the inefficiencies that feed us

the inefficiencies that feed us, Spencer Arias (2023)
for solo percussion

The creation of this work would not be possible without the important contributions of Berkley J. Walker. It is crucial that the science is highlighted, by vocalizing the scientist note aloud to the audience so that they can learn about the research the music was inspired by.

Scientist Note
Farm to plate is all the rage today, people wanting to follow their food from where it was grown, to their tabletop. We want this to ensure that it has been processed according to our values but also a fascination with the process itself. But what about going further back from the farm, to the real source of our food on the planet earth to the sun itself?  My research focuses on following this energetic journey from the sun to our plate and understanding where energy is lost and how this journey will be impacted by a changing planet. Understanding this journey may hold the key to capturing more energy from the sun and more sustainably producing food and fuel for a growing planet. We call this journey “photosynthesis”. Photosynthesis is the catch-all term for the reactions in plants that harvest energy from the sun and change carbon dioxide molecules in the air into sugars. These sugars are not just the sweet kind but form the building blocks of the vast majority of life on this planet.

So how much of all the energy that comes from the sun actually ends up in the food we eat? It turns out the journey from photon to plate is not as efficient as you might think. Photosynthesis in crops has only a total ~1% conversion efficiency of solar energy. This one percent powers practically all life on this planet and gives us the air we breath, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and a growing amount of the energy we consume. So what are we finding out about these inefficiencies of photosynthesis? My lab studies a particular inefficiency called “Photorespiration”. This inefficiency stems from the fact that carbon dioxide and oxygen, are actually quite the same shape. They are so similar that the first step of photosynthesis that grabs a carbon dioxide has trouble telling them apart and about 1 time out of 5, grabs an oxygen instead of a carbon dioxide. When it grabs an oxygen the result is a sugar molecule that is of no use to the plant, and must be recycled. This recycling is expensive, using about 148 trillion Calories of energy in just the Midwest, this is enough calories that if you converted these to donut equivalents, you would have enough donuts to stack to the moon and back over 20 times.

Work in our lab is revealing that this inefficiency is more than it first seems. We look at photorespiration to understand how it is integrated with everything else the plant does to stay alive. We are finding that this apparent inefficiency in terms of energy, may also have great benefit in other aspects. Instead of simply being a recycling pathway, it is an “up-cycling” pathway that may help make the protein and vitamins in plants that are so important for human nutrition.
-Berkley J. Walker, Ph.D Molecular Plant Sciences, Associate Professor of Plant Biology at Michigan State University

Program Note
The inefficiencies that feed us was written in collaboration with Plant Scientist Berkley Walker about his research on Photosynthesis. The work uses a gestural representation of the process of a photon moving from the sun to a plant to the plate of the food we eat. The science is at the center of the work.