brian Swimme

Two decades later, in Paradise Lost, the poet John Milton imagined the eating habits of angels. He pictured them as alchemical beings who don’t need to defecate, because they gain energy straight from matter with perfect efficiency. Perhaps he inserted this tangent into his epic poem because he lived with terrible indigestion and died, potentially, of ulceration.

The Family Guy treated this issue in an episode where Stewy and Brian time travel into the future where taking a dump or peeing is eliminated for everyone by the instantaneous voice-prompted teleportation of their feces/urine from their bodies.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8xnfxN-WrGo