For a team of Johns Hopkins researchers, the challenge of feeding people during times of crisis or conflict is an opportunity to dramatically reinvent how food is made: out of almost nothing.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is home to one of four teams selected for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Cornucopia program, attempting to unlock the potential to produce nutritionally complete, palatable foods in the field. The group is using electricity to capture water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and trace minerals from the air and then producing a rich, glucose-based material (called feedstock) on which to grow microbial food products.