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Banning and labeling cell-cultured meats take a political controversy to boiling point.
by John Klar
Iowa has become the latest state to signal hostility toward fake meat food products, imposing fines of up to $10,000 on manufacturers who mislabel protein-based products as meat. Other states, including Florida, have banned meat-simulating products outright rather than require labeling. Meats “cultured” from plant proteins in a laboratory are not available for sale on Americans’ grocery store shelves. Still, the growing culture wars over their future reveal much about the products themselves.
Advocates for restricting or labeling these nouveau meat substitutes argue that confusing labels deceive consumers, meat-copied products are unsafe to eat, and globalists seek to compel human dependency on alternatives to nature’s provision. Those opposing such restraints invoke free markets, consumer choice, and unfair favoritism for industrial agriculture as their rallying cries. These voices claim fake meat will save the world from existential climate doom, end animal suffering, and offer people healthier eating choices.
Food is now fair game in the culture war crossfire, especially manmade food versus “natural” food grown and processed traditionally. There is no evidence that cell-grown meats carry a cancer risk. There is, however, ample evidence that the three main drivers of fake meat consumption – animal welfare, human health, and ecological impact – are not served by processed meat alternatives. It also is increasingly evident that, despite billions of dollars in investment, fake meat cannot be grown at scale or cost-effectively, meaning the entire brouhaha over labeling and banning may prove to be a red herring dispute over products that will never actually exist.
Left-wing media has pounced on red-state bans and labeling initiatives of fake meat as culture war paranoia, often gushing about how these nouveau foodstuffs will stave off animal cruelty, rescue humanity from climate-destroying agriculture, and provide cheap, healthy food to the world’s poor. In the rush to distort science to advance political notions, such dreams are popular – just not scientific. Using animals for food is not cruel if they are slaughtered humanely after a life of conscientious husbandry. Advocates of plant-only diets call to eliminate all animals from the food chain because of the alleged abuses of industrialism, ignoring that millions of livestock enjoy balanced lives with no suffering, as has been the case for eons.
Similarly, cows and other animals rotationally grazed rather than confined in feedlots are not the destroyers of the ecosystem but its saviors. Cows on grass sequester more carbon dioxide and methane in the soil with their manure than they ever belch out, improving water retention and soil health in the bargain. Synthetic fertilizers used to grow plant-meat (or vegan) diets destroy soils and the microbiome. GMO crops dependent on glyphosate and fossil fuels for production and harvesting compromise human and ecosystem health.
Fake Meat Opponents Bashed
Nevertheless, the usual cow-bashing suspects have proliferated to criticize those who oppose fake meats as ill-informed, unenlightened attackers of consumer liberties (or, as one opinion claimed, “low-IQ red state denizens”). Popular Science unscientifically claimed that “Republican lawmakers opposed to cultivated meat, broadly, have attempted to connect the industry to a larger supposed culture war.”
There is most certainly a broader culture war at play, in which newfangled science partnered with venture capitalist profiteers seek to impose their products on unsuspecting consumers. Republicans are faulted for invoking a “culture war” over transgenderism, yet, like fake meat, that “supposed” conflict is a recoil against novel surgeries and hormones for children touted as lifesaving. So too are changes in America wrought by critical race theory and new vaccine technologies.
Vox characterizes challenges to fake meat as an unscientific attack against farmers by corporate profiteers:
“On the surface, bills aiming to ban cell-cultivated meat could be waved away as mere political theater, a ratcheting up of the culture war by attacking alternatives to factory-farmed meat as a cheap way to own the libs during an election year.
“But there’s something more troubling at play here. The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein.
“If lawmakers are really concerned with deceptive labeling, they may want to focus their efforts in the meat and dairy aisle, where consumers have long been misled by warm and fuzzy terms like ‘sustainable’ and ‘humanely raised,’ both of which have no legal definition.”
Vox is advocating for a multi-billion-dollar food processing industry hellbent on profiting from meat-simulating GMO plants as a cheap way to own the food supply. Pointing fingers at the “politically powerful agribusiness lobby” hardly excludes the fake meat industry: Many of the world’s largest meat producers and processors are also heavily invested in the fake meat market. GMO labeling requirements enable consumers to make informed purchasing decisions: Why should meat-buying be any different? If the terms “sustainable” and “humanely raised” are suspect, then what of the ubiquitous clamor over the warm and fuzzy term “renewable”?
Fake meat fantasies closely resemble renewable manufacturing boondoggles. That vague term conceals the simple truth that supposedly “renewable” products end up in landfills, generate massive quantities of chemical pollutants in their manufacture, are heavily subsidized, enjoy regulatory favoritism. GMO crops are favored with massive federal subsidies, then used to fabricate fake meat in huge vats in climate-controlled factories, polluting the planet far more than cows munching grass. And so Americans are quite right to scrutinize the claimed benefits, as well as implicit shortcomings, of meat imposters.
The fake meat debate will fade faddishly into the rearview mirror. Cultured meats cannot be produced at scale, cost-effectively, or without creating more environmental harm than benefit. They will not succeed in a free market any better than EVs, even if they do taste like that which they seek to copy. A ban of fake meats is unnecessary, but protecting buyers by clarifying what is in their foods is fundamentally just. Ensuring fake meat products are clearly labeled will sufficiently inform consumers to avoid them.
The author is a Brookfield best-selling author, lawyer, farmer and pastor.
