The Troublesome Truth Behind the Fake Meat Industry

You want to talk about fake meat? Sure. A little bit. Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, it wasn't covered as much in the film. But I think it's important for someone like you that really understands it to talk about it, so people get, this could be a stand-alone clip. So just for people who aren't aware, there are companies like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat that are promoting this idea of fake meat that tastes like meat, but it's made typically from soy. So Impossible Burger's main ingredients are GMO soy, coconut oil, sunflower oil, natural flavors. Beyond Meat is pea protein isolate, canola oil, refined coconut oil. So Impossible Burger has publicly criticized holistic land management and regenerative agriculture and saying, ah, it's not really that different. In fact, sometimes the emissions can be even more than feedlot beef. But there was a third-party life cycle analysis, full life cycle, so they looked at the whole process, not just emissions from cows burping, but the whole process at White Oak Pastures, which is a beef operation that's a savory institute hub. So they're following the regenerative savory institute practices. And they found that their beef operation was a net carbon sink. So again, it actually sequestered carbon from the atmosphere. It was not emitting carbon. Not neutral. It was taking carbon out. Can I pause you for a second? This is something I forgot to bring up earlier. One thing that solves the methane issue with cows is just to add a certain amount of seaweed to their diet. When you add a certain amount of seaweed to their diet, apparently it mitigates the methane issue. I don't know about that. Yeah. See if you can find that, Jamie. That's something that was offered up as a response to it. And I don't think it's a large amount of seaweed. I think it's a fairly small amount of seaweed in percentage to the overall diet. I think the amazing thing about the regenerative livestock or holistically managed beef, though, is it can actually restore grasslands. It can restore the soil and improve the soil. So you're not only producing this amazing nutrient-dense bioavailable food source, you're actually improving the soil and helping to reverse this really dramatic, threatening problem that we're facing of soil erosion. Because seaweed could help make cows burp less methane and cut their carbon footprint, LOL. A diet supplemented with red algae could lessen the huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cows and sheep if we can just figure out how to grow enough. So I guess that's the issue. Well, then you have to wonder what kind of energy is being used. So back to this, so this life cycle analysis at White Oak Pastures showed that this holistically managed beef actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. Now, this was the same company that performed a life cycle analysis for Impossible Burger on their fake meat. And what they found in that analysis was that the fake meat was less of a greenhouse gas emitter than feedlot beef, but it was still actually an emitter. Whereas the holistically managed beef was taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It was the same company. So, you know, if we're going to give them credit for the analysis they did for Impossible Burger, we have to give them credit for the analysis that they did for White Oak Pastures. The other thing with Impossible Burger, so the primary ingredient is called Soy Leg Hemoglobin, or SLH. So this is a bioengineered protein additive that adds meat-like taste and color. It does not meet the basic FDA generally recognized as safe, the GRASS designation, because it's not a food or even a food ingredient. And there's a document that you can get. I think it came with the Freedom of Information Act. It's online. I have the reference in my show notes. And in the discussion in this document with the FDA, Impossible Foods admitted that up to a quarter of its heme ingredient was composed of 46 unexpected additional proteins, some of which are unidentified and none of which were assessed for safety in a dossier. Impossible Burger put the product on the market despite admitting to the FDA privately that they haven't done adequate safety testing. And according to these documents, quote, FDA believes that the arguments presented individually and collectively do not establish the safety of SLH, Soy Leg Hemoglobin, for consumption, nor do they point to a general recognition of safety. So they don't know what the fuck it does. What's in it? But it's doing... It doesn't mean it's bad. It doesn't mean it's bad. They just haven't done adequate safety testing in the opinion of the FDA to release this as a food product. The company that did the tests on this Impossible Burger versus the Regenerative B, what is that company again? Qantas International. And so they're the ones who released the information for both studies? Both studies. They were the same company that did it for Impossible Burger. And then they turned around and did it for White Oak Pastures. And they found Impossible Burger is still emitting carbon, whereas White Oak Pastures is taking it out. I think that's a very critical point to make in this conversation. And there was an article criticizing fake meat by this woman, Dana Pearls, who's part of an environmental organization called Friends of the Earth. And she says, quote, instead of investing in risky new food technologies that are potential problems masquerading as solutions, shouldn't we be investing in proven beneficial regenerative agriculture and transparent organic food that consumers are actually demanding? The only issue that they would have with this is, yes, but now you're talking about killing animals. And we're absolutely morally and ethically opposed to killing animals. Yeah. I mean, we go back now to this 2018 paper that I mentioned earlier that examined the impact of plant agriculture on animal deaths and found 35 to 250 mouse deaths per acre. Mouse deaths? Mouse deaths. Deaths of mice. And up to 7.3 billion animals killed every year from plant agriculture. If you count birds killed by pesticides, fish deaths from fertilizer runoff, plus reptiles and amphibians, poisonings from eating toxic insects from the pesticides. What's the number? 7.3 billion animals killed every year through plant agriculture. In terms of life, there's far more life taken by plant agriculture than there is life taken by animal agriculture, even factory farming. Oh, yeah. We're not killing 7.3 billion cows. Right. So the question is, do we value the larger animals more? Or even, you know, are fish and insects less significant life forms than mammals? Are small mammals like root rodents less valuable than larger ones like cows? Is it better to kill many small animals for foods like grains and legumes, which aren't very nutrient dense and don't meet our nutritional needs, than fewer large animals that are super nutrient dense? I mean, I'm not claiming to answer these questions, but I think they're questions that haven't been adequately raised and addressed in this ethical argument. They haven't even been breached. And this is one that people dismiss offhandedly. These are lies by meat eaters to justify their consumption. But what you're saying is... You could make an ethical argument that killing an animal explicitly to eat it is ethically different than animals being killed as a sort of side effect of plant agriculture. I'm not saying that that's a valid argument, but I've heard that argument. I don't think it's a valid argument, because once you're aware of it, you're doing it the same. It's like the argument that I've had with people when they say that I don't kill animals, but I eat meat, therefore it's better than what you do, because I hunt. And I say, no, you're killing an animal with your credit card. It seems backwards. You're killing an animal. You're just hiring someone to do it for you. You still go to jail for murder if you hire someone to shoot somebody. Right. And you're more disconnected from the whole process. It's even more bizarre. The whole thing is very, very strange. I think that's very important, though, that you listed those numbers, that data. Because that's irrefutable, and it's one of those arguments that comes up that they just want to bury their head in the sand about. If you're buying agriculture, unless you have your own organic farm, where you are 100% aware of every single aspect from seed to plucking and cooking, if you're not, if you're buying from large-scale agriculture, you're a part of the death machine. Right. That's right. And you're also part of the environmental destruction machine, because these huge industrial-scale monocropping operations are incredibly harmful for the environment. And if, you know, if you, again, like you think of like pea protein, you know, that's an incredibly processed food. Like the amount of, you know, first of all, just growing peas at the scale you're going to need to have the world's largest pea protein company, and then all of the processing that needs to happen from taking a pea to isolated protein powder, which involves fossil fuels and all kinds of industrial processes, that is not an environmentally friendly process. So, you know, is that better for the planet than having cows that are, you know, being raised on land that couldn't be used for growing plants or other crop production and rotating the animals in a way that restores grasslands and improves the health of the soil that actually sequesters and removes carbon from the atmosphere? That, again, like Dana Pearls was saying, makes a lot more sense. It's a proven system than like scaling up industry to make more powders. Yeah, scaling up industry to make pea powder and killing untold numbers of rodents. And birds and destroying natural habitats, because if you clear a field for peas, it doesn't have the normal natural features. You don't have the habitat for those animals anymore. I can't.