Transcription
All right. Lab grown meat is supposed to save the planet. It's supposed to prevent cruelty to animals. It's supposed to be so much more efficient, so much more environmentally friendly. But what is the real story here?
All right. So, billions of dollars have been pumped into this product uh through various companies, through various investments. Most of it coming out of Silicon Valleys. There's been some government money that has that has gone into this. Several companies have now uh sort of adopted this. A farms, mosa meets, and some other ones.
And the reality is lab grown meat will never truly be meat as the meat we know it. It is a blend of animal cells have been cloned uh that are mixed with other ingredients to try to give it the texture that you might be used to. Uh there are a lot of problems with the production which you know don't make it necessarily better for the environment or healthier for us and it's something we should discuss.
First of all the environmental claims. This is going to require less input, less resources. it's going to be the more environmentally friendly option than raising animals as we have done for, you know, countless numbers of centuries. Now, the reality is that claim has never ever been proven. In fact, uh the most recent study looking at this or one of the most recent studies looking at this showed that the energy inputs, the resource inputs for uh producing lab grown meat can exceed conventional meat production by 25 times. it's 25 times more expensive uh to do so. So that claim first of all is completely fabricated. Anybody who says this is the way to go because it's going to save the planet from climate change or whatever it might be is totally talking nonsense.
The other thing is that, you know, we we are now finding out that these cows as they're being raised actually support the environment as they have done for again countless centuries. Grazing animals on Earth, out in fields, out in pastures is basically what nature is. And this lab grown meat is nowhere near that. It's a complete abomination of that.
Let's take a moment to talk about some of the inputs. Now, a lot of people think, well, we have cells in a in a dish and they they they'll grow and grow and grow infinitely until we can feed, you know, everyone on the planet all this, you know, meat from from a big vat. Um, the reality is is all of those cells that are rapidly dividing and rapidly growing are using an enormous amount of food. I mean, you have to feed these things. It's like anybody that's ever worked in a lab knows you have to provide a medium, a growth medium which includes nutrients in order for cells to grow. And the question is where do those nutrients come from? Well, by and large those nutrients are going to come from standard monocrop agricultural products. That is to say, the protein they're going to get is become is going to be coming from soybeans, peas. Sugars they get are going to be coming from likewise sugar beets or sugarcane or something along those lines, you know, corn syrup.
When we're talking about environmental friendliness or even ethics on animal agriculture, we have to realize that in order to produce these giant monocrops, you basically have to drop a nuclear bomb basically you know figuratively on the soil on the land in order to raise that crop. So every single animal that lived there is no longer there. every single insect that lived there is no longer there and that is supported by pesticides and herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, everything you think that just kill everything. And if you don't understand the scale of this in the United States, you know, we spray on something like four or five billion tons of pesticides a year. And the impact of that on the land is is enormous. You know, not to mention the runoff that occurs. We're killing not billions, not trillions, but quadrillions of insects every year in the United States. And all the birds and all the other animals that depend upon that are completely destroyed in order to support that system. And so a better solution obviously is to get animals on pasture and and spend the majority of their time like they already do. Many of them go to a feed lot to finish out, but the majority of them are spending most of their life on pasture, restoring the land, putting carbon back in the soil, encouraging the nature to to do what it's done for, you know, many many, you know, eons of time.
You know, you put a a pile of cells glopp together, it's going to come out like a, you know, like jell-o, and nobody wants to eat that. So, in order to mimic the texture of meat, what they do is they put some sort of scaffolding for the cells to grow onto. And that scaffolding is not made out of meat. It's either made out of cellulose coming from things like apples or mcelium coming from mushrooms or things like that. So, it is basically a plant-based meat hybrid is what you're getting there, which is kind of like, you know, going to the supermarket and buying ground beef mixed with soy protein. I mean, it's it's not what you want, basically. So, we're automatically, you know, turning this into a plant-based meat-based product or cell-based product.
Remember the cells are these immortal cells that that reproduce over and over and over again with all the problems that potentially go with that. You know, we know that like for instance, there are immortal cell lines of cancer cells that have been around since the 19, you know, 60s or something like that. So, we have to ask ourselves what's actually in the product and is it actually what meat is? And again, they're cloning one single cell. Remember uh the cells that go into meat are millions and millions of different cells of different types not just muscle cells but uh connective tissue cells neurovvascular cells you know uh fibroblast and so on and so forth. So we're getting a very different mixture from what we actually consume when we consume meat.
Okay. Third problem uh you know unlike a cow cow is basically solar powered. It's self-replicating. It eats grass and and drinks rain water for the most part. nature designed process that's been working very well for you know countless you know millions and millions of years essentially and these uh you know cells you know can't thermmorreulate themselves, you know, so they have to be maintained at the exact temperature for the duration of their uh production and that that is not, you know, autoregulated. This has to be uh this is utilized using air conditioning units, heating units, also you got to deal with all the waste products that are coming in there and again that costs a lot of money and energy. So this is an issue there.
The other thing that is interesting is that the cells themselves also don't have an immune system. And so early on in the process, you know, a lot of times they're giving antibiotics, antifungals, antiviruses or whatever it might be to protect those cells during the transfers. And then after that, they're giving often something called a antimicrobial peptide, which is mixed into the mixture. Again, the claim is it's generally recognized as safe, but there are a lot of things out there that have been stated to be generally recognized as safe, and it turned out not to be so. So, we don't really have any long-term data on that and how it affects human beings. So, again, we've got these mystery products that are in there.
The primary component is a muscle cell, right? We're turning that into steak. But the other part of a steak or or meat in general that makes it makes it desirable for many of us is the fat. And so, the fat is something that in many ways they have to add in later. And what we will often see is these people will design it or engineer it to be low in saturated fat or they'll alter the types of fat or they've even looked into using novel fats, you know, 23 24 25 carbon chain fats that aren't part of the human diet. They're using that because of supposed enhanced stability. So they're basically making a new product. This isn't meat like we know it. It has one component, some of the muscle cells which have been, you know, replicated, you know, perhaps thousands of times, which again could be very problematic. It has plant compounds, you know, for for for a uh a scaffolding and then it also has these fats which we don't know what they're going to do. Also, it has, you know, media components which we don't know how they're not going to react long term. Also, the fact that it is wildly expensive uh relative to regular production, not only dollar-wise, but also in environmental cost inputs and so on and so forth. So this is just supporting more of the factory-derived industrial model which we so many of us are trying to get away from.
It will not save the planet. You know we saw uh a decided reluctance to accept highly processed, you know, meat substitutes, i.e. things like beyond meat that largely people rejected that wildly. The same thing will likely happen with these cloned, highly industrialized cellular uh abomination type meats that are lab grown meats. You know, we're going to see the same reluctance uh from people to consume it. The better answer is to shore up our animal agriculture system, make it as good as we possibly can, make it efficient, make it, you know, continue to improve on the the environmental impacts by adopting better grazing techniques and so on and so forth.
Let me know what you think about that. Are you going to be the one that's going to be eating uh lab grown meat? Uh I for one, I'm not going to be the guinea pig for that and I don't think I ever will.