Manufacturers of lab-grown meat want you to think it’s the same as normal meat, but it isn’t
Lab-grown meat is back in the headlines this week, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signing into law a bill that makes it illegal to sell or produce lab-grown meat in his state. Three other states are mooting similar laws. So what’s the big deal with this “food of the future”? Here’s everything you need to know.
Of all the so-called “alternative proteins” or “foods of the future”, it’s lab-grown meat that seems to invite the most visceral reaction of disgust. Sure, “plant-based meat” doesn’t sound particularly appetising, but it’s made from things that are ubiquitous in today’s food chain—plant protein like soy and plant oils like canola, mainly—with some extra ingredients, including, in the case of Impossible’s flagship “ground meat”, a genetically modified soy product called “heme” which makes the burger “bleed” when it’s bitten into. Many people’s first reaction to “plant-based meat” is still just to say, “Plant-based meat!? How can you make meat from a plant?” (The answer, of course, is that you need an animal to do that. Anyway.)
Insects may be disgusting, but at least they’re natural. At least you actually find bugs out there, in the real world, even if the bugs our globalist overlords want us to eat will be bred in enormous factory farms, such as the facility under construction by French firm Ynsect in the Midwest, rather than gathered from under rocks and logs by schoolkids.
Lab-grown meat, by contrast, is not a natural product. It isn’t meat as you or I know it. Of course, its manufacturers want you to believe it is—but they’re lying, and with good reason.
While it’s true that lab-grown meat, unlike “plant-based meat”, actually is made with real animal cells, it’s generally made with a type of animal cell—so-called “immortalised cell lines”—that human beings, and all animals in fact, have absolutely no history of consuming. Ever.
In basic terms, the difference between normal animal cells and immortalised cells is that normal cells have a finite life, whereas immortalised cells, as the name suggests, just go on and on replicating, potentially forever, so long as they continue to be kept under the right conditions (the right temperature, adequate food, sufficient removal of waste products, etc.). In this respect, immortalised cells, and lab-grown meat, are functionally indistinguishable from cancer.
This has been a source of huge embarrassment for makers of lab-grown meat like Upside and GOOD Meat, both of which have now served lab-grown meat to the paying public in the US, after receiving FDA and USDA approval to do so. A Bloomberg piece on the subject reported that these companies flat out refuse to discuss the use of immortalised cell lines with the press, which is a tacit admission of just how serious a problem they consider it to be. They think they can make the problem go away if they just don’t mention it, which is why I make use of every opportunity I can to tell people, on Twitter, in media appearances and in my long-form writing, what lab-grown meat actually is.
Don’t get me wrong. Lab-grown meat isn’t tumours per se. Some immortalised cell lines really are tumours. The very first immortalised cell line, the HeLa line, was and is cancerous. The cells were extracted from the uterine cancer of an African-American woman called Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore in the 1950s. Henrietta Lacks may have died not long after the sample was taken, but her cells have been replicating ever since (if you want to know more, read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).
When actual cancer cells aren’t used, normal cells can be forced to become immortal through the use of enzymes, radiation, genetic engineering and other methods. Sometimes, in rare cases, cells just spontaneously become immortal, through a genetic mutation. A small number of tissues other than cancers also naturally replicate endlessly, such as early-stage stem cells.
Immortalised cells are favoured for various forms of research, and for the manufacture of lab-grown meat, because once you’ve harvested them, you don’t have to go back and harvest more. This saves time and cost. Immortalised cells taken decades ago from the kidney of an aborted fetus were used in the manufacture of some of the COVID-19 vaccines.
For lab-grown meat, immortalisation also allows the makers to claim that their product is “cruelty-free,” which is a key unique selling point: once you have an established animal cell line, you never need to take another sample, meaning that no more livestock need to be raised or slaughtered to make your product. Meat no longer means murder.
Or, at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. In reality, as I’ll tell you in just a moment, things aren’t that simple, and ethical vegetarians and vegans aren’t actually going to be able to eat lab-grown meat until there’s another way to make it, which doesn’t look like it’s going to appear any time soon.
