Frankenstein food awash with toxins that affect pregnancy.
Earlier this year, the Grocery Gazette reported that the UK was set to be a "world-leading developer of lab-grown meat", even though there has been little or no consumer call for it. The Guardian 's climate hysteric George Monbiot claimed lab-grown food “will soon destroy farming – and save the planet” whilst Bill Gates is investing millions of dollars into R&D and manufacturing of meat grown in a lab.
But what Gates and others have not mentioned is the huge environmental costs and sheer toxicity of 'meat' grown in a lab. Lab-grown meat is up to 25 times worse for the environment than real meat according to latests findings. Whilst it needs ‘pharmaceutical-grade’ production to make it even passably fit for human consumption.
In particular, there is a need to remove endotoxin from this cultured mix, a substance that in concentrations as low as one billionth of a gram per millilitre can seriously affect pregnancies. Studies found that it reduces human IVF pregnancy success rate by up to four fold even in microscopic doses.
These are the startling conclusions of ground-breaking work recently published by a group of chemists and food scientists from the University of California. It turns out that ‘pharma to food’ production is a significant technological challenge. The major problem with lab meat is that it uses growth organisms that have to be highly purified to help animal cells multiply. Compared with environmental savings on land, water and greenhouses gases, the whole bio-process is noted to be “orders of magnitude” higher than rearing the actual animal.
The report authors state: “Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said co-author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. The study found that even across scenarios using lower pharma standards, efficient beef production outperforms cultured meat within a range from four to 25 times. This suggests that investment to advance more ‘climate-friendly’ beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions.
The authors in California acknowledge that lab-grown meat ventures have attracted around $2 billion of investment to date. Early reports on feasibility were bullish with some predicting a 60-70% displacement of beef by 2030-2040. As noted, the huge problem in producing lab meat is the presence of endotoxin which is said have a variety of side effects including harm to in vitro fertilisation. In pharmaceutical labs, animal cell culture is traditional done with endotoxin having been removed. There are many ways to remove the unwanted substance, but the use of these refinement methods “contributes significantly to the economic and environmental costs associated with pharmaceutical products since they are both energy and resource intensive”.
The much-touted Frankenstein food is, despite all this, still being pushed ahead with. Bill Gates has stated that all western countries should transition to [his] synthetic meat by 2030. health and environmental issues be damned.
It uses 25 times more resources than real meat to produce, and unlike the thing it's trying to mimic, is unnatural, literally just a glob of chemicals, and there is no long term data on exactly what it will do to the human body. It isn't even clear exactly why it's being manufactured at all, as it certainly won't save the planet, and isn't even remotely healthy.