Guest essay by Eric Worrall
If Silicon Valley green tech giants have their way, real meat will become an unaffordable carbon taxed luxury item eaten by the very rich. The rest of us will have to eat “meatless meat” – meat flavoured mashed vegetables and lab grown tissue cultures.
Silicon Valley and the Search for Meatless Meat
By BETH KOWITT
December 19, 2017
In August one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups closed a $17 million round of funding. The Series A had attracted some of the biggest names in tech. “I got closed out because of Richard Branson and Bill Gates,” bemoaned Jody Rasch, the managing trustee of an angel fund that wasn’t able to buy in. Venture capital firm DFJ—which has backed the likes of Tesla and SpaceX—led the round, with one of its then-partners calling the nascent company’s work an “enormous technological shift.”
The cutting-edge product the startup was trying to develop? Meat—the food whose more than $200 billion in U.S. sales has come to be the defining element of the Western diet. But what made this company’s work so revolutionary was not what it was trying to make so much as how it was attempting to do it. Memphis Meats, the brainchild that had the startup-investor class salivating, was aiming to remove animals from the process of meat production altogether.
It’s the type of world-saving vision that has oft captured the imagination of Silicon Valley—the kind of entrenched problem that technologists believe only technology can solve: feeding a fast-growing, protein-hungry global population in a way that doesn’t blow up the planet. Conjuring up meat without livestock—whose emissions are responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gases—is core to that effort. Just listen to how the progenitor of Googleyness itself describes the prospect of animal-free meat: “It has the capability to transform how we view our world,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin has said. “I like to look at technology opportunities where the technology seems like it’s on the cusp of viability, and if it succeeds there, it can be really transformative.”
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As a sign of the market’s potential, alternative meat producers point to the explosive growth plant-based milk has made in the dairy aisle, now capturing almost 10% of U.S. retail sales by volume. “I want to be able to say you don’t have to make a choice in what you’re eating,” Memphis CEO and cofounder Uma Valeti says, “but you can make a choice on the process of how it goes to the table.”
Hoping to make that choice easier, the new agripreneurs are tackling semantics first—redefining what “meat” means. Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown says he’d like to get people to think about meat “in terms of its composition” rather than its origin. The reframing isn’t just an epistemological one, but also a scientific one, reducing meat to its molecules.
That won’t be an easy sell, and the movement has its detractors—some of whom seem miffed by the notion that anyone would try to mess with Mother Nature. “They want to make up their own dictionary version of what meat is, and these are people who do not eat meat,” says Suzanne Strassburger, whose family has been in the meat business for more than 150 years. “The real question is, are they feeding people or are they feeding egos.”
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Read more: http://fortune.com/2017/12/19/silicon-valley-meatless-meat/
There will be a market for this product. While I understand some people drink soy milk because of allergies or cost, many of those 10% of people who drink Soy milk do so for idealogical reasons – they also try to avoid other cattle products, buying veggie burgers and suchlike, and will likely be ready in many cases to buy lab grown cultured meat (guaranteed cruelty free).
For people who genuinely can’t afford meat at current prices, a cheap substitute which helped them and their children get the protein they require wouldn’t be a bad thing – though cutting red tape to help reduce the cost of real meat would likely achieve the same goal.
I doubt most of the remaining 90% of us would willingly embrace highly processed artificial meat tasting substitutes when we can buy the real thing.
Discouraging ordinary people from buying real meat will have to be a business goal of these high tech entrepreneurs. No doubt they would justify such efforts in terms of saving the planet from climate change.
It is easy to see how discouraging real meat consumption could happen – advertisements flooding the airwaves with messages emphasising the “cruelty” of cattle farming, adding Vegan messages to elementary school lessons, imposing carbon taxes and animal welfare regulations to make cattle farming impossibly expensive, lots of donated cash for politicians who pass laws which favour well funded artificial meat producers. Though I suspect real meat would still be available at climate conferences and UN events, at least for important attendees.
Coming soon to a supermarket shelf near you.
Removing the subsidies the meat industry receives from taxpayers would make meat several times more expensive than it already is. That may help their cause as well, dumbass
Screw these people and their global warming/climate change BS…
I suggest that animal welfare issues have a lot more to do with why people choose not to eat meat than any desire to ‘save the planet’.
