Can we make any food without relying on plants?
Short answer: it’s easier to grow it
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Because photovoltaic panels are more expensive than plant leaves
We could do what you’re suggesting, it would just be incredibly inefficient.
Why would I want to manufacture a plant when I can use a seed to do it for me?
I assume you’re talking about (for example) some equipment that takes in soil/water/air, rearranges the atoms and churns out potatoes. We definitely can’t do that. It’s too hard, we’re nowhere near that level of technology.
I can only imagine the people in this thread are referring to lab grown stuff where they use plant cells, which is cheating because that’s still depending on plants.
As other people say, it’s easier to let the plants do the job for us.
That said, check out vertical farming if you’re not familiar with it. It’s a modern approach to farming that very much relies on plants, but dramatically reduces problems such as excessive land use and dependence on pesticides.
You have to figure out how to recreate photosynthesis which, believe it or not, is an incredibly difficult process to recreate.
Recreating photosynthesis is the easiest part by a huge margin.
Whether you decide to define it as synthesizing ATP or glucose, both a simple molecules that we can create in a lab. Everything else is the hard part, there is a huge amount of “things” on that “everything”.
Here’s a relevant short video about the benefits of farming in general
I hope this helps answer your question 👍
We don’t have the tech. Cells are tiny factories capable of ingesting nutrients and producing little chains of proteins, fats and other stuff.
We don’t currently have the ability to build machinery that small. With CRISPR we kinda start to tap into that power, to modify genetic code to do what we want, but it’s still far from reliable enough to create a potato 3D printer. We’re big monkeys with big hands and it’s hard to manipulate tiny things.
