I was working on some marketing for the ranch and discussing our ranch ‘slogan’ with a trusted friend to have her help me fine tune it.
The slogan we have been using is:
Producing CLEAN Nutrient dense meats for a healthier you
My friend had me explain why I chose each of the words in the slogan. Here’s what I told her:
Producing- my daughter and I are raising livestock on our land
Clean- we don’t use any chemicals, hormones or antibiotics on the land or with the livestock
Nutrient dense- the food we eat needs to have the nutrients God intended them to have to nourish and support our bodies to be healthy and functioning properly
Healthier- there is much research that most of the chronic diseases many are experiencing now is due to the lack of nutrition in the foods humans are eating.
After hearing my explanation, she tasked me with doing a Google search for ‘clean meat’.
It turns out that the ‘industry’ is calling lab raised meat as clean meat!
This revelation floored me!
In my research, I found the following:
“Those of us who are advocates for tissue-engineered meat often cringe when we hear non-appetizing terms like ‘tissue-engineered’ and ‘lab-grown’ use to describe the product in media reports. We know that using phrases like these (or even worse, “frankenmeat”, “test tube meat”, and so on) will turn the public, media, and investors off the product before it even exists.”
https://www.gfi.org/the-naming-of-clean-meat
So the fake meat makers did a study and determined which words would be more receptive to the public, and determined that calling it ‘clean’ would make it appealing!
“The more we tissue engineering supporters use "clean meat" to refer to the product in press releases, speeches, websites, product packaging, and other public communications, the more likely we will be to overcome the early but critical hurdle of generating public support for a novel product.
So it’s a marketing scheme! Knowing that the public, media and investors would not be interested in lab meat, they have ‘decided’ to promote it as clean meat!
What is fake meat?
Lab meat, frankenmeat, tissue engineered, test tube, synthetic, cultured meat has been developed as a solution to the objection by animals rights people of the slaughter of livestock to produce the meat, to the poor conditions of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and associated environmental factors, and to the purported looming protein shortage as the world’s population grows.
A quick review of how lab meat is grown:
Lab meat is made by taking cells from a food animal and growing them in a mixture of vitamins, lipids, amino acids and growth hormones. The lab meat is then colored, ground, mixed with fats and shaped into burgers.
In a testimony at an US Food and Drug Administration meeting in 2018, senior scientist for Consumers Union, the advocacy division of Consumer Reports, stated that the vats of solution in which the lab meat is grown can become contaminated with disease-causing bacteria, viruses, fungi and mycoplasma.
So the fake meat grown in the lab can be exposed to the same disease-causing bacteria, viruses, fungi and mycoplasma as in the CAFO!
At this same meeting in 2018, evidence was presented that many companies use antibiotics, hormones, even blood products taken from fetal calves, at least during the first steps of the process, to get initial batches of cells to transition from life inside an animal to life inside a vial or dish.
So living, breathing livestock must be used in the first steps of the process to produce fake meat!
an argument against fake meat
Now, I’ll agree that animals raised in CAFO’s are living in horrible conditions, and causing much environmental damage.
But as Diana Rogers, RD. author and producer of the movie Sacred Cow, coined
Its not the cow, its the how
It’s not the cow that is causing the problems, it’s how humans have chosen to raise, produce and care for the cow.
For centuries nature took care of itself, until we as humans decided we knew better and imposed methods and practices that suited us.
We placed animals in CAFO’s because we feared that we couldn’t feed the growing population. We thought that by concentrating animals in a small lot, and feeding them grain (which is abundant because we now raise hectares and hectares of monocultures of soy, corn and wheat under government subsidies), keeping the animals healthy with antibiotics, and making them grow quicker with hormone supplements. All this to increase the production of meat.
What we didn’t understand when we started all of this, is that there are consequences to deviating away from the natural functions.
The concentration of animals in small lots causes:
The grass to die out (the animals are made to eat grass, and will eat the grass until they cause it die out), called overgrazing.
This causes bare ground, so there is no grass/plant to photosynthesize carbon dioxide into carbon (into the plant and soil to feed the plant and living organisms in the soil) and oxygen (into the atmosphere).
The bare ground causes the water to run off because there is no grass to mitigate the force of the raindrop on the surface, therefore creating a ‘cap’ on the bare ground. This cap doesn’t allow the rainwater to infiltrate into the soil causing erosion as the water picks up loose soil as it travels downward to lower elevations.
The bare ground’s inability to infiltrate the rainwater causes flooding. Healthy soil has the capability of holding a large volume of water. For every 1% increase in organic matter, the soil can hold 25,000 gallons of water per acre.
Without water, the millions of living organisms in the soil and above the soil, cannot live.
The lack of living grasses/plants on the soil coupled with the cap, means that the sun is ‘cooking’ the soil and killing any living organism in the soil. This converts the soil to just dirt.
What many don’t realize is that soil is just like a human body. There are millions of living organisms in the soil that need food and water just like a human body.
Many of our current agricultural practices do not promote healthy soils! Instead many are killing the living organisms.
If we work with nature, instead of against it, we will move toward healthy soils, which in turn supports healthy animals and nourishes healthy bodies!
As the infographic above from USDA states, healthy soil is key to feeding 9 billion people by 2050!
So instead of spending millions on developing fake meat, we should be re-learning how to work with nature instead of against nature, and put animals in their natural environment where they can thrive without any human intervention!
If a cow is allowed to eat grass, and their time on the pasture is managed so that the grass can recover before it’s eaten again, then we have:
Ground that is covered with living grasses and/or trampled grasses that create a ground cover
Grasses that are photosynthesizing carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon, improving the carbon cycle
The carbon is feeding the plant and the roots below ground which then feeds the living organisms in the soil
Grasses and/or mulch that slows down the force of the rainwater, allowing the water to infiltrate into the soil, reducing flooding effects due to the improved water cycle
The ground cover keeps the soil and living organisms from heating up and killing off plants and organisms.
The improved carbon/mineral and water cycles then create an environment that allows the natural seed bed in the soil to germinate resulting in a diverse grass pasture
The increased water holding capacity of the soil, the increased diversity in the grasses/forbs, the improved carbon/mineral and water cycles then allows the livestock producer to increase his animal production thereby increasing the volume of meat from the same pasture
With improved mineral, water and biological cycles, the livestock and plants are being provided with the nutrients they need to be healthy, which in turn provides the nutrients to humans consuming the livestock and plants.
Regenerative agriculture attempts to replicate the natural functions and ecosystems compared to conventional agriculture where man has attempted to control/affect the natural functions and ecosystems.