The Guardian newspaper (UK) in August 2016 reported as follows:
There were more than 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations over the past two years at British slaughterhouses, according to data released by the government’s food watchdog under freedom of information laws.
The data, comprising reports by vets and hygiene inspectors, details instances of needless pain and distress that include chickens being boiled alive and trucks of animals suffocating or freezing to death.
The log of reports submitted to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) reveals how regular breakdowns on production lines, equipment failures and poor procedures in abattoirs result in thousands of animals being subjected to avoidable suffering each year. Many individual acts of cruelty and neglect by slaughterhouse staff, hauliers and farmers are also documented, alongside malpractice that increases the risk of food poisoning.
The FSA said however that “only a tiny percentage” of animals that pass through Britain’s slaughterhouses are affected, adding that “the vast majority of meat processors comply with regulations”.
Meat inspectors and campaigners argue that there is an under-reporting of welfare abuses, blaming insufficient staff and the often intimidating working conditions at abattoirs.
Vets and meat hygiene inspectors working for the FSA inside abattoirs reported a total of 9,511 animal welfare breaches between July 2014 and June 2016, with records classified into three categories according to severity. Category 2 refers to a low-risk isolated incident, while category 4, the most serious, means animals were subjected to “avoidable pain, distress or suffering”.
Analysis reveals almost half the recorded incidents were category 4 breaches – a total of 4,455, or an average of six a day. A single breach can involve hundreds of animals. Between April 2011 and July 2014 there were 6,859 reported incidents in all categories.
Failures in the slaughter process were also highlighted, with thousands of instances of animals not being stunned properly and in some cases not stunned at all. Inspectors recorded cases of chickens and pigs being immersed in tanks of scalding hot water – used to soften the skin and remove hair or feathers – while still alive.
Almost 600 instances were recorded of animals arriving at slaughterhouses already dead. In one case 574 chickens, from a load of 6,072 birds, died after being left on a lorry in very hot conditions. This counts as one welfare breach despite involving hundreds of birds.
The data also highlights practices that could facilitate the spread of the bacteria campylobacter, the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK. About four in five cases of the infection, which kills about 100 people a year, come from contaminated poultry.
Ensuring birds are as calm as possible when they are being caught and transported is an important preventative measure, because stressed birds defecate more, potentially spreading the infection and increasing the risk of meat contamination. However, the data includes regular instances of chickens being “overstocked” in crates and incidents of birds being left in lorries for lengthy periods of time. In one case, because of a breakdown at the plant, 14 trucks were left overnight for more than 12 hours; in another, birds were left in crates at the abattoir for 20 hours.
The British Meat Processors Association, the industry trade body, declined to comment on the findings.
More than 900 million farm animals are killed for food each year in Britain. There are 317 approved slaughterhouses across the UK, most run by a handful of large companies that dominate the meat processing sector.
Between June 2014 and July 2016, the spokesperson said, all category 4 breaches resulted in enforcement action. In2013 an d 2014 the FSA referred 14 breaches of welfare regulations to the CPS, of which four resulted in prosecutions. Three of those prosecutions were later dropped.
Of the remaining cases, four resulted in warning letters. Over the course of the two years, two slaughterers’ licences were suspended and three were revoked for failure to comply with welfare legislation.
The fact that serious welfare breaches were the exception not the norm was not the point, said Marc Cooper, head of farm animals at the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).
“Such incidences of severe pain, distress and suffering are wholly unacceptable and completely avoidable,” he said. “If they’re avoidable, that means they shouldn’t be happening at all – you shouldn’t be seeing one. You would hope that strong enforcement action would be taken.”
Halal and schechita are methods of slaughter allowed on religious grounds. A sanitised website description of shechita describes what happens:
“Shechita is performed by a highly trained shochet. The procedure consists of a rapid and expert transverse incision with an instrument of surgical sharpness (a chalaf), which severs the major structures and vessels at the neck. This causes an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain and immediately results in the irreversible cessation of consciousness. Thus, shechita renders the animal insensible to pain, dispatches and exanguinates in a swift action, and fulfils all the requirements of humaneness and compassion.”
A scientific examination of the process clearly demonstrates that this is not the case, as research at the University of Bristol (UK) found in 1992. In addition to the carotid arteries, extra ones run through the neck bones to supply blood to the brain. These are not cut during religious slaughter. Blood flow increases over four-fold in these arteries during religious slaughter, and brain activity can persist in a calf for over one and a half minutes after its throat has been cut. It has also been shown that most sheep can take almost half a minute to lose brain responsiveness.
