- Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S., has failed to scale up its production to produce meaningful amounts of synthetic meat
- Plagued by contamination issues, Upside had problems with rodent DNA found in one of its chicken cell lines
- While parading its expensive stainless-steel bioreactors for the press, Upside is actually growing only small amounts of fake meat bits inside small, single-use plastic bottles
- Fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat
- Lab-grown meat is often made using animal components, so it’s not really animal-free, and when Upside tested its fake meat for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken
(Mercola)—Silicon Valley is banking on cultured meat taking off, providing animal-free “meat” to satisfy the carnivorous appetites of the world’s more than 8 billion people — most of whom eat meat. But what started out with grandiose fanfare and backing from billionaire investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos1 is falling flat.
The dream of creating cultured “chicken” breasts or animal-free “beef” fillets is turning out to be nothing more than a fairy tale. Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S.,2 has resorted instead to “growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh.”3
It’s not only unappetizing. Even if it succeeds, fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat, while presenting consumers with another highly processed food product that may further devastate human health.
What Happens When Silicon Valley Gets Mixed Up in Food Production?
Putting faith in Silicon Valley to produce wholesome food was the first mistake in the race to create cultured food. While regenerative farmers raising grass fed cows and free-range chickens work in concert with nature to provide food in the form humans have thrived on since the beginning of time, Silicon Valley does just the opposite.
In a process completely removed from nature, venture-backed startups are using precision fermentation based on genetically engineered microbes to create synthetic food products in a lab. At Upside, which has received backing from Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk and even meat giants Tyson Foods and Cargill,4 stainless steel bioreactors are paraded as a measure of progress at media events, but it’s nothing more than careful PR.
Inside reports from employees, uncovered by The Wall Street Journal, claim that the bioreactors are plagued by contamination and rodent DNA was once found in a chicken cell line.5 Illustrating the contradiction that is the fake meat industry, the “sustainable” lab-grown chicken is in actuality being grown in two-liter plastic bottles — hundreds of which are required to product a few fillets.6
In the U.S., a limited amount of Upside’s lab-grown chicken is available as part of a tasting menu at Bar Crenn in San Francisco. But even Bloomberg reported this “sustainable” solution makes no sense:7
“The company is growing them in small, single-use plastic bottles, in amounts so piddling that a single night at Bar Crenn, a ‘certified plastic-free’ establishment, according to its website, could require the use of more than a hundred such bottles.”
Upside’s Expensive Fake Chicken Bits Aren’t Made From Muscle Cells
To make fake meat, cell lines taken from a living organism. They’re then manipulated to grow quickly and consistently. While myoblasts are the type of cells that grow into muscle meat, they’re the most difficult for fake meat companies to grow and “immortalize.”
“A regular cell extracted from an animal, known as a primary cell, won’t replicate forever. Eventually it stops, entering a phase known as senescence. If a company wants to grow significant amounts of meat and doesn’t want to have to keep taking cells from live animals or embryos, it needs to turn primary cells into immortal ones,” Bloomberg reports.8
Because myoblasts are difficult to immortalize, fibroblasts, which grow easily, are often used in cultured meat products. “But when it comes to food, they’re not what most people would consider delectable. They can develop into fat and other cells, but they’re most known for their role in making connective tissue, like cartilage or what’s found in skin,” according to Bloomberg’s report.9
Adipocytes, or fat cells, are also sometimes used, often mixed with plant proteins. In a dossier for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Upside named genetically engineered immortalized fibroblasts and a naturally immortalized myoblast cell line as options for its fake meat. But Samir Qurashi, a former Upside employee, shared doubts the company had a myoblast cell line capable of being used in production.
“It’s next to near impossible,” he told Bloomberg, and, indeed, the fake meat Upside is serving at upscale Bar Crenn is made from fibroblasts, the type that typically forms connective tissue. Further, according to Bloomberg:10
“The chicken doesn’t even include immortalized cells; it’s made of primary fibroblast cells that at some point will stop replicating and at best grow only into connective tissue. This means that to make more chicken, scientists will eventually have to go back to an embryo and remove more cells, a process that, even when it works, also kills the embryo. (Bar Crenn didn’t provide comment.)
It’s an admission that has left experts both confused and amused. “I scratch my head,” says David Kaplan, director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. “Why would you ever use primary cells?”
The Myth of Animal-Free Meat
One of the foundational principles behind cultured meat is the ability to produce food without killing animals. But fake meat is often made using animal components, negating this principle.
Normally, cells grow in a structure in your body. The cell lines being grown in labs are grown in a thin film or growth medium. In the body, the growth medium is your blood, Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports,11 a complex substance that laboratories try to replicate using fetal bovine serum (FBS) — blood taken from living calf fetuses.