What matters, as I was saying, is that humans and animals—lab-grown meat is also being targeted as a pet product—have no history of consuming immortalised cell lines. We just don’t know whether it’s safe to eat, and I’m not the only one to say this. Experts say this too; although the experts who were involved in the certification process for Upside and GOOD Meat’s products don’t seem to have raised this issue. I’ve read the FDA filings for GOOD Meat’s “cultured” chicken product, and it’s just assumed that it’s exactly the same as the meat you’d get from the butcher or supermarket. For the regulators, the key issue was the nutritional profile (protein, fats, carbs, micronutrients) and potential contamination with pathogens during the laboratory process, not whether the animal tissue itself might be harmful—something we have no way of knowing unless long-term feeding studies are carried out, which they won’t be.
But the FDA’s processes for ensuring the safety of novel products and ingredients are famously lax, essentially allowing the companies behind the novel products and ingredients to dictate the terms and provide the required data themselves. One academic paper on the subject described the FDA system as being like “the foxes guarding the hen house.”
Now, I mentioned that with lab-grown meat, the “cruelty free” epithet may be deceptive. It is. Josh Tetrick, the CEO of GOOD Meat, loves to make the claim on Twitter that his lab-grown chicken is “slaughter-free”, but the truth is that slaughter is still an integral part of making lab-grown meat, and it’s likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
An essential ingredient in the manufacture of lab-grown meat is something called “fetal bovine serum” (FBS). This is blood extracted directly from the hearts of cow fetuses, often while they’re still alive, on the slaughterhouse floor. FBS is an essential part of the growth medium used to create lab-grown meat. It contains special hormones and other substances without which you simply can’t get cell lines to grow in the right way. FBS is also extremely expensive, costing thousands of dollars a litre. For this reason, users of FBS are constantly looking to create artificial alternatives to it, but so far they’ve totally failed. While only small quantities of FBS are used in the manufacture of a batch of lab-grown chicken, it’s still there, leading to the absurd situation that although no chickens need to be slaughtered to make the product, pregnant cows and their calves do. Again, this is a problem manufacturers of lab-grown meat just don’t want to talk about.
GOOD Meat also doesn’t want to talk about its supply chain, for similar reasons. Earlier this year, I discovered that the company manufacturing GOOD Meat’s chicken product, JOINN Biologics, is a Chinese-owned company that has ties to the Chinese military’s biowarfare program and is involved, through its parent company JOINN Laboratories, in breeding large numbers of animals, including primates, for lab experimentation.
Another large helping of absurdity is added to the mix: Yes, no chickens are slaughtered to make GOOD Meat’s product, but cows and their calves are, AND monkeys must be bred and sold for a life of excruciating torture. I thought this was supposed to be an “ethically superior” product!? I guess not.
The absurdities and iniquities of lab-grown meat, which its manufacturers are well aware of, point us toward its true purpose. Lab-grown meat is a “food of the future”, not because it is more ethical than real meat, but because it is corporate-owned. You can’t patent a chicken, but you can patent lab-grown chicken. Proprietary control over their products is what corporations want, and it’s what they’ve been working tirelessly to achieve for the best part of a century. This is exactly what happened with the transformation of the American food system from one in which people consume whole foods to one in which people consume factory-made processed foods, and it’s exactly what’s been happening with the more recent introduction of genetically modified products into the food chain. Corporations have achieved a staggering degree of ownership over the food we eat, but even that isn’t enough. There are always new “ownership envelopes” that can be opened.
The Great Reset vision of a “Planetary Health Diet”, in which a global population of 10 billion people is fed a largely uniform diet made up of plant foods supplemented by novel proteins, is one that sees no place for farming and food production as it’s taken place for the majority of the last 10,000 years. If the globalists succeed, we will have handed over the food supply in toto to corporations. I’ve written about this vision at length in my latest book, The Eggs Benedict Option, and I’ve tried to outline credible ways we can resist and instead return to eating in the manner of our ancestors.
One obvious thing you can do is not to eat lab-grown meat. But you don’t strike me as the type that would anyway.
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