Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. Originally published on March 12, 2023.
In fact, fake meat seems like the perfect solution to ending world hunger, protecting animal welfare, and saving the planet from environmental destruction. Even a cursory glance beneath the surface reveals a more sinister reality.
To help raise awareness of the latest assault on human health, I spoke with Polly Tommy about the dangers of fake meat products at the Children’s Health Program’s “Tea Time” program.1
Fake meat is just about controlling the food supply.
Fake food – including sweated meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat – is the latest attempt by globalists to control the food supply. Former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger once said, “Control the oil and you control the governments; control the food and you control the people.”2 Controlling the people is their whole agenda.
Globalists have monopolized the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) grain industry. In the early 2010s, not many people knew about GMOs. In the year In 2011, we began educating the public about their dangers as they became a major threat to public health and the environment.
In the year In 2012, a ballot initiative was launched in California to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods and food ingredients. The initiative was narrowly defeated by large-scale donations from multinational corporations, but we won in the long run because awareness of GMOs in the food supply has increased dramatically. Now, most health conscious people avoid GE/GMOs.
A similar trend is now occurring with fake food. Globalists are trying to replace animal farming with lab-grown meat, allowing private companies to control the entire food supply.
Fake meat is worse than CAFOs.
Most people know that intensive animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – a diet of unnatural GMO grains, have problems with overcrowded conditions, inhumane treatment, excessive pollution, and the spread of disease. CAFOs are bad—but the new age of fake food is going to be even worse.
With patented fake meat products, globalists will have unprecedented control over people’s health.3 Trying to provide the entire world population using animal free methods sounds good, but it is delusional.
Will Harris is a regenerative farming pioneer who runs White Oak Pasture in Bluffton, Georgia. Produces high-quality grass-fed products, including beef and other animal products, in a way that benefits consumers, the environment and the financial health of the business. While globalists peddle the idea that animal foods are destroying the planet, when reformed the way Harris does, that’s far from the truth.
Ultimately, it is fake foods that endanger the environment. “For every pound of grass-fed meat we sell, we capture 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide. Ironically, the same environmental engineers did the analysis on Impossible Burgers,” Harris said on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “They produce 3.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide.”4
Regeneration beats fake foods.
Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, is a major player in the fake meat market. He claims it has a better carbon footprint than animal agriculture, and has hired a team of scientists and strategists called Quantis to prove his point. According to the executive summary, the product reduced its environmental impact by between 87% and 96% in the categories studied, including land invasion and water consumption.5
But this compares fake meat to meat from CAFOs, which are environmentally destructive and nothing like Harris Farm. Harris did a similar analysis at Quantis for White Oaks and published a 33-page study comparing emissions from White Oaks grazing to conventional beef production.6
Farmed fake meat reduced its carbon footprint by up to 96 percent in some categories, while White Oaks had net total emissions in negative numbers compared to CAFO-raised meat.
Additionally, grass-fed beef from White Oak Pasture has a 111% lower carbon footprint than a US CAFO, and the reclamation system effectively captures soil carbon, offsetting most of the emissions associated with beef production.7
“The WOP (White Oak Pastures) system effectively sequesters soil carbon, offsetting most of the emissions associated with livestock production,” the report said. “At best, WOP beef could have a net positive effect on the climate. The results show great potential.”8
So the idea that animals should be removed from agriculture to save the planet is completely wrong. In fact, animals are part and parcel of the restoration process.
What is fake meat?
Fake meat is marketed as a health food, but it’s nothing more than a highly processed chemical concoction. Impossible Foods, for example, uses genetic engineering to insert DNA from soybean plants into yeast to create GE yeast with the gene for soybean hemoglobin.9
Impossible Foods calls this compound “heme,” but technically plants produce a non-heme iron, and this is soybean hemoglobin derived from GE yeast.10 Heme iron occurs only in meat and seafood. Impossible Foods uses GE heme as a color additive in fake meat burgers to make the product appear to “bleed” like real meat.
