(The Organic Prepper)—COP28 is wrapping up, and I’m never going to eat a chicken nugget again. Why? Because of the relentless drive toward getting “novel protein” (insects and cultured meat) into the food supply.
This year’s climate summit was the first to extensively address food production. There was a Food Systems Pavilion with eight thematic days, and one of those days was exclusively about how to “Advance Protein Diversification.”
In other words, how to get people to eat stuff they don’t want to.
The publishing industry is getting into this, too. You can find dozens of books that have been recently brought to market, earnestly promoting insects as food to save the planet. These are not to be outdone by books swearing that lab-grown meat will revolutionize food.
They discussed how to “push” consumers toward novel protein.
Discussions highlighted innovations in Israel, Brazil, Singapore, Denmark, and the Netherlands, all countries that have pioneered research in either insect farming or cultured meat. The folks at the climate summit discussed “how we can push others toward the tipping point in protein diversification.”
One discussion focused on circular agrifood and biomass. “Circular agrifood” sounds high-tech but really boils down to waste processing. For example, a farm may be perfectly circular if livestock exclusively consumes vegetation on the farm, their poop is spread around the pastures, they get processed on-farm, and the waste materials are buried, fed to dogs, or otherwise kept on the property. Two hundred years ago, most farms were “circular agrifood systems.”
So, are they promoting the traditional closed-loop, locally-owned, independently operated farms?
Not quite. This discussion was chaired by an expert in waste management and a representative of an innovative food processing company, not managers of closed-loop farms.
In fact, if you live in a wealthy country, these people may see your local farmer as the problem, not the solution. Speakers at COP28 summits blame overconsumption in wealthy countries for food instability in poorer ones.
This is a gross simplification of an incredibly complex set of problems.
Overconsumption of food isn’t just a “rich people problem.” It’s the opposite.
For starters, overconsumption of food is not necessarily related to overall wealth. You don’t see overweight people walking around elite enclaves like Malibu or Aspen. They’re in the poorer parts of major cities, and throughout rural America.
I spent much of my childhood in a low-income household. People at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain are not overconsuming pastured steaks and Kerrygold butter. They’re overconsuming the stuff their SNAP benefits pay for at Dollar Tree, foods like Doritos and Mountain Dew. These foods are artificially cheap because they are made of processed corn, which is heavily subsidized by the government.
US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is aware of this. He was less militant about eliminating meat from American diets than his European counterparts. His talks during “Food Day” emphasized less food wastage rather than eliminating meat and dairy. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) insists that affluent Westerners need to reduce meat and dairy consumption by 35-50% to achieve climate goals.
Climate change is being blamed for food shortages in developing countries. However, you cannot ignore the role distribution problems play. These might be related to war or to internal problems such as corruption. They are not necessarily affected by the actions of wealthier countries.
Solving the problem of low-income, overweight Americans would involve massive cultural changes. It would involve fixing the subsidy system that makes junk food so cheap. It would involve a huge push to re-introduce home economics classes, empowering people to prepare their own food. And it would involve a change in cultural expectations. When working multiple part-time jobs is the norm, it’s really hard to find time to prepare healthy meals.
Food scarcity in developing countries isn’t because of “rich Westerners,” either.
Solving the problem of food scarcity in less developed countries is no small feat either. It would involve better infrastructure, such as roads and refrigeration facilities. It would also require accountability at the local level in terms of ensuring corrupt officials do not keep donated goods for themselves.
All of these solutions involve increasing local control and self-empowerment for individuals to make better decisions for themselves.
So, is that what the food giants and the attendees of summits like COP28 are working toward?
These summits promote consolidation and processed foods.
No, they’re going to keep moving toward consolidating food companies and putting more highly processed junk food on the market.
The “Big Four” meatpackers (JBS, Cargill, Tyson, and National Beef Packing) control more than 80% of the market. Of these four, JBS, Cargill, and Tyson have invested in cultured (lab-grown) meat.
They are beginning to see themselves as in the protein business rather than the meat business. Also, it doesn’t hurt that investing in alternative proteins helps companies’ ESG scores.
They are not just investing in cultured meat. Cargill and Tyson have also been investing in insect production.
In 2022, Cargill partnered with Innovafeed, an insect meal producer. They feed livestock waste to black soldier flies, which then are in turn fed to farmed fish, chicks, and piglets.
Now Tyson’s getting in on the game. In October, Tyson purchased a minority stake in Dutch insect farming company Protix. They plan to build a black soldier fly facility in the US for use in pet foods and livestock feed. Tyson says they do not plan to add insects to human food “at this time.”
Fish, chicks, and piglets do naturally consume insects. But I still think this drive toward partnerships between giants in the traditional livestock industry and insect producers is worth our attention.
In a previous article about eating bugs, I referenced studies finding that putting the infrastructure in place for insect protein production is not as climate-neutral as it pretends to be. Constructing the facilities required for a substantial amount of protein production would require a significant amount of space and energy. A whole new infrastructure would need to be built, and in a more freely functioning market, investors would need to see demand before making those kinds of commitments.
As we noted in another previous article, the demand for novel proteins has not been developing organically, and a huge infrastructure for conventional meat processing already exists. Consumers are not choosing novel proteins. They’re being pushed on us by people who seem religiously convinced that eating insects is good for the planet.
Tyson may not be planning to put insect meal into their meat products “at this time,” but they’re investing in the infrastructure that could make that happen when they think the time is right. With all the talk about how good eating insects is for the environment, it’s reasonable to assume that companies will start looking at how to incorporate insect protein into their food products.
How to really improve the agricultural system
There are absolutely ways in which the agricultural system could improve. But the real solutions lie in working toward fewer middlemen. This would make locally produced food more affordable, wherever “local” is for you, and more profitable for the farmers. Customers need more transparency to make better dietary choices, and building connections with local farmers and custom processors is a great way to achieve that.
I have eaten crickets that still look like crickets. I am not interested in processed foods with hidden ingredients. As the food giants move toward novel proteins, it will be more important than ever to know where your meat comes from. Unless, of course, insect nuggets sound delicious to you.
What are your thoughts, though? If you could save money, would you eat lab-grown meat or insects? Do you think this type of “food” production is good for the planet? Are you interested in trying these products?
Let’s discuss it in the comments section.
About Marie Hawthorne
A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
You eat that Schmidt and die
i will abandon any stores that put lab meat on their shelves.
DITTO
Anything that you freeze is going to require electricity, when that goes out, you lose it all. I have had that problem many times. My little house has a little fridge,, so I don’t keep much long term for that reason. I depend on and I support local stores privately owned.
Please let the lab-grown meat and bugs be REQUIRED AT ALL COLLEGES, SCHOOLS, AND OTHER LIBERAL HELL HOLES.
Thanks for your cooperation.