Feeding ourselves with cellulose

Steve Zoma wrote:I live in Maine and grew up with Matt McSpadden in real life, LONG before we ever connected on-line again here.

You should really real Paul's article on "Gert" a fictional woman who used permaculture to really get ahead. I did likewise, never playing the financial game called credit, using cash instead, and instead of endlessly watching funny cat videos on Youtube, spent it listening to people like Dave Ramsey and Charlie Munger who flood youtube with how they did life.

I retired at 42 years old and was a Gert living entirely off my farm. I did life a bit different then Gert, as this year I cashed out, selling my former farm but was VERY selective to whom I sold parts of it off too.

I did get cancer and return to the workforce in 2022, but life is much different when you don't have to work. There is appreciation for the virtues of a routine, and comradery with your co-workers.  Then when you run the numbers... well... is it any wonder Dave Ransey says, "your ability to work is where wealth comes from". As I showed, working has a 2500% return on investment for me.

I disagree with others about having lots of land. It is nice in some aspects, but a liability in others. Now that I have just a little, I am not tied down to any place and thus can pick up and move. We are looking at that now, Sell the house worth $400,000 we bought two years ago, buy a new house for $100,000 working at the same company but 150 miles away, then in 15 years when I need the money, $300,000 will have amounted to 1.4 million with compounded interest.  The math is easy to do. But who wants to move in the middle of nowhere? Me, because the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward, especially so when you do things others would never do.

The hard part is finding the house. But if you chose carefully, you can pick well. My current house is only an acre in size, but around me is Conservation Land of 2500 acres. It is not like having full ownership, but I pay property taxes on 1 acre, and can forage on 2500 acres for free. Life is NEVER about how much you make, but how much you spend.

The thing is, I never did anything special. I just figured out quickly what Gert did; the only way to win is to just not play the game. Sure I got bullied along the way, but by not playing, I won, and won big and very early in life. Others can too, but the question is: when are you, and other people on Permies, going to take big risks? NOTHING ever big came out of being in a comfort zone. It can be as simple as getting out of bed and going to work, or making that big move?

I see, Maine is a very beautiful state. I am considering Maine, particularly the cheap land near the Canadian border. Is it safe there? I know many times that cheap land comes with large caveats.

Credit is indeed a dangerous game and one of the reasons I am trying to create a cellulose society. Jefferson had good reason to be doubtful of the bankers, and centralization in general.

I do agree that work is a virtue, but many times, work can seem pointless as a means of upward mobility and saving for retirement. Work can get you far, but I know of many doctors whose primary source of wealth is asset appreciation, not their salaries. Their (already expensive) houses have at least doubled in value only in the last decade or so, not to mention stock growth at 11% a year will exhibit compound interest effects. The salaries have increased, but prices even more, so in effect, many people are poorer now in real terms compared to the 1950s.

That is why I am so distrustful of work, and I have seen elites drink alcohol all day to still get a stipend to live due to being landlords and bondholders. In other words, credit is very useful as a means of extracting value from others. Labor is for the honest man, and I am glad Maine has not been permeated by the "rent-seekers" yet. Because once a society's best means of upward mobility is assets and not labor, it goes downhill very quickly. Have you ever been to Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, New York City, or the Rust Belt? Very nice people (except in NYC, many greedy people there), but many things made me sad.

In the future, mass automation is inevitable. Maybe not to the scale to which we are promised, but still significant enough to make many people jobless. During the Great Depression, many people retreated to the farms from the cities, but I see no such safety net now. Perhaps a cellulose society in Appalachia or somewhere could serve such a role for a decade or two.

Regarding work and its 2500% return, we are still trading in our time and brainpower for it. Assets appreciate regardless of whether we are inventing something or merely playing video games. I think many in the wiser generations need to realize how many young folks like me have been fed the narrative of "making your money work for you." Many in my generation don't even have driver's licenses, probably because they bought Musk's promise of self-driving cars. Many in my generation don't like work in general.

Have you read Graeber's book "BS Jobs?" Many in my college cohort will get such a BS job, which is perhaps why many are also very disillusioned and feel spiritually purposeless. It also mentions how fulfilling jobs in education or nursing don't get paid proportionally to their societal importance. Currently, only engineers get paid a fair share, even scientists are underappreciated these days.

Still, I see your point. Perhaps in such a cellulose-based society, people can do other small jobs, such as education or chemical production. Perhaps I can take a different internship. I am learning a lot from y'all!

One of the largest downsides of large lands is also taxes, but simultaneously, when currencies are manipulated, real assets such as land are the safest. If you have stocks, however, they are also safe from inflation, so I commend your choice.

Why were you bullied for going on another path in the US, the land of the free? That makes me sad to hear.

Sadly, I am currently obligated to be here. Hopefully, the next time I make a decision, I take your advice and make a bold move.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Young,
I think it would be really cool if you were to go through the process of converting cellulose to sugars and take pictures and share them (maybe in their own post). I think it is a cool process, and I would love to see it done in real life.

Hello Mr. McSpadden,

I was directly inspired by this video by YouTuber "NileRed."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-mWK_kcZMs&ab_channel=NileRed

In it, he converts cellulose from toilet paper into alcohol using a glucose intermediate.

Thus, theoretically, it is all viable. The YouTuber even remarks on the higher-than-expected yield. My only wonder is why people do not use such processes on their homesteads more often. Even without coppicing, I can see people taking weeds and autumn leaves to process their cellulose, feeding them to non-herbivores for nutrition.

Also, regarding the questions of how my bunker would source fats, the body treats alcohol similarly to fats and processes them into fatty acids in the body, which is a potential pathway to research. Perhaps I can take the metabolic pathway to make fats from alcohol outside my body.

Thank you.

James Bridger wrote:I think maybe part of the issue stems from different ideas of freedom. The OP's idea of freedom sounds like sitting in a bunker, not doing much, eating "wood goo". BTW< Would it really be goo? Crystallized sugar? I'm curious as to how this product made from wood would actually turn out. Anyway, that's not my idea of freedom, it sounds miserable to me. And that's not to knock the OP, if that sort of situation is what he desires, then by all means I hope he attains it. Freedom for me is to be able to own (mostly wild) land, with the ability to not go to a 9-5 job, and provide all my own food, spending my time working with my wife and kids, with nobody telling me how to run my life. Perhaps that sounds miserable to the OP, I don't know. But everyone has their own ideas of "freedom".

That is valid, we all have our own ideas of freedom. If I dried the decomposed cellulose, it would likely be a crystal.

YouTuber "NileRed" who made clear wood remarked it was stripped of lignins and almost purely cellulose, so I would expect its decomposition product to look similar. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUU3jW7Y9Ak&ab_channel=NileRed

Your ideal life sounds beautiful, but the main problem is it is out of reach of my generation. We must make our own sacrifices to preserve what we adhere to most, and let the rest be taken by the world.

By the way, if you don't have a 9-5 job, how do you pay property taxes? That is also one of my main problems of a cellulose society.

It seems this thread has come to a standstill, and I will summarize my findings for future reference.

My original question was:

[Given energy calculations], 300 liters of paper can last me about 3 years.
[...]
Given these calculations, why aren't people organizing to make a cellulose-based society where nobody has to toil just to eat and live?  