The health risks of GE heme are unknown, but that didn’t stop the US Food and Drug Administration from approving soy leghemoglobin in 2019. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a lawsuit against the approval, calling it “unusually fast.”11 And dangerous to public health.
CFS alleges in their lawsuit that soy leghemoglobin uses synthetic biology, or “genetic engineering on steroids,” to create new biological components, devices, and systems that do not exchange DNA between species, but instead, exist in the natural world.12
Impossible Foods turned to synthetic biology to produce GE Soybean Hemoglobin because they could not extract enough of the substance from the soybean root to produce the fake meat products on an industrial, mass-produced scale. The FDA’s GRAS for Soy Leghemoglobin is 526 pages long, if that gives you any idea of the industrialized complexity of GRAS’s so-called “health” food.13
Beyond meat, it is similarly industrialized. After burgers, patties contain 22 ingredients. These include extractable canola oil, pea protein isolate, cellulose from bamboo, modified food starch and methyl cellulose.14 – Rarely “healthy” foods. Forming these ingredients into a meat-like patty requires further processing.
Although true natural foods cannot be patented, Impossible Foods has at least 14 patents, and nearly 100 more are pending.15
Impossible Foods fake meat loaded with Glyphosate, LA
Considering that many ingredients in fake meat products are made from GE soy,16 No wonder they are contaminated with the herbicide gyphosate. The consumer advocacy group Mothers Across America (MAA) commissioned Health Research Institute Labs (HRI Labs), an independent laboratory that tests for trace elements and toxins in food, to determine how much glyphosate is in Impossible Burger and its competitor Beyond Burger.
The total concentration of glyphosate and AMPA, the main metabolite of glyphosate, in the burgers was 11.3 parts per billion (ppb) in the uncooked burger and 1 ppb in the beyond burger.17
When the results came out, Impossible Foods engaged in a smear campaign to try and discredit MAA as an “anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, anti-science, foundation group that successfully peddles dangerous medical misinformation and is completely unregulated, untested, potentially toxic” by the mothers’ group.18
Glyphosate in fake meat is one issue. Excess omega-6 fat in the form of linoleic acid (LA) is another. In my opinion, this metabolic toxicity is a primary contributor to chronic disease. It is important to note that fake meat alternatives do not contain healthy animal fats. All the fat comes from industrial seed oils like soybean and canola oil, which are the top sources of LA.
Removing overly processed foods from your diet is important to keeping your LA intake low, and this includes processed meats.
The ‘correctness boiling’ is not natural
Fake food companies want you to believe that their products are natural because they are made with plant components, even though they do not exist in nature. Authentic fermentation is another term used by the biotech industry to re-popularize health-promoting natural fermentation.
Actual flatulence is not the same as its natural counterpart. One of the biggest concerns about the actual use of fermentation is that companies are allowed to claim it’s natural.
Metabolic engineering is a major part of precision engineering, which includes methods such as next-generation sequencing, large-scale library screening, molecular cloning and multiomics to “optimize microorganism, metabolic pathways, product yield and bioprocess scale”.19 Sounds like something that went down on a farm, doesn’t it?
Whether it’s true flatulence, gene editing, GMOs, or whatever, don’t fall for the hype that it’s good for you or the planet.
Where should you get your meat?
If fake meat isn’t healthy and CAFO meat isn’t a good choice, the logical question is where can you get meat that’s good for your health and the planet? The answer is to get to know a farmer in your area. Visit the farm and see how the animals are raised.
Find out what resources are available to you in your local community. The community verifies organic food vendors in the right way. If you can’t find a local farm for animals like cows, buffalo, or sheep, look for certified organic options at your local grocery store. However, it’s best to stay local and have a real, whole food source nearby.
Plant as many vegetables as you can, grow fruit trees, and raise chickens if allowed in your area. For food you can’t find on your own, lean on your community to fill in the gaps.
As with GMOs, it’s important to raise awareness of the dangers of fake meat, especially at this early and massively expanding stage. Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, you need to ditch all fake meat options and choose real food instead.
When shopping for food, know your farmer and look for the regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass-fed farming methods we need to support a healthy and independent population.
