MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

Over the weekend, I got into one of my busy flurries where I neglected to eat. I left my office, hopped a train and realized I was on the wrong one. It took me far out of my way and I was supposed to meet up with Janine to go to a movie. I hurriedly hopped a train back near the theater where Janine was waiting and thought I had time to eat a burger at Carl’s Jr.

I really hate eating fast food and thought I could grab a small burger to tie me over and then eat something sensible later. I saw that Carl’s Jr. offers something called the beyond meat veggie burger. I remembered that the Carl’s Jr. people stopped by the studios to offer the staff a taste of their beyond meat and the staff thought it was unbelievably similar to beef.

I decided to order a double “meat” star burger with the Beyond Meat – thinking this is a big risk it better taste passable.

I was very surprised at how good it was.

It tasted like a beef hamburger and I also noticed that it was even a little pink and there was a hint of red juice giving me the illusion that it was a true beef burger.

I then thought to myself, of course, this burger tasted so good – it is slathered in mayonnaise, mustard, cheese, onions, and lettuce – that is enough to mask the taste of god-awful vegetable mush pattied into hamburger.

So I removed the bun and most of the vegetables and ate the meat itself.

It still fooled me.

I texted Ron and my other friend Lucian who both had significant other’s that avoided beef and said: “Wow, you won’t believe how good the Beyond Meat burger is at Carl’s Junior.”

I felt like I was in a commercial.

In the movie theater, as the previews and trailers rolled, I was that one guy that is on his phone before they say silent your cell phone and I was searching the internet, trying to understand this “mad science” of making a veggie burger bleed like a meat burger.

I learned a lot about how the burger is done so well using so little that nutritionists are saying it is too good to be true.

According to the Beyond Meat website:

“It’s sold in the meat section of over 10 thousand grocery stores in the US and soon, the world. It is made without soy or gluten and is GMO-Free. By braiding together proteins, fats and minerals, they have re-created the basic architecture, and thus texture, of meat, unlike any other brand or product. The Beyond Burger according to the site is not a veggie burger.”

They call it a delicious, juicy, meaty burger for true meat lovers.

It just happens to be made from plants.

It is actually made from mixtures of pea protein isolates, yeast, and other ingredients. It literally contains all of the amino acids proteins necessary for a healthy vegan diet. It is also low in carbs so it is almost the perfect burger for people who want to eat a hamburger without all of the diet guilt.

This got me thinking about how this is supposed to be the year that lab-grown meat is also supposed to pop up in stores.

The topic of lab grown meat has been a controversial subject for a lot of my listeners because of the GMO fears that accompany the idea of eating meat that is made from cultured blood cells from an animal rather than from slaughtering the animal.

The meat has been called many things. It has been nicknamed, in-vitro meat; it is also known as cultured meat or “shmeat.” Alternative names include hydroponic meat, test-tube meat, vat-grown meat, and victimless meat.

It is NOT synthetic or artificial meat because it comes from an animal; however, it has never been part of a complete, living animal. It is also not imitation meat, which is a vegetarian food product produced from vegetable protein, usually from soy or gluten. Those types of “meat-type” products provide an emotional bridge for people who can’t completely deal with leaving behind the taste of meat.

Now a vegan or vegetarian who feels badly about an animal suffering will no longer have to worry about this meat since an animal does not have to die in order for it to be eaten. The animal only needs to have a needle to extract blood from the muscle and from there meat is created in a laboratory.

Now you can eat something that is beyond meat from plants – or cultured meat from a lab.

The future is now.

A recent Nielsen poll found 23 percent of consumers want more plant-based proteins on the shelves. Health Focus International also found that 60 percent of U.S. consumers said they are reducing their consumption of meat-based products.

A few have also expressed the need for leaner cuts of beef and pork with less fat content.

Those who say that don’t realize that meat without fat means meat without much flavor. So lab-grown meat could actually simulate fatty meat with less fat and even increase the nutrients and essentials nutrients needed.

At its most elementary, the process of making lab meat involves taking stem cells from a living animal, say, a chicken, and then feeding those cells various nutrients until enough tissue is produced for the desired outcome: a burger, fried chicken or pork.

According to proponents of this technology, there are fewer environmental problems with lab meat than the traditional method of raising and slaughtering animals. Producing meat without actually growing and feeding an animal requires fewer resources—a tenth of the land and water, and less than half of the energy conventional meat needs.

The biggest winners from the deal will likely be the three Israeli clean meat companies, SuperMeat, Meat the Future, and Future Meat Technologies, which by the way, the lab or clean meat will be kosher including pork.

China is also interested in the technology because of the population’s demand for meat.

China isn’t alone in their interest in clean meat. Billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson, and the agricultural giant Cargill, have all this year invested in the Bay Area startup Memphis Meats as part of their $17 million Series A funding round.

Bill Gates also helped fund the Beyond Meat products that imitate meat using plant derivatives.

Western meat-eating has been a target of world environmental policing for some time and while meat eaters have become easy targets for the derision of the globalists, the new lab meat would solve a lot of problems.

The meat is cruelty-free and so there is no guilt, there is no farming, no grazing, and no greenhouse gasses. It is better living through science, right?