The main reasons such societies haven't sprung up yet:

Engineering/Implementation	Lack of Superiority	Ethical/Spiritual
Actual yields are lower, proposed process would take more work than hypothesized	Diet would be unappetizing	Inertia of thousands of years of agriculture is strong
Threshold of simplicity to self-produce many daily technologies hasn't been met	Process is more complicated for humans than conventional permaculture	Spiritual connection to Earth and Nature
Process lacks other crucial engineering details	Conventional permaculture yields enough food for farmers with low labor requirements	Seems invasive and artificial to many
Lack of prior real-world testing and experimentation	Minimal participation in the current economic system is sufficient for basic needs	Differing priorities, differing ideas of freedom

To resolve this, I would need to:

Make New	Incorporate
Simplify production of pre-existing technologies and allow individual fabrication	Incorporate various chemicals into my process
Make the cellulose -> glucose process as natural as possible, minimizing industrial processes	Incorporate fruit forest gardens, Hugelkulture beds, etc. for nutrition and better-tasting food

Interesting side information
Cellulose is already a staple in our diets, contained in milkshakes and caragreen
My vision overlaps with pre-existing research regarding biofuel production from cellulose
Black liquor, a fuel processed from cellulose, is already being used in industry
"Earth Overshoot Day" is a thing
The rice and beans for 80 years would cost ~$20,000 without shipping
Miyazawa Kenji is an awesome poet everyone should check out
Following the example of Gert may allow financial independence (https://permies.com/t/gert)

I would like to express my gratitude to all who participated in this thread. Please feel free to continue the thread further.

Trace Oswald wrote:

Young Jun Lee wrote: Fundamentally, I see nature as a tyrannical force which aims to screw us over at every step.

I would just like to say, I'm so very glad I don't share this point of view.  I see Nature as an ally, a giver of things, a companion, a source of food and wonder and beauty.  Forgive me if I misread or misinterpreted anything you said, but this forum seems to be ill-fitted for you.  I think the people here want to grow things, build things, improve the world, work with Nature and all of her challenges, not see her as an adversary that is attempting to crush us at every turn.  If you have no interest in anything of these things, this seems an odd choice for spending your time.

I have seen my fair share of crop failures destroying farmers' bank accounts, and I have seen too many cases of fungi, insects, climate, and even other humans ravaging my experimental Gaspe Flint Corn to blindly see nature as an ally.

However, I do agree that I need a more balanced view of nature. Based on people's experiences here, it seems Mother Nature isn't as harsh as I thought. Perhaps when farming becomes de-facto gambling out in the cornfields of Iowa, only then Nature strikes us.

I would like very much to stay in this forum because your visions are closest to mine. No other internet community I know of is trying to replace conventional industrial agriculture with a model that doesn't scar the land.

It's important to mention scarring the land takes a lot of human effort and fossil fuels, which I would like to prevent. I know many farmers back in Korea who got hip replacements from years of work, despite extensive mechanization of farming.

I also want to improve the world, just in a more chemistry-embracing direction, but I understand if my vision seems anti-Nature. I did hydroponics for a while and realized how inefficient the plants were, we couldn't eat most of the green and only took their seeds. So, I tried to find more efficient ways, and here we are. It took many mental leaps to justify artificial chemicals, which I also hated initially. I justify it using the viewpoint that everything is a result of chemical reactions, so using artificial chemicals is just me cutting out the middleman.

I wouldn't cut out all of nature, just the parts everyone here is already trying to mitigate: pests, fungi, and climate risks. I think trees are fine, so long as they aren't the poisonous ones or the ones with spikes. But I understand if my ideas discomfort you, I will try to be more pro-nature from now on.

A post submitted by a  Vegan  Juniper Tree.....


" Dream with the Rabbits."

The symbolic meaning of the rabbit is that of fertility, abundance, innocence, vulnerability,
quickness, agility,, luck, resurrection and love.

Yes,....Young.

Keep us posted on the Matrix Goop.

I would be interested to know what an "elite position" is. You used that phrase three times and I'm just wondering what it entails.

I'm going to level with you, my new friend. I dropped out of highschool in the midst of my second attempt at ninth grade. The only reason I'd gotten that far is most likely because the thought of holding me back would mean the staff would have to endure my presence an entire school year more, and that was just not worth the fight. Send the lost cause on her way! I did meander my way into the local vocational college, where I was aimed right at an Associates degree, however it is an Associates of Applied Science and most people think that I made that up. I might as well have, I haven't used it or it's credentials for quite a number of years now.

The point being, I am not much in the way of an educated individual. I am not, on the same token, an imbicile. Granted that spectrum offers quite a robust bit of space inside for one to squish into, and that makes it difficult to really grade... You would find your friend Faeryn somewhere in between intelligent and rather dense.

That all being said, whilst reading your post, I engaged in the following activities:
1. Head tilt to the side like confused or excited canine
2. Eyebrow smishing to indicate to no one that I am on a plane of great confusion
3. An interpretive dance to demonstrate artfully the level of confusion I ascended to
4. Retrieval of the dictionary
5. Re-retrieval of the dictionary just moments after de-retriveing
6. Paused a moment to ponder the idea that perhaps everyone was not, in fact, Kung Fu fighting
7. Have absolutely no freaking clue what to make of eating cellulose? I feel like a grade A dingus right now.

I'll keep reading, and re-reading to see if I can piece it together and make something of it. My goodness, friend, you are operating on a plane beyond my own. Huzzah!

Love & Respect,
F

Faeryn Savage wrote:I'm going to level with you, my new friend. I dropped out of highschool in the midst of my second attempt at ninth grade. The only reason I'd gotten that far is most likely because the thought of holding me back would mean the staff would have to endure my presence an entire school year more, and that was just not worth the fight. Send the lost cause on her way! I did meander my way into the local vocational college, where I was aimed right at an Associates degree, however it is an Associates of Applied Science and most people think that I made that up. I might as well have, I haven't used it or it's credentials for quite a number of years now.

The point being, I am not much in the way of an educated individual. I am not, on the same token, an imbicile. Granted that spectrum offers quite a robust bit of space inside for one to squish into, and that makes it difficult to really grade... You would find your friend Faeryn somewhere in between intelligent and rather dense.

That all being said, whilst reading your post, I engaged in the following activities:
1. Head tilt to the side like confused or excited canine
2. Eyebrow smishing to indicate to no one that I am on a plane of great confusion
3. An interpretive dance to demonstrate artfully the level of confusion I ascended to
4. Retrieval of the dictionary
5. Re-retrieval of the dictionary just moments after de-retriveing
6. Paused a moment to ponder the idea that perhaps everyone was not, in fact, Kung Fu fighting
7. Have absolutely no freaking clue what to make of eating cellulose? I feel like a grade A dingus right now.

I'll keep reading, and re-reading to see if I can piece it together and make something of it. My goodness, friend, you are operating on a plane beyond my own. Huzzah!

Love & Respect,
F

I don't know how old you are, but I do know schools used to have fewer accommodations for different styles of learning. Today, we can learn via podcasts, videos, reading, hearing, digital flashcards, making models, VR headsets, games, etc. I am sure you would have gotten a high school diploma with honors in this era.