In the words of an article I read written by a vet: “The only humane method of slaughtering an animal is to render it unconscious by electrical or mechanical stunning, followed by immediate bleeding out. Inflicting a fatal wound on a conscious animal that may choke on its own blood for half a minute is cruel.”
I once had a conversation with a slaughterman who’d been accidentally stunned by the electrical equipment at the abbatoir where he worked. He described how ‘everything turned blue’, and how he’d been revived in a nearby room. Clearly proper stunning is effective.
I understand that pre-stunning is becoming a matter of discussion among member of the Muslim faith, and is now allowable. Halal meat which has been produced from animals thus slaughtered is available.
Important farm animal welfare issues have been hugely neglected within the EU. Environment Secretary Michael Gove, in his 2017 Conservative Party conference speech, opined that outside the Union’s single market, we can introduce more humane methods of farming, including the restriction of live export of animals. The RSPCA tells us that every year millions of calves, pigs, horses, goats, sheep and chickens are transported all over Europe for further fattening and slaughter, the journey often taking days. Not surprisingly, many suffer from stress, exhaustion, thirst and rough handling. Animals are loaded onto trucks, and are often on the road for many hours before being crammed onto a ferry, some as young as two weeks old being forced to endure this gruelling journey before meeting their fate across the Channel in conditions illegal in Britain. Effective enforcement of live transport laws has over the years been lacking in many EU member states. Checks carried out by the European Commission’s own inspection body, the Food and Veterinary Office, as well as livestock journeys followed by RSPCA staff, have shown that the authorities in a number of countries are failing to enforce the rules effectively, leading to unnecessary suffering. Let us hope that with Brexit this inexcusable and ugly aspect of EU membership will soon be in the past, as the UK will no longer be bound by its rules.
Hopefully this has clarified why some people become vegetarians!
Let them eat (insect) cake in the districts. They are mostly disloyal anyway and rarely meet their quota. Give them opioids in their insurance coverage to make them happy.
This is the most ridicules topic a I have ever seen. Thank GOD these idiots lost their grip at the last election. Time to grow up and stop following the evil Rex Mundi, new world order foolishness.
If God wanted everyone to be vegetarians He would’ve given everyone 32 molars.
I hate to echo that leftard blowhard More MikeWhale, but this is another case that warrants his assertion: Eat The Rich,
Maybe this insanity should be better called Soilent Green
If my cats eat it, I’d be willing to give it a try.
As a Ruminant Nutritionist and Dairy Farmer, You should know a few things about animal agriculture.
First is that Animal agriculture, particularly Cattle are the biggest recyclers in the US. The majority of feed I feed to my cattle is waste from another industry. Examples include: Distillers Grains and Distillation Syrup from distilling liquor, and making ethanol. Distillers Grains, Barley Screenings, Malt Sprouts and Reject Barley from Beer Brewing. Cotton Seed and Gin Trash left over from cotton production. Cotton Seed Meal, Soy Bean Meal, Canola Meal, Safflower Meal, Linseed Meal, Palm Kernel Meal and Copra Meal from various oil production processes. Corn Gluten Meal, Corn Germ Meal and Hominy are left over in making High Fructose Corn Syrup and other milled corn products. Beet Pulp and Molasses produced from sugar production. Wheat Millrun/Mids/Shorts, Wheat Bran, Wheat Screenings, Rejected Wheat Flour and Wheat Grain, and Straw from the production of Flour. Rice bran, Rice Flour and Rejected Rice. We also feed Fat that is a byproduct of cosmetic production, Acid Whey from making cheese, and Feather Meal from poultry producers. Rejected Human Food is recycled by animals; I’ve seen Ramen, Doritos, Fruit-loops, Bread, Twinkies, Cheetos, Chocolate and Candy feed to animals (and they love it by the way…). Tomato Pulp from Ketchup, Carrot Pulp from making those little baby carrots. Grape Pumice, Apple Pumice, Citrus Pulp, from Juice and Wine Making. Rejected Potatoes, Potato Waste, Potato Pulp, Rejected French Fries from various potato products. Rejected Fruit and Vegetables, and Almond Hulls help make California the largest dairy state in the United States. Fact is these products would end up in landfills if they weren’t fed to animals. All of these things are high quality feeds.
