In case you’ve been hoping new foods like insects or lab-grown “meat” would go away on their own, lab-grown “chicken” has just been approved for sale by the USDA. Two companies, Upside and Good Meat, will be producing their meat-like product for high-end restaurants soon.
We wrote a few months ago about how consumers have not expressed interest in novel proteins. People around the world just want meat. However, this push to change our diet doesn’t seem like it’s going away, so let’s first look at what this product actually is and why we’re being told we should eat it.
What is “lab-grown meat?”
Lab-grown meat, which will be labeled in stores as “cell-cultivated,” is a highly processed product that mimics the taste and texture of real meat. Proponents claim it will save the environment and end animal cruelty The truth, however, is a little more complicated.
Scientists begin by taking cell samples, either from live animals or from stored cellular lines, and place them in a soup of amino acids, sugars, salts, and other compounds needed by the animal tissue to replicate. In about three weeks, sheets of muscle tissue will be present in the fermentation tanks, and these are used to create dishes that look like they contain meat.
So, first of all, these are not vegan products. Scientists are taking actual animal cells and forcing them to replicate. Additionally, fetal bovine serum is one of the ingredients used in making these products. Ever heard of fetal bovine serum? It’s made with blood from calf fetuses. FBS is obtained by killing pregnant cows along with their calf fetuses, which means that not only is cell-cultivated meat not acceptable for vegans, but it’s also not acceptable for people that insist on humane animal husbandry.
And let’s think about what else is in the soup that feeds the growing animal cells. As explained by Alan Lewis in the Environmental Health Symposium last year, the soup in which the animal cells are cultured contains sugars and amino acids, which largely come from corn and soy. These crops are almost exclusively grown in huge monocultures with all their attendant health and environmental concerns.
And then we have the energy and industrial facilities required to produce this product. Even proponents of cell-cultivated meat admit that, as our energy grid currently stands, cell-cultivated meat has a far larger carbon footprint than any kind of livestock system.
They say this “meat” is ethical, but it’s not.
Trying to pretend that these food products are the ethical equivalent of a pastured, custom-processed chicken from the farm outside your metro area is incredibly misleading.
This strikes me in particular because, for years, I had a small side business producing truly pastured, custom-processed chickens. I still produce them for my own household.
Claiming industrially produced meat-like products are somehow more ethical than the chickens raised outside my back door, on feed produced two hours away and then processed behind my shed, is not only insulting but absurdly wrong. The carbon footprint going into my birds is minuscule compared to the carbon footprint involved in these energy-intensive industrial facilities.
And I’m willing to bet that my chickens taste a lot better, too.
So, why is lab-grown meat being pushed so hard?
Why the push for this stuff, especially when, as noted before, people don’t really want it?
We’ve already discussed the way in which driving conventional farmers and ranchers out of business will consolidate the food supply into the hands of a few very powerful players. And while I think those points are as valid as ever, there are a few other things I’d like to consider here.
This push away from animal husbandry, this drive to demonize conventional farmers and ranchers, has been taking its cues from the climate movement. And climate activists talk like scientists but think like religious zealots. A high percentage of the world’s population that considers itself educated has very little real connection with nature and its systems; they idealize nature while at the same time avoiding getting their hands dirty. This disconnection from living, breathing, eating, copulating, and killing nature makes them easy prey for whatever scheme the folks looking to capitalize on climate alarmism come up with.
Promoters of lab-grown meat are part of this. They have an emotional reaction to much of what goes into conventional meat production, and when you confront them about the use of a product like FBS, they just insist that they’re working on it, the usage is temporary, and a more ethical solution is just around the technological corner.
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. There are so many trade secrets involved in these high-tech formulations that it’s actually pretty hard to find out what, precisely, goes into these highly bioengineered food products. What we do know is that these facilities are astoundingly expensive and complicated, and to produce cell-cultivated chicken at a scale even close to the current demand for chicken is completely unrealistic. But, to the true believer, that’s all beside the point because they operate on faith.
It’s also worth thinking about this approval of cell-cultivated chicken within the framework of kamikaze marketing, as Daisy’s previously discussed. In America, as most of us over-40s understood it, companies exist to make money, and so when products flop, one would expect the folks at corporate headquarters to shift gears. This doubling down by corporations on unwanted products does not make sense.
However, thanks to massive amounts of investor money tied to ESG scores flowing into companies, consumer preferences and the power to boycott don’t have as much political clout as they used to. This is as true with food products as it is with tuck-friendly bathing suits.
It’s all part of an agenda.
Finally, 2030 is rapidly approaching, and I think this drive toward engineered food is merely one more marker on the path to a society where we own nothing and are all happy about it. Elites have all kinds of opinions about how the regular people around the world should be living, and this approval of cell-cultivated meat should serve a reminder that much of what happens in the corporate world is about their plans rather than true consumer preference.
The World Economic Forum has stated it wants to nudge meat off the menu. We’ve talked about nudging before on this website, and this is something the White House intends to get in on, too. Just last September, the White House hosted a conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Moving forward, there will be a huge public-private partnership aimed at changing the way Americans eat.
Those who are connected with nature won’t want lab-grown “meat.”
I can’t imagine cell-cultivated chicken sounding appealing to anyone who has actually raised chickens or enjoyed home-raised meat. Selling cell-cultivated meats would only work on a population completely separated from actual farms, a population stuck in 15-minute cities, whose images of “farms” consist only of huge monocultures and animals crowded into chutes, getting ready for slaughter.
Farm life consists of far more than that. I used to do survey work and have traveled extensively through small towns throughout the Midwest, the Gulf Coast, and the Western Slope of the Rockies. Watching cattle graze at dawn is beautiful. Watching chickens chase bugs (or occasionally mice) is pretty funny. If you’ve ever seen someone working a team of Clydesdales, you know that the humans and animals involved add to the beauty of the landscape, not detract from it.
Promoters of cell-cultivated meat like to dismiss these kinds of farms as artisanal and impractical for most of the world’s population. And it’s true that many people can’t afford artisanal food, but more people can produce at least some of their own food than they probably realize. The recent approval of cell-cultured chicken should serve to remind us that, if you’re a meat eater, finding independent food suppliers has never been more important. Better yet, learn to raise some of your own meat yourself.
I was raised by die-hard suburbanites, but I was able to learn how to produce much of my own food as an adult. There is a big push to end conventional animal husbandry, but if you look around, there is a lot of good advice available for those who want to become more self-sufficient. If you feel at all inspired to become more involved in your food supply, now is the time to start learning.
What do you think about lab-grown “meat?”
What do you think about the push toward lab-grown “meat?” Would you eat it? Would you choose it over real meat? Do you think there’s an agenda at play here or is it just an effort to feed the world?
Let’s discuss it in the comments section.
About the Author
A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.
Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.
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.
Definitely an agenda at play. They want us to eat bugs and worms also.