My degree is literally a "Bachelors in Science (B.S.)", the bad naming seems to come with the "science" part.

I wrote it in an overcomplicated way because I read too many scientific articles, I will make sure to write casually from now on.

Your actions remind me of when I read my first philosophy book or scientific paper, but it is merely a difference in vernacular. People who read certain media use their lingo. e.g., NYTimes uses "ilk", academia uses "hitherto", Shakespeare uses "thither", and others. I see it as a difference in background, not schooling, if you look up the dictionary enough times you will intuitively understand the word.

Regarding point 7, it is very simple.

1. grass and wood contain lots of cellulose.
2. humans don't eat grass as main diet, but cows and pandas do.
3. This is because humans cannot digest the grass, but cows can.
4. If we eat a salad, whose main ingredient is cellulose, we will get very low calories
5. This is because salads have lots of indigestible (for humans) dietary fibers made up of cellulose.

6. Cellulase is an enzyme that breaks down cellulose
7. It breaks down cellulose into glucose
8. Glucose is a type of sugar
9. We can convert indigestible cellulose into digestible glucose for humans
10. Humans can digest wood and grass by processing it with cellulase enzymes

11. Cellulose is inedible to many pests
12. Mice, cockroaches, pigeons, etc. cannot digest them
13. Only special termites can eat wood, wood is usually eaten by fungi
14. Moths cannot eat wood but can eat softer cotton (another source of cellulose)
15. Cellulose can be used to store glucose long-term without worrying about pests

Given 1~15, I can stockpile lots of wood and chemicals to process it into glucose sugars for the rest of my 80 years on Earth. For other nutrients, I am looking into how to stockpile.

But if I can stockpile food like this, I am wondering why societies don't eat abundant wood and grass by processing it with the cellulase enzyme into sugar. Probably cost, but for bunkers, there isn't a cheaper and better alternative nutrient source.

Thank you for your interest, and feel free to ask for more clarification.

I was thinking exactly the same thought the other day. All this wood, how do we eat it? Then I remembered mushrooms and thought I should set up some indoor mushrooms as winter veggies. Oyster mushrooms and puffballs, they provide plenty of protein and nutrition. I think that in the city, space shouldn’t be an issue for mushrooms. You can start a mushroom farm and easily fulfill your dreams of converting sawdust into sustenance; and enjoy it too.

There are difficulties certainly! “Something big” is going on more or less constantly and has been for the last billion years or something. Flooding in Appalachia! Late frost! Not enough rain! Famine! War! Nuclear weapons! Covid! And yet somehow, our species is still here. Somehow, we all ate apples in the years they fruited and didn’t in the years they rested. Somehow, we are mushrooms when the rain fell and didn’t when the rain didn’t fall. Somehow, we ate parsnips when the rye got rotten, ate squash when the corn got chomped! Nature is a good and caring mother, and even with so many children, She has taken good enough care of us, if only we were grateful enough to notice it. That is why we are here at all, though scarred by the rigours of life and especially our own foolishness.

I have faced a lot of challenges growing food and the best thing I have found is not to turn away from Nature or try to control the environment, but to let things happen, let the pests come, etc., and eat whatever is left. Usually there is a lot when you know where to look and take a forager’s attitude to things. Where there is a lot of edible species diversity, you can have multiple crops fail and still have abundance. Some years are good for apples, others for corn, others for parsnips, turnips, squash, etc. Hunter gatherer societies have tended to be more food secure than agriculturalists for that reason. But hunter gatherer is almost synonymous with permaculture because of how such people tend the abundance, vibrancy and and splendor of the land.

People like the Buddha and Peace Pilgrim never thought about food when they weren’t eating it. They had attained inner peace, nirvana. They ate when people offered them food and didn’t eat when people didn’t offer them food. I’m inspired by them. I don’t think I garden any more for the sake of raising crops, so much as for the sake of cultivating connection to the land. I garden for the sake of the land and for the young children of today, and their children’s children. I (try to) garden as a sacred act. Living and working out of greed makes us feel agitated and disconnected. Living and working out of social & spiritual connection and generosity makes us happy and meaningful. And true happiness is rooted in gratitude and contentment.

Hopefully this is all meaningful and not just the grandiose babbling of a crabapple eater.

Edit: Made it more practical, less not nice, and less spiritual

On the grounds that this site is supposed to be about using permaculture to make the world a better place instead of being angry at bad guys, I'm going to throw a little suggestion out there.

For someone living in a desert with limited food choices and little love of anything that sounds like work, how about prickly pear plants?



That particular plant came about because we noticed that someone had dumped a pile of pads by the side of the road. I loaded some into the car and threw them down with the intention of reading up about them and figuring out how to persuade them to grow at a later date. Which never happened.

In the meantime the pads seemed to like their new home and put down roots. And began to grow. No work involved. And while they took a few years to reach this size, I don't count it as 'waiting' as I just got on with my life until I noticed how big they'd got and remembered to do that research.

It turns out the young pads are edible.



I harvest with a pair of stainless tongs and a sharp knife.

Once I've got the prickles off I slice them up and cook up in boiling water for a couple of minutes. They are nice and lemony and very fresh tasting. I serve like green beans. They make a good addition to something simple like rice and beans.



Then later in the year they give fruit. I now have two varieties - one giving orange fleshed fruit and one giving pink.



When I have plenty of fruit, if I feel up to it I pick a load of them, pulp them up in the blender, strain the bits out and freeze the pulp for use at any time I want over the next year or so.

The plants themselves require zero care except for hacking bits off that start to block your way. They can be grown as a prickly boundary fence to deter intruders. The only fertilizer I've ever put on any of mine is a bit of pee if that is the appropriate place at the time.

Burra Maluca wrote:On the grounds that this site is supposed to be about using permaculture to make the world a better place instead of being angry at bad guys, I'm going to throw a little suggestion out there.

For someone living in a desert with limited food choices and little love of anything that sounds like work, how about prickly pear plants?



That particular plant came about because we noticed that someone had dumped a pile of pads by the side of the road. I loaded some into the car and threw them down with the intention of reading up about them and figuring out how to persuade them to grow at a later date. Which never happened.

In the meantime the pads seemed to like their new home and put down roots. And began to grow. No work involved. And while they took a few years to reach this size, I don't count it as 'waiting' as I just got on with my life until I noticed how big they'd got and remembered to do that research.

It turns out the young pads are edible.



I harvest with a pair of stainless tongs and a sharp knife.

Once I've got the prickles off I slice them up and cook up in boiling water for a couple of minutes. They are nice and lemony and very fresh tasting. I serve like green beans. They make a good addition to something simple like rice and beans.



Then later in the year they give fruit. I now have two varieties - one giving orange fleshed fruit and one giving pink.



When I have plenty of fruit, if I feel up to it I pick a load of them, pulp them up in the blender, strain the bits out and freeze the pulp for use at any time I want over the next year or so.

The plants themselves require zero care except for hacking bits off that start to block your way. They can be grown as a prickly boundary fence to deter intruders. The only fertilizer I've ever put on any of mine is a bit of pee if that is the appropriate place at the time.

