If veggie burgers, frankenfish, and G.M. vegetables weren’t bad enough, environmentalist are now clamoring for Fake Meat.
Why would anyone need to create fake meat?
Environmentalists, PETA, and the United Nations believe it is the only way to feed the worlds since all those real cow farts are going to eliminate mankind. We are, after all, destroying the planet by our desire for animal products like fried chicken and gravy, rib-eye steaks, wild salmon, sausage and biscuits, etc. Okay, biscuits and gravy aren’t destroying the planet, just our waist line. But I grew up in the South and gravy and biscuits are a staple.
Companies like Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats, and Beyond Meat are using science lab and farms, rather than animal meat, to create products that they hope will rival traditional staples such as burgers, hot dogs, chicken and pork in an effort to “save the planet” from cow farts.
Lab created meat, aka “clean” meat, is relatively new technology that has only been solidified in the last five years of so. While the process is complex and expensive, researchers have found ways of coaxing harvested meat cells into dividing and growing in a lab. Doesn’t that make your taste buds tingle?
In the fall of 2016, Memphis Meats spent around 3 weeks in the lab to create a single cultured meatball that cost $18,000 a pound. So much for that fake meatball sub! A sort of pinkish ground meat was produced in Maastricht University lab by a vascular biologist and surgeon that consisted of billions of cells cultured from skeletal muscle cells taken from one beef neck which were “nourished” in a warm broth of synthetic nutrients and cow-fetus serum to get the cells to grow into myotubes, the building block of muscle fiber. By reducing the serum in the broth, the lab was able to get the cells to fuse. Then they were suspended in a gel surrounding a central column (Velcro) that allowed them to align and form muscle fibers. Sounds delicious doesn’t it?
Beyond Meat’s fake “clean” meat is built on work conducted on pea proteins at the University of Missouri, with the addition of a wee bit of beet juice just to create that “bleeding” effect. Impossible Foods, founded by biologist Patrick Brown, is attempting to unlock the power of heme, a component of animal blood, in his burgers that are made from things like wheat protein, soy protein, coconut oil, potato protein, etc.
Beyond Meat is also working on plant-based fake meat. Quorn, the leading brand for fake meat produces its alternative in a 50 meter high tower that produces a high protein, high fiber fungus related to the mushroom family with a structure similar to that of animal muscle cells. The fungus is mixed with binders, flavoring, etc. and then formed into desired shape and heated which causes it to coalesce.
Many fake meat products are formed from a combo of wheat and soy. Soy, by the way, is one of the largest genetically modified crops in the U.S. Once the texture is sufficiently “meatish,” (bet you never though that would be a word) it is seasoned and flavored to hide the lack of taste and ran through an extruder that shapes it into something that resembles a meat product.
Since this seems to be the wave of the future, who is going to oversee the production of such a disgusting product and will it be labeled fake when it hits the grocery store isle?
Right now the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture are fighting over the honor of overseeing this new product. Environmentalist would prefer the FDA since they are very lax at overseeing big Pharmaceutical companies, Monsanto and Bayer. What better way to dump fake meat products on the consumer?
These “sustainable” fake meat folks are afraid that the USDA might actually stand up for ranchers, and farmers and force them to comply with realistic measures such as marketing their pretend meat products as “fake” and educating the public about how they were created. They believe that the USDA is part of the problem in not shutting down the pork, beef and poultry industries because of its “in-humaneness.” Too bad they don’t the same compassion for unborn babies!
Fake Meat Research is funded by environmentalist such as Bill Gates, and organizations such as the Friends of the Earth, and is being pushed as a “sustainable organic food” as opposed to “venture capitalist hype” which would lead us down the wrong path of eating as God intended. Can anyone say Agenda 2030?
As it stands now, the FDA, which has little or no understanding of agriculture, seems to be ahead but that could change. In June of last year, the White House released a new government reorganization plan which suggested that all food safety functions be housed in a single agency within the USDA.
Come on people, it’s not rocket science – animals are meat – plants aren’t.
Source: The fight Against “Fake Meat” has Officially Begun, CNBC; Clean Meat vs. Plant-Based Meat: What you Need to Know About Sustainable Burgers, Food and Wine; The Truth About the Battle to Regulate Fake Meat, by A.G. Nook
