Synthesis of food

As mentioned here advanced productive nanosystems like nanofactories are quite unsuitable for food production.

Virtually all molecules that make up our food are very flexible chain molecules often with branches and sometimes with aromatic rings. One may consider small salt crystals an exception but they get instantly dissolved and do not stay crystalline in the body.

Mechanosynthesis of floppychain molecule structures

If you carefully read the tooltip paper (referenced on the mechanosynthesis page) you recognize that for the synthesis of stiff diiamondoid carbon structures half rings of several carbon atoms are added. Those half rings behave like floppy chain molecules. Also in the paper longer chains are streched between two tips.

To synthesize the floppy chain molecules one may be able to employ the following trick: First one starts out with at two opposing tooltips that I'll call the tensioning tooltips. With further tooltips one starts to extends the length of the chainmolecule between the two tensioning tooltips. While increasing the length of the chainmolecule the tensioning tooltips must keep the chainmolecule in tension. Extension of the chainmolecule must always happen near the tensioning tooltips where the thermal fluctuations of the chain are smallest. It may be possible to include branches into the molecule into a double ended tree topology. Every branch will need a seperate tensioning tooltip. This will probably require a lot more design effort in comparison to simple mechanosynthesis of diamond and graphitic structures especially if there are many branches which are very close together (what about big floppy loops).

Synthesis of diamond can be done at room temperature with acceptable error rates. For the synthesis of these more floppy molecules cooling may be necessary.

The unnaturality of synthesized food

What may be synthesizable

Composition:

Structure: Cocktail of nutrients shugars, fatty acids, vitamins, amino acids, nucleotides, ... Damn good

How good is it for you

Food that does not contain stuff of which we don't yet know that we need it. Like drinking distilled water. On the short term there will be no consequences but on the long therm there might be deficiency symptoms.