Uh.....dang. I'm super jelly of your cactus. Is that a wild variety or some domesticated version bred to grow big like that? We have prickly pears around here, but they're tiny, and the fruits, if you can find them, are shriveled little nasty things with little flavor.

Cellulase isn't produced as manna by the ecosystem. It can only be produced by middlemen that charge high prices for their services.

We have known how to make Cellulase for hundreds of years. If producing food grade sugar from wood was efficient, and inexpensive, I'd guess that our whole food system would have already moved in that direction.

My understanding of nutritional science indicates that sugar is right up there with omega-6 plant based oils as the worst possible food-like-substance for humans.

I read label quite frequently.

A lot of plant based stuff has cellulose as an ingredient.  This made me wonder what cellulose actually is.

After some research I decided cellulose was just another name for Plants.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:Cellulase isn't produced as manna by the ecosystem. It can only be produced by middlemen that charge high prices for their services.

We have known how to make Cellulase for hundreds of years. If producing food grade sugar from wood was efficient, and inexpensive, I'd guess that our whole food system would have already moved in that direction. My understanding of nutritional science indicates that sugar is right up there with omega-6 plant based oils as the worst possible food for humans.

High glucose wood syrup? 🤣

On the other hand mushrooms are extremely healthy, rich in protein, and taste good.

I get the impression that humans as generalist eaters were always meant to scavenge around for those succulent treats that the rest of the animals and the stronger-stomached specialist eaters didn’t get to. There is such a variety of foods that are edible to us, and then so many common things (wood, tough leaves, grass) that are less than, but edible to plenty of other creatures.

Though I do wonder if it would be possible to use broken up blocks of mycelium to cook and digest cellulose, sort of like how koji mold is used to pre-digest starches into sugars and proteins into amino acids.

Hmm... I guess everything that needs to be said about this has been said by others, but I thought of one thing. Assuming one wanted to do this (I very strongly don't, personally) and assuming you could get it to work in practice (I very strongly doubt it, personally) it would mark another giant step away from nature. As far as I know, previous such steps have not made people work less, but rather the opposite.

Some numbers I've heard: Hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari worked on average three hours per day and person. Traditional farmers in the Himalayas worked a yearly average of five and a half hours per day and person. Many modern wage-slaves work at least eight hours per day, and a lot of them still don't have "enough" money. These numbers might be off (taken as they are from memory, and presented here without source reference) but I think the general trend is that the farther you get from nature, the more you have to work. I don't see why the wood-syrup-eating future envisioned in the OP would be any different in this regard.

Other than this, like others have said, there's the question of what constitutes a good life. If you label any and all human activity as "work", and decide that it's all equally nasty, it seems to me that you'll miss out on most of life.

Young Jun Lee wrote:If I had trouble at a chemical plant, I would have a much easier time debugging it than treating a single animal patient. You only need industry experience and an undergraduate engineering degree for chemical plants, but animals? You need a doctoral degree. I value the simplicity of the chemicals more than the complexity of the animal and living plant, even if it means my products will feel very sad and lifeless.

Plants and animals are so complex that they heal themselves, and care for themselves, and have done so for millions of years, without  human intervention. Without machines. Without degrees in engineering. Without infrastructure.

Maieshe Ljin wrote:All this wood, how do we eat it? Then I remembered mushrooms and thought I should set up some indoor mushrooms as winter veggies.
[...]
Nature is a good and caring mother, and even with so many children, She has taken good enough care of us, if only we were grateful enough to notice it. That is why we are here at all, though scarred by the rigours of life and especially our own foolishness.

I think mushrooms are nice. My bioreactors would be like mushrooms too, except producing carbs instead of proteins, and being collectivized. I would even use the same enzyme as the mushroom: cellulase. Mushrooms contain very little carbohydrates, focused more on proteins. Perhaps mushrooms can be a neat protein source, but humans also need carbs, which can be fulfilled by glucose from cellulose. I appreciate the information.

I lived near the woods as a child, and I would see many poisonous pokeweed, poisonous mushrooms disguised as edible ones, and acts of barbarism between animals. There is great danger in anthropomorphizing beings who don't understand our ethics, or care about us at all. Sunlight just is, and will not care if it warms up the saint or the robber.  

The boundary between neglect and freedom will never be clear.

Humanity is very anti-natural, and I always remember this while wearing my glasses.

Burra Maluca wrote:
For someone living in a desert with limited food choices and little love of anything that sounds like work, how about prickly pear plants?
[...]
The plants themselves require zero care except for hacking bits off that start to block your way. They can be grown as a prickly boundary fence to deter intruders. The only fertilizer I've ever put on any of mine is a bit of pee if that is the appropriate place at the time.

Yes, I remember putting their fruit in sodas to enhance the taste. It was a very nice addition.

I think it would be a great idea, and further processing their cellulose into glucose would unlock even more nutrients for us. In addition, it seems like a nice source of water.

My only concern is plants and their reliance on nature, and currently, nature is reliant on human society getting its act together.

Thank you for your information.

Maieshe Ljin wrote:

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:Cellulase isn't produced as manna by the ecosystem. It can only be produced by middlemen that charge high prices for their services.

We have known how to make Cellulase for hundreds of years. If producing food grade sugar from wood was efficient, and inexpensive, I'd guess that our whole food system would have already moved in that direction. My understanding of nutritional science indicates that sugar is right up there with omega-6 plant based oils as the worst possible food for humans.

High glucose wood syrup? 🤣
[...]
Though I do wonder if it would be possible to use broken up blocks of mycelium to cook and digest cellulose, sort of like how koji mold is used to pre-digest starches into sugars and proteins into amino acids.

Yes, that was sorta the idea. I watched many documentaries regarding Appalachia and the Deep South. Two pieces of media that awakened me to these American regions were the game "Night in the Woods", and the book "Hillbilly Elegy." I won't comment on their substance, but my research suggests that the problems they depict do exist, albeit not everywhere and not in the severity they suggest. I also spent some time in the Piedmont of Virginia and saw a lot.

Those remote and struggling areas just so happen to have lots of trees, which I thought could be coppiced. I then conducted some thought experiments to see how such large quantities of wood could be gathered and used. I envisioned a situation where each person rents forestland and coppices it without killing any trees, then processing it into some syrup locally to use as a sugar source just like High fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Say what you will about HFCS, but it creates jobs, and its manufacturing also involves enzymes, breaking down starch into sugar. It replaced sugar mainly because it was so cheap, so if enzymes can be mass-produced, I am sure high glucose wood syrup (HGWS) could compete.

Did you know that the movie (originally a book), "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind", shows rural Malawi farmers cutting down trees for timber because they needed the money to survive? Such decisions are made in the context of inefficient nutrient distribution chains, where the only reliable way to mass-produce edible carbs is corn farming, so people cut the timber and sell it for money, then use the money to buy other people's corn. The currency system is also a source of inefficiency, as running it requires paying the people who run it in the first place. If the Malawi farmer could coppice the trees, process its wood into sugar, and eat it, they wouldn't need to cut down the trees or lose precious time, energy, and value to an inefficient system.