“It’s really gruesome how this is harvested,” she says,12 pointing out that this contradicts the narrative that lab-grown meats are made without animals. FBS is often used to grow cultured cells because of the proteins and vitamins it contains. A 2013 study stated, “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS) …”13
When lab-grown chicken made by U.S. startup Eat Just debuted in Singapore in 2020 — marking the first cultured meat to be sold at a restaurant14 — it was produced using FBS. Upside stated in 2021 that it had developed a way to grow fake meat without animal components, yet its first chicken filets still depended on animal compounds.15
In fact, part of Qurashi’s role at Upside was to harvest cells from crustaceans, a process that killed them. As reported by Bloomberg, “Qurashi had the extremely challenging task of procuring cells from live crustaceans — a job that always led to their untimely demise, costing two or three animals their life each week. ‘Literally, people cried when they saw me,’ Qurashi says of his colleagues.”16
In order to develop synthetic “blood” instead, precision fermentation and artificial hormones may be used. Micronutrients and minerals must also be sourced, making the process “insanely expensive,” van Hamelen says.17
Use of FBS-free medium may cause cultured meat to cost over $20,000 per kilogram.18 A report from the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry,19 suggested that if the cost of FBS-free mediums could be reduced, it would drive down the cost of cultured meat by 90%. This, however, is unlikely.
“[T]he report provides no evidence to explain why these micronutrient costs will fall,” Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat.”20
Fake Chicken Contains More Lead Than Real Chicken
Adding to the controversy over lab-grown meat, when Upside tested its fake meat products for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken, along with about eight times more cholesterol compared to conventional chicken.21
There are other concerns as well. Writing in Frontiers in Nutrition, it’s speculated that “with this high level of cell multiplication, some dysregulation is likely as happens in cancer cells. Likewise, the control of its nutritional composition is still unclear, especially for micronutrients and iron.”22
Coffee the Christian way: Promised Grounds
Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, is also raising concerns about the health risks of fake food. Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet. One analysis revealed 92 mysterious, unknown compounds in fake milk that don’t exist in real milk.23
The Environment Also Suffers From Lab-Grown Meat
The other myth that’s part of the fake meat narrative is that it’s better for the environment than real meat. Even with the use of renewable energy factored in, lab-grown chicken would have the same carbon footprint as conventional chicken, according to a report by CE Delft.24 When global average energy mixes were used, lab-grown meat had a higher carbon footprint than pork and chicken.
A preprint study from University of California, Davis researchers also found that the environmental impact of lab-grown meat is “likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production,”25 again highlighting the myth that fake foods are more sustainable than real foods, especially when they’re produced regeneratively.
The reality is that fake foods are far from sustainable. John Fagan, Ph.D., a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years, explains:26
“The reality is that many of the carbon footprint calculations have been done starting with the fermentation process and going forward, but where did the high fructose corn syrup come from that is the primary energy component that goes into these fermentations?
… And you look at that industrial agriculture and you add that carbon footprint on to what they have been using in their calculations and suddenly it goes way in the wrong direction. And so we can’t even use the sustainability arguments to justify what’s being done. It just doesn’t work.”
This Is About Controlling the Food Supply
Sustainability, animal rights and human health are all buzzwords being floated around fake meat. But this isn’t about saving the planet or animals, and it’s certainly not about making people healthier. The reason why Silicon Valley is willing to invest billions into fake food is because it knows that whoever controls the food supply controls the population.
The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the entire food supply. Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake meat is important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase.
Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake meat and dairy alternatives and opt for real food instead. When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population.
- 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 21 Bloomberg December 14, 2023 (Archived)
- 2 Wired September 15, 2023
- 4, 5, 6, 15 The Wall Street Journal April 23, 2023 (Archived)
- 11 The Solari Report February 1, 2023
- 12 Rumble, Children’s Health Defense, Pharma Food: Biotech on Your Plate With Elze van Hamelen November 16, 2023, 14:07
- 13 Biomed Res Int. 2013;2013:597282. doi: 10.1155/2013/597282. Epub 2013 May 27
- 14 CNBC December 18, 2020
- 17 Rumble, Children’s Health Defense, Pharma Food: Biotech on Your Plate With Elze van Hamelen November 16, 2023, 14:31
- 18, 20 The Counter September 22, 2021
- 19 Techno-Economic Analysis for the production of cultivated meat February 2021
- 22 Front. Nutr., 07 February 2020
- 23 The Checkout, Episode 157, Dr. John Fagan’s Concerning New Findings About “Animal Free” Dairy, 10-11:00
- 24 CE Delft January 2023 (Archived)
- 25 bioRxiv April 21, 2023
- 26 The Checkout, Episode 157, Dr. John Fagan’s Concerning New Findings About “Animal Free” Dairy, 31:19
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
