Fake Meat is Back...now with "Grilled Beef Flavors!"

One of the fun parts of being a friendly neighborhood beef farmer, is that I have a small army of people scouring the internet for beef related content on my behalf.

And this week, I was forwarded an article by one of our customers. The headline reads:
 

It may look like pink Jello but scientists hope this new invention could revolutionize meat

That's right, after disappearing from the zeitgeist for a few months....

LAB GROWN "BEEF" IS BACK BABY!

And this time it's got "grilled beef flavor" that was evidently left out of Version 1. Huzzah!

Before I get into the meat of this article (pun very much intended), I want to take a quick moment to applaud CNN for abandoning editorial standards and making my job SO easy.

Here's the lede to this piece:

"Lab-grown meat — also called cultured meat or cell-based meat — is emerging as an alternative to conventional meat, offering the same nutritional benefits and sensory experience without the carbon footprint."

Couple teensy problems worth mentioning here....

One - presenting them as "lab-grown" and "conventional" meat suggests that they are two takes on the same thing. They are not. Meat is a word, words have definitions. The definition of "meat" is not "a gelatin based hydrogel forming a functional scaffold" (more on that below).

Two - claiming that it has the same nutritional benefits is flagrantly insane. Not only has the lab grown stuff not been studied, but we barely have a firm grasp on the nutritional intricacies of ACTUAL meat.

Three - the premise of this entire article is that IT DOES NOT HAVE THE SAME SENSORY EXPERIENCE AS ACTUAL MEAT.

And Four - Lab-Grown Meat has an enormous carbon footprint, like orders of magnitude bigger per calorie than real meat.

With that nonsense out of their system, they go on to describe the process of producing this miracle sludge with "grilled beef flavor"

And, I'm just gonna quote them in full, because I can't possibly be funnier on purpose than they were by accident.

-- 

They do this by introducing a switchable flavor compound into a gelatin-based hydrogel, to form something called a functional scaffold, which Lee described as the “basic composition of the cultured meat.”

Because the cultured meat is not yet edible, the researchers used an electronic nose, which “mimics the nosing system of humans,” Lee said, to test the aromas of the cultured meat, and see how they compare to conventional meat.

--

Oh boy.

There's nothing quite like the aroma of a hydrogel based functional scaffold hitting your "nosing system"

mmmm mmmm mmmmmm *chef's kiss*

But seriously, I have to ask - WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

Seriously, who are the absolute monsters involved in this?

The companies rushing to develop this crap and sell it to you (largely because you can't patent the intellectual property of beef)

The scientists who delude themselves into thinking that THIS is surely the nutritional breakthrough that won't backfire horribly

(to be fair, the scientists might be actual robots and/or aliens... the term "nosing system" is kind of a giveaway)

The sycophantic journalists who serve up unquestioning, dewy-eyed hackery to sell you on the Brave New World.

These are psychopaths. All of them.

And their vision of the future food system, of OUR future diets, is worth resisting passionately.

We deserve better.

You deserve better.

Our children definitely deserve better.

....

Alright, rant over.

Let's all just stick it to these guys and go grill some burgers this weekend.

But first remember to give them a whiff with your human nosing system.

I'm sorry "nosing system of humans" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard, I have to try and make it stick.

Your farmer,
Josh