Another story in Africa, this time in Mozambique which is stricken by famine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seCYoaL_I0w&ab_channel=KBS%EC%84%B8%EA%B3%84%EB%8A%94%EC%A7%80%EA%B8%88

The people spend all day searching for starch sources just to eat, even when there are many trees and grass around them. It was one of the moments when I realized that in such environments, a cellulose society proposal might make sense. Starch is rarer than cellulose, but humans by themselves can only digest starch and not cellulose.

Fungi processing to make cellulase could theoretically work, and it is something I should investigate.

Eino Kenttä wrote:Hmm... I guess everything that needs to be said about this has been said by others, but I thought of one thing. Assuming one wanted to do this (I very strongly don't, personally) and assuming you could get it to work in practice (I very strongly doubt it, personally) it would mark another giant step away from nature. As far as I know, previous such steps have not made people work less, but rather the opposite.

Some numbers I've heard: Hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari worked on average three hours per day and person. Traditional farmers in the Himalayas worked a yearly average of five and a half hours per day and person. Many modern wage-slaves work at least eight hours per day, and a lot of them still don't have "enough" money. These numbers might be off (taken as they are from memory, and presented here without source reference) but I think the general trend is that the farther you get from nature, the more you have to work. I don't see why the wood-syrup-eating future envisioned in the OP would be any different in this regard.

Other than this, like others have said, there's the question of what constitutes a good life. If you label any and all human activity as "work", and decide that it's all equally nasty, it seems to me that you'll miss out on most of life.

I believe otherwise. I think it doesn't matter how far one strays from nature, so long as we minimize the middlemen.

The primary source of all energy is the sun. Then, chloroplast-containing organisms use sunlight to make nutrients. Afterward, insects, fungi, bacteria, etc. use the nutrients to breed their own populations. If you go up the pyramid far enough, you reach humans.

I think it's all a matter of complexity. Humans now work more because despite ample automation, as described in Graeber's book "BS Jobs", we invented new jobs to navigate bureaucracies, regulations, technologies, etc. It is not unlike the Soviet Union which had mandatory jobs for everyone, and where nobody got paid well.

I think so long as one keeps the structure simple, going away from nature is fine. There is no bureaucracy in coppicing wood and putting it into the bioreactor, as far as I know. I think in a cellulose society, due to the lack of need to till the land or put fertilizer or make sure starch-enrichers grow, I can cut it down back to perhaps hunter-gather levels of labor.

Perhaps my methods are inferior to permaculture and hunter-gatherers. However, I see my method as more scalable, and definitely superior to modern industrial agriculture as I would use coppicing instead.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:

Young Jun Lee wrote:If I had trouble at a chemical plant, I would have a much easier time debugging it than treating a single animal patient. You only need industry experience and an undergraduate engineering degree for chemical plants, but animals? You need a doctoral degree. I value the simplicity of the chemicals more than the complexity of the animal and living plant, even if it means my products will feel very sad and lifeless.

Plants and animals are so complex that they heal themselves, and care for themselves, and have done so for millions of years, without  human intervention. Without machines. Without degrees in engineering. Without infrastructure.

Bioreactors aren't as complicated as you believe. A homebrew setup can be regarded as a bioreactor. My cellulose society would likely process similar to how we make alcohol today.

The chemical process is very simple, and I don't see it as any more difficult than feeding a goat. Isolating cellulase might be difficult, however.

For the benefit of anyone reading this who isn't familiar with what cellulose actually is, I'd like to share a few videos.

This one is less than half a minute, showing the chemical structure and how it is made of lots of glucose units all joined together.



This one is a minute long, showing how cellulose is different to starch even though both are made from glucose. In short - starch for fuel, cellulose for structure.



This one is over two minutes long and is probably my favourite - showing the structure at the molecular level, then gradually zooming out so you get a feel for the relevance at different scales.



And finally one that's over twelve minutes, for you to enjoy over a nice cuppa.  This one has a nice mix of the history of its discovery, science, pretty pictures, uses and how it fits in the 'real world'.

Young Jun Lee wrote:
There is no bureaucracy in coppicing wood and putting it into the bioreactor, as far as I know. I think in a cellulose society, due to the lack of need to till the land or put fertilizer or make sure starch-enrichers grow, I can cut it down back to perhaps hunter-gather levels of labor.

Perhaps my methods are inferior to permaculture and hunter-gatherers. However, I see my method as more scalable, and definitely superior to modern industrial agriculture as I would use coppicing instead.

It's definitely doable to live (to a large degree at least) off of a coppice system. If you plant chestnuts and hazelnuts, for instance, you can eat the nuts and use the coppiced wood for building material and fuel. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ben Law? He coppices chestnuts, and does all kinds of cool stuff with the wood.

You talk about cutting out middlemen. Still, someone has to produce the chemicals you need in your process. Even if you produce them yourself, you still need equipment to do so, which someone has to produce. A chestnut coppice (possibly combined with some annual gardening and eating the deer and boar who might also want chestnuts) requires absolutely no human middlemen, no infrastructure, no industry and no chemicals. As you say, it's all about complexity. Do you really want to try to replace almost every function of a massively complex ecosystem with technology? We have always been a part of that ecosystem, it has kept us alive for the last 3.8 billion years, and I think it's very likely that it will continue to do so in the future.

I guess what I'm trying to understand is just how it would be easier or better to live off of refined sugar made from wood, than to plant the coppice that's necessary anyways with tree species that give you food without all that extra effort? If you're worried about your stored food being eaten by pests, you could dry your chestnuts using the heat from a rocket mass heater burning coppiced chestnut wood, and then store them in airtight jars. If you're worried about crop failure, you could plant as many food-producing species as possible, and the chances are that some will always thrive and give you food. You could settle near some big body of water, and simply eat fish in the unlikely event that all your crops fail simultaneously. You could learn about the wild foods in your area, to have an additional back-up. Basically, you could tap into the stability of a system that's developed and survived over billions of years, rather than rely on a rather unexplored process dependent on an industrial system that's been around for a couple of hundred years.

I also do not share the OP's stated priorities and preferences, but to be fair, unless you're coppicing your chestnut woods with stone tools you fabricate yourself, you also rely on a long chain of middlemen to mine iron, produce steel, fabricate tools, and move those tools to a venue where you can purchase them.

Another use of Burra's prickly pear (nopal) is that the mucilage derived by fermentation of either the extracted pad juice or the chopped/macerated pads can be used in plasters to waterproof earthen structures.  I live in the northern tier of the US in a cold temperate climate, and nopal even grows here in some relict populations, so it isn't just a xeric or desert environment plant.  Some of the local examples may be escaped ornamentals, but I know of one patch on top of a high hill or small mountain; it seems highly unlikely that a human transplanted it there via steep and narrow footpath access, though a bird may have dropped a fruit or the seeds there, I suppose.

A Nubian vault structure, made with mud bricks and so waterproofed, might suit the OP's needs for a hunker bunker.  No need for any permanent timber in constructing the shelter, and mostly just made with sweat equity.  Maybe a bit of lime or Portland cement as a stabilizer. The black liquor can be used to help stabilize earthen structures, too,if I'm not mistaken.  With the addition of the wofati annualized solar gain system, he might need very little exogenous heat in his domicile reminiscent of a Pharaonic grain storehouse.