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Categories: Agriculture, Commentary, National News, Science and Technology
For all of you that enjoy a great documentary. This is an excellent video about the entities behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution, ESG and the cultural revolution referenced in this article. I strongly recommend taking the time to watch this video about the destruction of shareholder capitalism and adoption of state capitalism or state communism (a communist political system equivalent to what exists in China today) or as the World Economic Forum calls it stakeholder capitalism. A new social, political and economic system, which will replace our current (capitalist) free market system. Please watch. Public school children are being brainwashed into the “S” (Social ) component through Social, Emotional and Learning, which is a a WEF, United Nations, Wold Bank and OECD initiative. This is the best documentary I have seen on this topic. It is absolutely eye opening.
https://x.com/YellowForum/status/1784218590901584280
I’ve said it time and time again: whether it’s the clot shot, chemtrails, fake food or Alphabet sexual propaganda it all boils down to a slow boiling genocide of the masses by the elite. But very few see it and very few will wake up.
For the left: Homosexuality is a cause for celebration, Communist China is a country to be venerated, aborting babies is empowering, and food that has been consumed since time immemorial is decimating the planet. Got it. (And those are but a few of their more rational ideologies).
I love my steak but I have to say to those Red State sallies, “why not let the free market decide?” If people don’t want to eat fake meat, then they won’t buy it. To ban it is Un-American and to assume that a customer can’t tell the difference is insulting. There is a niche market for “fake meat” just like N/A Beer, but its never going to be the real thing
Chris, I appreciate your perspective, but the free market system is being crushed by stakeholder capitalism, which is modeled after China’s political system. Corporations and people will ultimately have no choice because like China the decision will be made for both entities by the government.
Christine, that’s not true at all, its just babble. You (and you especially) constantly hold this false dichotomy in your head. Is our government, led by Sleepy Joe, feeble and incompetent like I’ve read you write before. Or, are they omnipotent and all powerful, creating the New World Order? You have to pick one.
What does that even mean, corporations will have no choice? Are you talking about regulations? Sleepy Joe is going to make people and corporations do his bidding? Make it make sense.
Chris, my caims are true and there is extensive documentation. The documentary link I included shared many documents. I work in government contracting and the acquisitions put out by the federal government include compliance with ESG or Environmental, Social and Governmence. This includes DEI requirements that require companies to hire people based on race and gender identity, not skill, as the acquisition as a percentage specified. Large companies that win these contracts are required to monitor small companies compliance with ESG requirements. Other proposals I read require compliance with UNSPC codes, a United Nations standard for billing. Federal proposals require contractors to to comply with carbon reduction goals set by the Paris Accord, as does the state of Vermont. Our governor is a member of the US Climate Alliance, which is committed to implementing the Paris Accord and Equity. All of our educational programs are developed in collaboration with the UNESCO, another United nations agency. My child went through the school system and this is not told to parents. These programs include Common Core; Social, Emotional and Learning; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; as well as Equity statements and policies and gender identity. Our state equity director is featured on an Abundant Sun Utube video discussing implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda. Abundant Sun is a United Nation stakeholder and NGO.
May 24, 2022: “Kim Kardashian added a new title to her resume: Chief Taste Consultant at Beyond Meat. Kardashian joined the vegan meat brand because she is both a fan of its products and its world-changing mission. As part of her role, Kardashian will lend her taste-making expertise and participate in Beyond Meat creative content to help the brand advance its mission of changing the broken global food system for the better. ”
If plastic vegan people like Kim say it’s all good while pumping chemicals and surgical enhancements into her face, chest, and rearend, we should all be good with that endorsement! The climate change celebrities are the most knowledgable afterall.
What is carmine? “Carmine: Crushed insects — Red dye is used in everything from baked goods to drinks, and if it’s the Carmine variety — also called cochineal — it’s made of bugs. This type of dye is made from crushed cochineal beetles. Starbucks used the red dye in some of its drinks, but declared early last year (2012) that it would no longer use it.
Funny thing about ingredients, if you look up what they actually are, where they actually come from…many would mortified….Carry on!
Chris,
I agree that banning a product is not productive. The consumer can decide.
The problem appears to be twofold. First lab grown food is being labeled as meat. That is dishonest. Also because the consumer has not taken to these products as well as expected, the companies that produce them are pushing to adulterate natural meat products with some element of their own.
Label it correctly and ensure it is not added to natural food products. If that is guaranteed, then let the customer decide.
Chris, the banning of fake meat is a _response_ to the constant assault by WEF types to ban real meat. The ridiculous assertion that cows fart too much methane, which is causing global warming, (while the ruminant population in N.America was much greater during the last Ice Age,) is laughable. And yet country after country has been trying to force mass culling of cattle in the name of climate hysteria. You probably haven’t even noticed months of massive farmer protests all across Europe over it, because the media is complicit and hasn’t covered it. The truth is that communists love to starve & malnourish people, because food is control, and industrialized fake meat is just more of the same.
To Christine and Chris
You can both be right. Our politicians are frontmen for a bureaucratic state that regulates almost every aspect of our lives.
If you want to see how the monied classes managed to manufacture consent to all of this, check out the BBC documentary “the Century of Self”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
They weaponized pyychology to create a perfect synthesis between “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984”.
what percent of the public made the right choice when told to take the covid kill shot///// nothing to see here folks, just move on/////