Well, most people are not comfortable with it.

But I ask why?

It doesn’t make sense. This meat is not GMO, it has nothing to do with Monsanto and if we reject the possibility or the opportunity to eat this meat, we may be forced to eat rice and porridge as the United Nation’s wants us all to be vegetarians in order to beat Climate Change.

The U.N. will demand that we eat what they say to eat, become vegetarians to save the planet and they probably won’t adhere to their own solutions.

With the costs of conventional meat farming techniques constantly increasing and increased demand from a rising world population, in-vitro meat may be one of several new technologies needed to maintain food supplies by the year 2050. Conventional meat production may simply become too expensive for the average consumer to support. These meat sources would not have to rely on grain, pesticides or even GMO feeds in order to be made.

A vegan or vegetarian who feels badly about an animal suffering will no longer have to worry about this meat since an animal does not have to die in order for it to be eaten. The animal only needs to have a needle to extract blood from the muscle and from there meat is created in a laboratory.

Not only that, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has been investing in cultured meat research for the past eight years to save animals. PETA first announced a $1 million prize in 2008 for the first laboratory to use chicken cells to create commercially viable in vitro (test tube) meat.

The debut of a lab-grown burger or meatball is the first important step toward realizing their goal of one day putting environmentally sound, humanely produced real meat into the hands and mouths of the people who insist upon eating animal flesh.

PETA has also challenged scientists to create in-vitro chicken and in-vitro pork.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that the demand for meat in North America will increase by 8 percent by 2020, in Europe by 7 percent and in Asia by 56 percent.

Here is the solution in order to be environmentally friendly.

Yet there are now vegans that believe that lab grown meat is a waste of time and waste of resources.

So the problem is not about the cruelty – it seems to be something else that bothers them.

They want people to be scarified with just plant eating. That is good for them and to each his own; however, the labs are still trying to find ways to feed the world and being earth-friendly at the same time.

Meanwhile, scientists across the world are creating virus-resistant pigs, heat-tolerant cattle and fatter, more muscular lambs, a big question looms: Will regulation, safety concerns, and public skepticism prevent these advances from becoming anything more than fascinating laboratory experiments, or will the animals transform agriculture and the food supply?

So far, gene-editing tools have jump-started research worldwide, creating more than 300 pigs, cattle, sheep and goats. Now, proponents of the field say the United States is at a make-or-break moment when government action over the next year could determine whether any gene-edited food animals make it to market.

Cows are now being gene edited so they do not grow horns – avoiding a grisly procedure in the dairy industry called “disbudding,” when calves’ horns are burned or cut off.

For farmers seeking to maximize beef production designing, they are now able to design males or other bovines that are female but fatten up like males.

Males gain weight more efficiently than females. For scientists, successful births would add to a menagerie of gene-edited animals that demonstrate the power of the technology beyond the lab, where their use is mostly routine and uncontroversial.

Gene-edited or replicated clone plants will soon be in the grocery store, there are also GMO plants that can sustain chemical bombardment that have been proven to be less healthy for people.

However, similar tinkering with the DNA of animals faces a far more uncertain future. The regulatory process for getting animals approved is more complex and treats the edited DNA as a veterinary drug — a difference that animal scientists argue will effectively kill their field by preventing innovations that could make raising livestock more sustainable, more efficient or more humane. Many advocates and ethicists agree that the current oversight system is a poor fit but think that scientists and industry underestimate potential safety concerns.

In 2016, Craig Venter and his team at Synthetic Genomics announced that they had created a life form called JCVI-syn3.0, whose genome consisted of only 473 genes. This stripped-down organism was a significant breakthrough in the development of artificial life as it enabled us to understand more fully what individual genes do.

Most recently we have seen huge advances in the use of CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that allows substitution or injection of DNA sequences at chosen locations in a genome.

Together, these developments mean that in 2019 we will have to take seriously the possibility of our developing multicellular artificial life, and we will need to start thinking about the ethical and philosophical challenges such a possibility brings up.

In the near future, we can reasonably anticipate that a large number of unnatural single-cell life forms will be created using artificially edited genomes to correct for genetic defects or to add new features to an organism’s phenotype. It is already possible to design bacterial forms, for example, that can metabolize pollutants or produce particular substances.

We can also anticipate that new life forms may be created that have never existed in nature through the use of conventional and perhaps artificially arranged codons (nucleotide sequences that manage protein synthesis). These are likely to make use of the conventional machinery of mitotic cell reproduction and of conventional ribosomes, creating proteins through RNA or XNA interpretation.

And there will be increasing pressures to continue this research. We may need to accelerate the evolution of terrestrial life forms, for example, including Homo sapiens, so that they carry traits and capabilities needed for life in space or even on our own changing planet.

All of this will bring up serious issues as to how we see ourselves and behave as a species. While the creation of multicellular organisms that are capable of sexual reproduction is still a long way off, in 2019 we will need to begin a serious debate about whether artificially evolved humans are our future, and if we should put an end to these experiments before it is too late.

https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia/ground-zero-01-07-19

Written by Ron Patton