This would be very "Permie", and well suited to his expressed preference for a desert climate.  I also find myself drawn to the desert, though I've never actually lived there, only visited.

I don't believe a human can be healthy for long on a diet of pure glucose, even if supplemented with vitamins and minerals.  To me this seems like the "futurism" prognostications which were common in science fiction and the popular scientific press when I was a kid.  I.e., we'll have long distance space flight for the masses and only need to swallow a small capsule of nutrients every day.  This seriously misunderstands human metabolism and what is needed for general human health.  The metabolic theory of cancer (and other chronic disease) posits that mitochondrial metabolism gone amok due to excessive serum glucose is the underlying mechanism which leads to such outcomes.  That is, poor metabolic health underlies many or most of the chronic health conditions of modernity.  While a minority opinion, it has much evidence in its corner.  I myself wouldn't take the risk of trying to survive on glucose.  I don't think any mammal should be subjected to such treatment, except for a very good reason.  I think it is the express route to diabetes, and poor general health.  I suspect that any such experiment would run afoul of ethics board considerations without substantial justification.

In fact, carbohydrates, whether simple or complex, are the only macronutrient category which humans do not absolutely require in their diets, as much as this might surprise some.  In other words, a human can survive on protein and fat (well chosen), with no nutritional carbohydrates whatsoever, and especially if the protein is animal protein, which will help to more easily ensure the full panoply of essential amino acids.  Any needed base-load glucose will be provided by gluconeogenesis in the liver.  It is possible to obtain all essential (meaning, cannot be synthesized by the body) amino acids from a plant based diet (legumes and cereals are a classic combo to ensure this), but the amount needed to maintain health and/or build muscle will require careful dietary planning.  If humans were ruminants, we could make use of bacterial assistants more fully, but we don't have that sort of plumbing.  Adding some eggs, fish, poultry, rabbits, etc. can make the task of acquiring the requisite amino acids easier.  I have legumes (pinto beans, navy beans, lentils, dried peas), cereals (wheat, rice and field corn) and fats (olive oil and coconut oil) stored for emergency use, but I hope that I don't need to subsist entirely on them and whatever greens I can grow or forage for any protracted period of time.  FYI, field corn should be nixtamalized (turned into hominy with wood ashes or another caustic substance, for example "cal" or calcium hydroxide) to make the B-vitamins bio-available, lest pellagra rear its ugly head.

I am not interested in the OP's vision of hunkering in a bunker and eating cellulose-derived glucose goo.  But, to each his own, and I'd be curious to follow his experiment, if i didn't think it seriously jeopardized his long-term health.  I would encourage him to expand his view of human flourishing.  I certainly applaud his ability to think outside the box.  I think he misunderstands the complexity of biological life.  If you don't believe me, go watch a YouTube video on the ATP cycle or Krebs cycle.  Despite our vast knowledge, we have, at best, a surface understanding of how all of this works.  Hubris is common to the human condition (not least, to me!).  Epistemic humility is helpful.

Christopher Weeks wrote:I also do not share the OP's stated priorities and preferences, but to be fair, unless you're coppicing your chestnut woods with stone tools you fabricate yourself, you also rely on a long chain of middlemen to mine iron, produce steel, fabricate tools, and move those tools to a venue where you can purchase them.

Fair enough, way fewer middlemen then. Back in the day (in Sweden at least) many farmers used to do at least some of their own metalwork from scratch, starting with bog iron. But yeah, complete independence is probably next to impossible, we're social creatures.

I can’t find it but if we want another story about extreme diets, I once heard a story about a woman who lived in ancient China, fled into the forest and ate only pine needles or other similar wild herbs. She was said to have lived over two hundred years and apparently died shortly after being invited back to society and eating grains, according to some versions of the story. But I don’t remember where it was from. It could have been something I put through Google Translate. (Chinese is one of those languages I really should learn but never summon the effort…)

Yes. Carbohydrates can be quite harsh on the body. Though I find that it’s much healthier feeling in the form of fruit. I think that especially apples and crabapples are very wholesome and sustaining, more so than grains. Well fermented sourdough is also good though…

I don’t think that it is possible to split a line between humans and nature. We are not machines, only a little fragment of nature that has surrounded itself with machines. Though we have tried to develop tools by mathematical and chemical rules, we are not tools but natural beings, and we need natural food in order to survive.

If you do want to try this diet, which it seems you may, then try abstaining from food for a day, then eat some molasses and see if you can eat this way without feeling suffering or intense strain in your body. I’m not going to say a sugar diet is impossible, because I try to be open minded about everything, and admire experimentation.

Maybe you would like to look at the lives of early Christian ascetics. They were very austere and not needy, and yet there those of them who lived long and healthy lives that might be interesting to research.

Eino Kenttä wrote:

Young Jun Lee wrote:
There is no bureaucracy in coppicing wood and putting it into the bioreactor, as far as I know. I think in a cellulose society, due to the lack of need to till the land or put fertilizer or make sure starch-enrichers grow, I can cut it down back to perhaps hunter-gather levels of labor.

Perhaps my methods are inferior to permaculture and hunter-gatherers. However, I see my method as more scalable, and definitely superior to modern industrial agriculture as I would use coppicing instead.

It's definitely doable to live (to a large degree at least) off of a coppice system. If you plant chestnuts and hazelnuts, for instance, you can eat the nuts and use the coppiced wood for building material and fuel. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ben Law? He coppices chestnuts, and does all kinds of cool stuff with the wood.

You talk about cutting out middlemen. Still, someone has to produce the chemicals you need in your process. Even if you produce them yourself, you still need equipment to do so, which someone has to produce. A chestnut coppice (possibly combined with some annual gardening and eating the deer and boar who might also want chestnuts) requires absolutely no human middlemen, no infrastructure, no industry and no chemicals. As you say, it's all about complexity. Do you really want to try to replace almost every function of a massively complex ecosystem with technology? We have always been a part of that ecosystem, it has kept us alive for the last 3.8 billion years, and I think it's very likely that it will continue to do so in the future.

I guess what I'm trying to understand is just how it would be easier or better to live off of refined sugar made from wood, than to plant the coppice that's necessary anyways with tree species that give you food without all that extra effort? If you're worried about your stored food being eaten by pests, you could dry your chestnuts using the heat from a rocket mass heater burning coppiced chestnut wood, and then store them in airtight jars. If you're worried about crop failure, you could plant as many food-producing species as possible, and the chances are that some will always thrive and give you food. You could settle near some big body of water, and simply eat fish in the unlikely event that all your crops fail simultaneously. You could learn about the wild foods in your area, to have an additional back-up. Basically, you could tap into the stability of a system that's developed and survived over billions of years, rather than rely on a rather unexplored process dependent on an industrial system that's been around for a couple of hundred years.

Thank you for your input.

Many of the chemicals involved are simple in fabrication and storage. Hypothetically, I can stockpile salt (which does not easily expire), combine it with water and electricity, and make bleach using pencil lead or other graphite. However, bleach has a short expiration date (6 months), so unlike my previous assertions, simple stockpiling won't work. I can still automate the process as it is very simple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z42kc2ba8c&ab_channel=DIYBiotech

This bleach can be then used for delignification. The process can be run in the background while I am reading a book or something, which brings up the point of what counts as work and what doesn't. Personally, unless it's a dangerous reaction that must be monitored every minute, I wouldn't count the chemical reaction part as my work.

