Test Tube Meat! Are You Ready For This?

All right, so I'm home on a snow day, so you notice the different office here, but I didn't want you to miss ... Hold on. Let me get rid of something here, but I didn't want you to miss today's video because I think it's an important one for you. Let me just shut that down so it doesn't make any noise.

       Okay, so today, we're talking about what's been termed "clean meat." I'm going to call it "test tube meat" or "Petri dish meat." I guess the question at hand and coming more quickly than we thought is, "Are you ready to eat meat that was grown in a Petri dish in a lab versus grown on an animal?"

         You're starting to see articles come out and announcements be made that we're progressing in that direction, that we're making progress in this, and that we're starting to be able to create animal muscle tissue basically in a Petri dish. They take a small sample of muscle tissue from an animal. They start to grow it in a Petri dish. They add nutrients to it and some electrical stimulation to it, and set the right environment, and the cells start to multiply, and you're actually growing muscle tissue.

          The goal is to ... I don't know. I guess have a lab where they're growing like beef muscle and chicken muscle, and then they can turn around and sell that as meat without ever having to raise an animal, kill an animal, any of that. To me, I mean, I follow more like a Weston A. Price, Price-Pottenger kind of ancestral or anthropological view of how we should be eating. I'm more about whole foods, foods in their natural form, get rid of the processed foods, so it's difficult to tell ... I don't know. For me, I hope it gets difficult to tell, but it's going to be difficult for a lot of people to tell where this really falls. Is this a non-authentic processed food, or is this real meat that we were just able to get without slaughtering an animal?

         What's interesting is you're seeing this partnership almost develop between biotech companies. The companies that have done ... like the Monsantos, the Cargills, the Archer Daniels Midland kind of companies. You're seeing partnerships between those and these vegan, vegetarian kind of groups that I really didn't think you'd see, right? You're seeing vegan groups and GMO groups get together for the common good of not having to slaughter animals anymore.

        Now, the way you see it presented is they compare meat grown in a lab to the conditions in the factory farms where these animals are caged up, no grass, no sunlight their whole life. I mean, it's deplorable, but they don't compare and contrast it to open-range, grass-fed animals, which I think most of us understand is a better quality meat, better quality of life for the animal, much more humane, so on and so forth.

          When they put it in those terms, you get the vegan and vegetarian groups saying, "Oh my gosh, yes. Quit killing all these animals. Don't raise them in these horrible conditions. We can finally put an end to this," and then you get the biotech GMO kind of companies saying, "Yeah, we can finally get these goofy natural people on our side and steamroll everybody in between."

         My concern is, and they actually say in the article I was reading. They're listing investors like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Cargill. They're talking about them being five, six years off. One of the comments they make, part of a sentence here, "In five or so years, customers can decide for themselves if they're up for a bite." That's fine if it works out that way. My concern is, in five or six years, they lobby the government to say, "You can't tell the difference between our meat and real meat. Therefore, you're not allowed to label it one way or the other, and people aren't allowed to know."

         Now, if you think that's ridiculous, look at what's happened with genetically-modified organisms or GMO labeling. Right now, in the US anyway, they don't really do much in the way of labeling GMOs. Nobody ever says, "People have a right to know what they're eating. You have to tell them whether or not it's GMO." The biotech companies went in and lobbied to say, "Look. If there's no discernible difference, don't make us label it." Of course, they have money and they buy politicians, and so they don't have to label anything. Why would you think it would be any different with this new clean meat that they're talking about?

        We may get to a point where you go into the butcher shop and you get a rib-eye steak, and you have no way of knowing if that was grown in a lab or if that was produced on the hoof, right? That really concerns me. If they want to grow some meat in a lab, but give me a choice whether or not I want to consume it, I think the free market will have it say. Some people will be fine with it, some won't.

         You're going to have fast-food chains that will say, "We don't kill animals. We sell the laboratory meat." I'm sure they'll come up with a better, more marketable name for it than that, and then other restaurants will say, "We don't do that. We only do grass-fed, free-range meat," and we'll be able to make a choice.

        I think that's okay, but I think what you're going to find is they get the government to say that nobody has to label it and it's defamatory if you try to say that one is better than the other, and therefore, nobody can know, and we're just left to guess what in the world we're consuming, or they find a way to mix that with ... When you do ground beef, it's 70% lab-created and 30% raised on the hoof, and you don't have any right to know that.

            As I see the information coming out, I'm pretty concerned about it. I would love to see animals be treated more humanely, and I think grass-fed, pastured, free-range ... companies like North Star, Bison that raise their bison out in the open and they don't slaughter them in the regular factory manner. Companies like Butcher Box that use pastured and grass-fed animal products.

         I think those are fine. I think they can be very healthy for us. I think the animals can live out their normal life. I think they can be slaughtered relatively humanely. I mean, they are being killed, but other than that, I don't think it has to be done lined up in a row in horrible conditions.

          Yeah. I just wanted to bring that up and let you guys start thinking about it. Now, my position may not be popular on this. I know I'm probably going to get a lot of flack for it. I have plenty of friends and patients that don't consume meat for what they feel are ethical reasons, and I think that's great for them. It's not the way I live.

         It will be interesting to see the exchange of ideas underneath this post, so go ahead and put your thoughts down. Let me know if you think you're okay with eating laboratory-grown meats, if that makes you nervous, if you're comfortable with it, if you think it's the best thing ever, it's our next step in becoming ethical beings. I don't know, so let me know what you think, and for those of you, my friends out there that are hunters and carnivores, don't leave me hanging. All right? Say a few things. Pass it around to see what kind of information we get, but I just wanted you to be aware that this is probably a few years away from coming to some grocery store shelves, so just stay informed.

           All right. On this cold, snowy day, we got some ice here in Houston. I wasn't able to get into work today. I don't know if I'm going to be at work tomorrow, so you may get another post from the same office. Sorry about the mess behind me. Anyway, pass it around. Let me know what you think. Until next time. Stay warm, eat for your health, train for performance, and live the life you love today. Thanks.