The second thing that is important to note is the Amino Acid composition of plants is very poor. The stomach of Ruminants (Cattle, Sheep, ect.) is made of 4 compartments. The largest Compartment the Rumen is a fermentation chamber where bacteria grow on the animals feed. The Bacteria grown in the Rumen comprise fully 75% of the amino acids digested by cattle and have the amino acid composition similar to steak. This means that Ruminants can thrive on low quality protein that makes humans like North Koreans skin and bones.
Creating lab grown meat and milk while possible, will be environmentally unfriendly and require production of large amounts of High Quality Plant, Algae, Bacteria, or Yeast Protein refining these proteins to amino acids and sterilizing them to feed the sterile cell cultures. While it is possible, the God of Nature has given us the gift of Animals to do the Recycling and feed us High Quality Food.
As a side my Business is nonstop, smelly, messy and sometimes dangerous. I do it because I love dairy. I know milk and meat is the highest quality food we can make, and we do it at low cost to the consumer. When Feed is all processed by the cow our manure is recycled in a digester to produce electricity and what remains is turned into compost. We strive for scientific Improvement and making more milk with less resources to the benefit of humanity.
This is the usual ignorant self-blaming measure against global warming, carbon dioxide production, etc. The Third World countries are just as responsible for global warming as we are. Recent studies have shown that they are raising far more animals for meat than they did a few years ago. Eighty percent of the people in the world live in third world countries. They are likely to use open fires to cook and heat their homes and they continually engage in deforestation for fuel. They are not likely to have emission controls on their cars, etc. etc. Thousands of people in third world countries die of smoke inhalation or asphyxiation every year from household fires, just to give you an idea of how much they contribute to atmospheric carbon and global warming.
But just eat your fake meat and trade your Cadillac in for a Tesla, because global warming is a First World problem, right? I’m not saying that doing something, however small, can’t help, but we’ve got to get over the idea that we created global warming all by ourselves, and it’s up to us to fix it. Sure, it might make you feel good to eat your soy. If so, you are not reasoning but having an emotional reaction. The same emotional reaction is responsible for the idea that it is you-know-what if we try to place any of the blame for global warming on people in third-world countries.
What a bunch of crapola. Meat won’t be going anywhere at least for the next 7 years. We have a real leader in the whitehouse who can recognize a scam and put a stop to the greenie environmental wacko garbage that the previous clueless president put into effect.
This is why so many nations are in debt. Instead of growing things naturally, they hire a bunch of veterinarians to construct the frankenbeast.
Global warming (aka climate change) is the religion of the stupid.
Sheep, lemmings, and Leftists are easily manipulated.
zazzle.com/firstprinciples?rf=238518351914519699
“Livestock-whose emissions are responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gases”.
I thought that 94% of the greenhouse gases is water vapor.
Yes, and animals emit water vapor. Especially when you cook them — meat is esteamed as a delicacy.
I’m for eating eco-loons. Puts a whole new slant on ‘eating your greens’.
Apologies if someone already did the gag – didn’t have time to read all comments.
Tofui.
Soylent green and the “population Bomb” were put out when llefties were pushing for universal abortion.. Then they switched to “NUCLEAR WINTER” to stop the modernization of the US Nuclear arsenal. Then global warming. THIS ALL IGNORES THE FACT THAT THE NATURAL CARBON CYCLE DWARFS HUMAN CAUSES BY A MILLION FOLD.
All just more propaganda to achieve leftie dictatorship.
I like Soylent Green…I mean it’s better than Soylent Yellow by far…
A perfect tasting burger every time that is cheaper, uses 80% less energy / water, and no cow has to die?
Where do I sign up?!
(just as long as a burger still taste like a burger… I am after all a carnivore first and liberal second)
So to the “science-based” community, McDonald’s processed meat = bad, Silicon Valley processed meat = good. Global warming = real, GMO food = horrible. Doesn’t this hurt, when it happens?
Silicon Valley needs to be heated up to 90 million degrees
We’ll find out when the next Obama-style over reach President comes along with the next advocacy hit list on the masses.
Someone has been watching ‘Soylent Green’ on Netflix.
Nice try… But no cigar.
Typical “brilliant” liberal idea.
If it’s made out of ground Zuckerberg, it might go over as dog food.