The components in my opinion look very simple. I was already researching graphite production due to my interest in nuclear reactors, and since the graphite doesn't need to be that pure (the video above used pencil lead), I think I can make it myself crudely.
https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/66662/how-to-make-graphite-from-wood-charcoal

As for the electricity, yes, I would need someone else's labor, but I am thinking of stockpiling solar panels. Say 1 solar panel lasts for 10 years, then for 100 years, I can stockpile 10 to use 1 each decade. Accounting for defects, accidents, and natural oxidation (which I believe can be mitigated by storing electronics in a vacuum seal), perhaps 20 solar panels will do. They are large in volume but well worth it.

I think a crucial component of my idea, given y'all's inputs, is that I should be willing to use other people's labor so long as it can be stockpiled, such as in the solar panel example above. Perhaps graphite could be stockpiled instead, as well.

I wouldn't use batteries because of this exact problem: they cannot be stockpiled without it eventually expiring or corroding. I don't know much electronics, but I am thinking of using the solar panel cathode and anode directly, with the graphite rods.

One question I have is this: we already spend hours of our lives cooking, so how different are my chemical methods from cooking up a nice stew? Fundamentally, I see no difference, and my lab sessions at university reminded me a lot of cooking classes. Cooking itself is merely a means to pre-digest our food to absorb more nutrients from it, no?

Ben Law seems like a person I can learn from, I will start reading his material. Back in Korea, the fruit tree farmers would always trim their trees and there would be left over wood. The trees would have to fit in mesh nets to prevent avian pests and weather. E.g., http://m.jadam.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=14974
I can do something similar.

We don't need all parts of the ecosystem. Sunlight for vitamin D, micronutrients, carbs, fats, and proteins are all that we need on the nutrient side. Perhaps some exercise too, but it can be done in gyms. We don't "need" animals, insects, fungi, or bacteria. Not all of them. The web can be greatly simplified if one uses the cellulose society method, due to all the chemicals being made inorganically as seen above with bleach.

Nature is not as simple as you may think. Plants, from my hydroponics experience, require pH balance, NPK, and other micronutrients such as iron, etc., or else they won't do very well. To maintain pH balance, one might need limestone. And then the water must be filtered and monitored to make sure no fungi breed. If I planted it in normal soil I would need the same nutrients, while making sure pests don't breed. I would need to weed out undesirable plants and make sure the plants I desire grow. To kill the pests, I might bring in their predators, which may become their own problem in the future, perhaps interfering with the crop eventually. These component lists are just as long as what I am proposing.

Nature can use a restructuring. Do we really "need" fruits? On a societal level yes, people are comfortable with their sucrose source with specific packaging, but for myself, I don't see the need. We are killing off many insects and yet, the agricultural industry for grains does just fine due to wind pollination.

Only certain fruit trees are failing, in California, and others, whose crops need insect pollination. My method won't even need pollination, as cellulose growth is a default of the environment. The food web is failing, and the wind is irregular. So what? Did we really need that complexity in the first place? Why care about the caterpillar and the queen honeybee if I found a new way to bypass their pollination services? Does the wind pattern or drought matter if I stockpiled water and cellulose? Why make silk and require the moth's services when you can make rayon from cellulose directly? No piece of nature "deserves" to be there. Wind and rain and fire's days are outnumbered. We don't just need a silent spring, we will get one, whether we like it or not.

Chestnuts in an airtight jar sound nice. I also considered freeze-drying for awhile, until I realized for that energy usage, I might as well just process cellulose into glucose. But I will consider it. After all, if I can get chestnuts as a side product from pre-existing trees, why not take them all, perhaps leaving some for the wildlife? Another point is that wood doesn't have a shelf life, similar to honey, which I aim to mass produce with cellulose sugar.
https://componentadvertiser.com/in-our-pages/library/does-your-lumber-have-a-shelf-life

Living near water is a good idea, and for that reason I have also considered lakeside land, oceanside land, and riverside land. But they tend to be expensive and out of my budget.

Of course, nature as a system adapted over billions of years. But when did nature promise us that she will save us? Nothing will save us except for ourselves, and nature has many imposters who want to poison us, in the sea and the rivers and the mountains and the fields. Nature will feed you to the bears if that's what she sees fit, which is why humans made agriculture in the first place. We got sick of nature's antics of killing us off without warning or reason.

We developed vaccines. We developed antibiotics and antifungals. We developed pesticides because nature isn't benevolent. Nature is merely an energy gradient striving for balance, and humans are at the forefront of the battle, for we are a bloated species ourselves. I don't care if nature is a goddess, nobody feeds me to the bears, and nobody loots my crop for the subhuman entities of nature. I will not associate with beings who breed thieves and murderers. We will have a Twilight of the Gods, and make a new world for our own.

Normally, I would just take the established pathways. But I do not own a farm, I don't have money for the good land (or housing in general), I have no connections to anyone outside the Northeastern metropolis, the nature is not the one I grew up in, the job market is dry and wages low, and many other reasons.

Perhaps I will end up like David Hahn or Chris McCandless or Theodore Kaczynski, dead or in eternal solitude. But I believe in a final struggle against nature, including human nature, and I believe that it can be won. True, eternal victory for me comes in the form of rejecting a world that forces participation and refusing to participate in the systems that exploit and undermine me. They are not entitled to my participation: society, nature, humanity, all of them. I will return to nature when my participation becomes a choice and not a forced one.

Crop diversity is good, but homogeneity means less labor. That being said, I will consider diversifying my crops, if I get some viable farmland.

Thank you for your input.

(Interesting side note: we can already use sugar mixtures to make fruit cells, as seen here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/future-will-we-be-growing-fruit-home-bioreactors-180968133/)

Christopher Weeks wrote:I also do not share the OP's stated priorities and preferences, but to be fair, unless you're coppicing your chestnut woods with stone tools you fabricate yourself, you also rely on a long chain of middlemen to mine iron, produce steel, fabricate tools, and move those tools to a venue where you can purchase them.

That is true, perhaps I can buy 80 years' worth of axes and store them in an airtight environment. If true self-sufficiency is impossible, I am fine with stockpiling what must be supplemented.

Kevin Olson wrote:
[...]
I don't believe a human can be healthy for long on a diet of pure glucose, even if supplemented with vitamins and minerals.  To me this seems like the "futurism" prognostications which were common in science fiction and the popular scientific press when I was a kid.  I.e., we'll have long distance space flight for the masses and only need to swallow a small capsule of nutrients every day.  This seriously misunderstands human metabolism and what is needed for general human health.  The metabolic theory of cancer (and other chronic disease) posits that mitochondrial metabolism gone amok due to excessive serum glucose is the underlying mechanism which leads to such outcomes.  That is, poor metabolic health underlies many or most of the chronic health conditions of modernity.  While a minority opinion, it has much evidence in its corner.  I myself wouldn't take the risk of trying to survive on glucose.  I don't think any mammal should be subjected to such treatment, except for a very good reason.  I think it is the express route to diabetes, and poor general health.  I suspect that any such experiment would run afoul of ethics board considerations without substantial justification.

