Mike Holmes wrote:OK, maybe not as apetizing as a good ear of corn... but it's supposed to be better for you...
Mike
That's not quite true for a few different reasons.
Expensive algae is only going to be used in omega-3 supplements and the like; very little consideration is given to taste.
What happens when algae becomes dirt-cheap is the same thing that happened when wheat became cheap; we invented pasta, pizza, breads, cookies, gluten-based fake meat, béchamel sauce and all sorts of other delicious wheat-based and wheat-containing products. Who knows what foods will be invented when you give millions of people with widely varying skillsets in cooking, food chemistry, entrepeneurship and so on cheap access to algae?
Cheap algae would be a huge component of fish-feed if realized; and I'd much rather eat fish than corn.
Fish farming is rapidly expanding across the world and currently represents more than half of global fish production(and sea-food in general). All this time we've been hunter-gathering fish rather than farming them; this leads to all sorts of problems that cause extremely low yields per unit area of ocean. You haven't got property rights so you get tragedy of the commons(each fish you catch has a concentrated profit, but the cost in reduced fish population is diffuse in that it hurts everyone a tiny little bit); even from the perspective of wanting to maximize sustainable fish catches and long term profits it would be more productive to do much less fishing. If you slaughter all the cows on a farm it leads to maximum profit today, but no profit next year so a farmer wouldn't make such a stupid decision; if the cows are unowned property and anyone can just come along and slaughter them the farmers incentive is to pre-empt everyone else and be the first to slaughter them so he can get the profits and he's certainly not going to invest in any capital equipment to maximize cattle-productivity. The result of this is that large predatory fish, the kinds humans like to eat, have declined in population by 90% over the last 50 years(the war on drugs and the various undeclared wars in the middle east might not be going too well but the war on fish is a major success).
The other major factor that makes fish farming so efficient is that you can separate fish by species and age group; predatory fish tends to eat their young and if they don't some other species we don't like to eat might.
The problem with farming something like salmon is that you're farming the equivalent of lions. They need a big helping of fishmeal for the high protein and the fat composition(similar to algae since that's what herbivorous fish, shrimp and so forth tend to eat). Fish farmers try to keep it at a minimum because of cost(it is also not sustainable at current rates so eventually they MUST invent their way around it to maintain or grow fish prdoduction). In order to cheapen out the food they mix it with fat and protein from soy,various slaughterhouse 'byproducts'(the kind of stuff you'd normally find in dog food), rapeseed oil and various other stuff. If they had cheap access to high-quality fats and protein from algae it's a no-brainer, you no longer need bulk amounts of fish-meal at all(you still might want to feed salmon some shrimp or at least the nasty bits of shrimp that humans don't want to eat; this is where salmon gets its pretty pink colour and some of it's flavour).
Algae cheap enough for fuel production might also be able to replace a large fraction of the grains and soy used in feeds for land-bound mammals. Obviously you'd have to do various trials and such to convince farmers that it's not too unhealthy for the animals, doesn't make the meat taste too unsual or anything like that. The fat composition should partly carry through to the finished product(meat, milk, eggs, whatever), just like grassfed beef has a higher quality fat composition(less omega-6 fatty acids and more omega-3 fatty acids than grain fed beef).
