EDMONTON — The Alberta government announced Wednesday it will commit $375 million over three years to a program that converts the province's hydrocarbons directly into food, an initiative Premier Danielle Smith described as "finally closing the loop between what we pull out of the ground and what we put on the table."

The program, branded Oil-to-Table, will fund pilot facilities that process refined petroleum byproducts into a protein substrate the province says is "indistinguishable from food in most of the ways that matter."

"For too long we've shipped our raw product somewhere else so somebody else can add the value and sell it back to us," Smith said at an announcement held at a Sherwood Park petrochemical facility. "We're done apologizing for our resources. Albertans should be able to eat them."

Officials were keen to stress the science. "It's got hydrocarbons," said a spokesperson for Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation, gesturing to a tray of beige cubes. "It's what plants crave. It's what people crave too, once we explain it to them properly."

Pressed on whether the product was safe, nutritious, or food, the ministry said all three questions were "still in the modelling stage," but that any federal review was exactly the sort of red tape the province intended to ignore. A briefing document described the substrate as "energy-dense," a phrase it used four times and never qualified.

The Premier framed the spending as a first-mover advantage in a sector she called "petro-nutrition," which she said does not currently exist, owing to Ottawa. The first cubes are expected to reach a controlled group of taste-testers in 2027, "or whenever the people who understand it are done explaining it to the people who don't."

The Premier's office did not respond to a question about what the cubes are called.