Omnivorous Eating is Underrated

What is the opposite of a picky eater?

The first two terms that popped into my head were negations: non-picky and non-choosy. In particular I’m trying to describe the ability to eat a very wide variety of things. A varietal eater? A wide/broad eater? A promiscuous eater? This came to me as I started thinking about bacteria being promiscuous, not just in eating but also in exchanging genetic material. Wanton eater? Not to be confused with wantan (the Chinese dumpling) eater, this popped into my head because the game Bios Genesis uses wanton-ness to measure ability for horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

For the title of this post, I’ve settled on omnivorous; not in the sense of eating both meat and vegetables, but rather ‘taking in or using whatever is available’. I’m an omnivorous reader, at least of non-fiction. (I’m rather narrow when it comes to reading fiction.) I also happily eat animal and plant products, and I have no qualms in eating strange international delicacies that would put off the average American. I also enjoy eating and talking about food, and my most regular visual social media posts are probably photos of yummy food.

However, what motivates today’s post is thinking about the distant past and the possibly near future – the origin of life and future technology just around the bend.

The origins of life on our planet are way back in the distant past. Since this is one of my research interests, I’ve been pondering the ancient origins of metabolism. Several articles I read this week speculate about the promiscuity of bacteria (and archaea) to utilize a variety of carbon sources for food. This is crucial to survival in an ever-changing environment. If your main food source is depleted, can you ‘innovate’ or ‘evolve’ to use another food source. If not, you die. HGT could play an important role in providing bacteria with the robustness to handle different food sources. There are experimental studies and computer simulations aimed at discovering how organisms can be robust.

Chemical reactions involving simple precursor molecules that are likely to be found on the early Earth result in diverse complex mixtures of hundreds of interesting molecules, only a small subset of which are used by extant life. I will quote myself from a previous blog post. “The riddle of origin-of-life chemistry has less to do with making a large variety of molecules [this is easy!] – it’s about why life only picks out a select few and uses them over and over again.” My suspicion is that proto-metabolic systems started off being very promiscuous but perhaps not very efficient. They could make use of certain types of molecules as sources of energy – but also all the chemical cousins of these molecules. But as energy demands grow with larger, more complex metabolisms (although still ancient), less efficient pathways are used less and less, and possibly pruned out. We see the same thing in genes. An endosymbiont, compared to its free-living counterpart bacteria, has ‘lost’ a lot of the genes that would generate proteins that make it robust. It’s happy in its host, and would die outside of its cocooned world.

But the environment changes. Bacteria adapt. Those that don’t die. But those that do, live on and multiply. We’ve seen these evolutionary changes in our lifetime. Micro-organisms have evolved to eat man-made chemicals previously thought non-biodegradable. Scientists utilize this promiscuity to evolve organisms that will eat toxins, plastics, and other ‘trash’. You can also engineer micro-organisms to eat particular types of food and then produce (or ‘poop’) other chemicals – think biofuels of the more exotic kind, or other specialty chemicals. We humans think we are remarkably omnivorous too! And so we are perhaps more so than many other creatures closer to our size and mass, but those bacteria are amazing. There’s an evolutionary reason why your gut and digestive system is full of them. We contain multitudes!

Eating, in fact, is simply amazing! We take in nutrients from a variety of sources and our metabolism turns it into biomass and it powers biomechanics. Think about an automobile engine. The number of fuels it can take is rather limited. It powers motion, but there’s no equivalent to building biomass. How fantastic would it be if a car could do simple self-repairs? Heal thyself, automobile! The bodies of living organisms do this all the time, as long as the injury is not too severe – in which case we need the help of doctors and medicines. When you take your car to the garage to be serviced or repaired, that’s sort of like a visit to the doctor.

Why can’t cars repair themselves? Why can’t they redirect their resources when something not-too-catastrophic fails to function? Maybe, they can. With computer systems controlling the ‘heart’ of the car, it’s possible to design the system to consider such contingencies. You could program the program to be systems-oriented. For example, instead of the code that connects your indicator switch directly and solely to the indicator lights. Maybe the code links your input hardware (switches, knobs, buttons, perhaps even the steering wheel or the gearstick) to an array of sensors and outputs but an artificial intelligence helps to sort this out.

Let’s imagine a simple example. Your left rear indicator light stops working. A sensor notes that. When you, the driver, turn on your indicator light – the system, knowing that its primary indicator light is down, makes an alternative choice. It could flash your left rear lamp instead. Or it allows a mechanical adjustment that pushes your front left indicator light away from the body so that a driver behind can see it, if your left rear lamp has also failed. The idea is not necessarily to think up all the contingencies and program them in priority but to code the system into thinking about functionality. Let me call it programming with a systems mentality.

Not just the software, but the hardware of the car perhaps should also be designed and built differently. I haven’t thought about exactly how that should work, but I think eating should be considered important. With the advent of 3D printing and software plans that could be beamed in from the cloud, an intelligent diagnostic system could potentially build the needed fix and tell you how to swap something out at your next stop. In my previous post, I discussed how the manufacture of guns was changed so that the system was built of interchangeable parts that did not require an expert gunsmith to fix every time something went wrong. Precision engineering played a role in that, but the systematic design for plug-and-play (or in this case plug-and-shoot) was crucial. For more serious matters, the modern garage also equipped with more advanced 3D printers could have the part ready for you at your next stop.

What does eating have to do with this? You feed raw chemicals to the 3D printer, and it produces an object that you need for functioning. As 3D printers become smaller, cheaper and more automated, what’s to prevent one from being installed in the automobile of the future? One that can self-repair at least certain minor but important issues. Perhaps the automobile is not the best place for this technology – but I do expect plug-and-play to continue in prominence with the intermingling of software directing the construction of custom hardware. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the cutting-edge 3D printing technology comes from a company called Carbon. I’ve seen some of their work and listened to the company’s founder Philip DeSimone at a couple of conferences. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

Eating. It seems so basic, but it’s anything but. And omnivorous eating? Now, that’s something quite special.