In fact, carbohydrates, whether simple or complex, are the only macronutrient category which humans do not absolutely require in their diets, as much as this might surprise some.  In other words, a human can survive on protein and fat (well chosen), with no nutritional carbohydrates whatsoever, and especially if the protein is animal protein, which will help to more easily ensure the full panoply of essential amino acids.  Any needed base-load glucose will be provided by gluconeogenesis in the liver.  It is possible to obtain all essential (meaning, cannot be synthesized by the body) amino acids from a plant based diet (legumes and cereals are a classic combo to ensure this), but the amount needed to maintain health and/or build muscle will require careful dietary planning.  If humans were ruminants, we could make use of bacterial assistants more fully, but we don't have that sort of plumbing.  Adding some eggs, fish, poultry, rabbits, etc. can make the task of acquiring the requisite amino acids easier.  I have legumes (pinto beans, navy beans, lentils, dried peas), cereals (wheat, rice and field corn) and fats (olive oil and coconut oil) stored for emergency use, but I hope that I don't need to subsist entirely on them and whatever greens I can grow or forage for any protracted period of time.  FYI, field corn should be nixtamalized (turned into hominy with wood ashes or another caustic substance, for example "cal" or calcium hydroxide) to make the B-vitamins bio-available, lest pellagra rear its ugly head.

I am not interested in the OP's vision of hunkering in a bunker and eating cellulose-derived glucose goo.  But, to each his own, and I'd be curious to follow his experiment, if i didn't think it seriously jeopardized his long-term health.  I would encourage him to expand his view of human flourishing.  I certainly applaud his ability to think outside the box.  I think he misunderstands the complexity of biological life.  If you don't believe me, go watch a YouTube video on the ATP cycle or Krebs cycle.  Despite our vast knowledge, we have, at best, a surface understanding of how all of this works.  Hubris is common to the human condition (not least, to me!).  Epistemic humility is helpful.

I see. Perhaps I could then feed the sugar to various animals, which would have increased digestive efficiency due to bypassing gut bacteria for nutrient availability, and use them to mitigate my risk of cancer, using the animals as my liver. Perhaps I can feed chickens with this? They are simple, mass-producible, and genetically distinct enough that I am willing to take them along with me.

Perhaps glucose is not the way. I can always take a note from high-fructose corn syrup to turn the glucose into fructose using pre-existing enzymes and leave lots of cellulose intact to have dietary fiber effects. Cellulose breakdown isn't 100% efficient anyway, so lots of cellulose will be left. The end product, I think, will taste like applesauce.

Someone earlier brought up fish, which I neglected. Perhaps I can feed the glucose to fish if I can get enough water? I do not know much about fish, however. I could always eat daseulgi fed with the sugars, I suppose.

I am also thinking of using algae, just as YouTuber "Cody's Lab" did using algae panels. It is a very interesting watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64cEmjtwRgw&ab_channel=Cody%27sLab
Algae is very nice because I can break up its carbs using cellulase to maximize carbs absorption, while also having algae's abundant amino acids and fats.

The ATP and Krebs cycle also led me to this. I originally tried to make hydroponic plants that grow in the dark w/o LED lights to make a viable food source, but the ATP process and Krebs cycle all require so many proteins and molecules. Of course, nature optimized it, but it didn't suit my timeframe, efficiency, and stability requirements. The article that inspired me to do it: https://www.science.org/content/article/crops-grown-without-sunlight-could-help-feed-astronauts-bound-mars

We cannot know everything, but we know enough to predict various natural phenomena. I don't know everything, but I know enough to know that the world exploits us in one form or another. Leaving is the key.

Some more connections.

Finland already has a robust xylitol and xylose production industry, which is a sugar alcohol and sugar made from wood respectively (humans cannot digest xylose, however, sheep can using their gut microbiome).

I think if their model is slightly modified, it could mass-produce sorbitol (from cellulose) instead of xylitol (from hemicellulose), and then sorbitol dehydrogenase can be mass-produced to create fructose from sorbitol. Although not glucose. Perhaps this process can remove cellulase enzymes altogether, instead converting cellulose into sorbitol directly using acids and inorganic catalysts.

Research states sorbitol is already being made this way from biomass. So why not individuals do it in their own bioreactors?

All enzymes I use use fewer amino acids than alpha-amylase (used in HFCS), so theoretically, the enzyme manufacturing costs might be cheaper, although I need to research it more.

Cellulase - 181 amino acids
Sorbitol Dehydrogenase - 357 amino acids
Alpha-amylase - 496 amino acids

I think there could be two systems, one to make glucose using cellulase, another to make fructose using sorbitol, and the two can be combined to make sucrose.

Young -

I would be even more skeptical of a diet based on fructose rather than glucose.  Fructose is first metabolized in the liver.

In nature, fructose is packaged in fruits and vegetables (we'll ignore the question of whether tomatoes and squashes count as one or both - botanists and dieticians would be at loggerheads over this).  Thus, fructose naturally occurs in things relatively high in fiber.

How many apples or peaches could you eat in a day?  How many grapes?  How long is the fruit season, without preservation (drying, canning, or freezing)?  I would guess that if you put away half a dozen peaches within a single day, you'd very much regret having done so, and would be more temperate in your consumption in the future!  Peak season for any particular fruit, at least in temperate climates, is usually a few weeks, at most.  Some variety (grapes, apples, apricots, cherries) may stretch this out, but realistically, the fruit season is still just a fraction of the year.  My point is that natural consumption of fructose is regulated.

If fructose is industrially separated or synthesized, then added to beverages and "foods", this natural metering is bypassed.

Back to the liver: metabolizing large quantities of fructose (sugary beverages are the primary culprit, but it's in all manner of packaged foods) will lead to fatty liver disease and sclerosis (the same sort of damage seen in chronic alcoholics).  I've heard of cases of children as young 12 years of age presenting with fatty liver disease and sclerosis.  Not only will there be the potential for the poor metabolic health downstream, but also for permanent liver damage.

Please (please!) be very careful with long-term diets high in fructose.

I think I detect that your are moving toward a more typically "permie" position - pass the food stuff through something else first, before you eat it.

Again, I applaud your ingenuity, and your ability to brainstorm about other life ways.  It sounds to me like the sooner you (personally) can leave the city, the better.  You may have a more sanguine view of society and nature if you can find the right small rural community.  I myself would find it difficult living in a large city, so I am sympathetic.  I also understand gritting your teeth and doing what you must so.

No one wants to be doing more work to reap the same amount. I am not sure about using any cellulose for all my dietary needs still. But farming is thought to be hard, but even without machinery it could be done much more easily than generally thought in our modern culture, and in other circumstances too, clearly. The Fukuoka method of natural farming would be much easier, I would try making use of having seedballs prepared for casting to the area where I want the plants from them to grow. There cannot be no work but I think living should not be such great work and effort to keep going. Having others in community should be for making things easier. But the way it has been it yet really isn't, still it could be, if with others this way.