Beneath the greenwashed façade, the promises of lab-grown meat fall flat. Lab-grown meats are not about your health or the environment's; they're a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed product controlled by patents.

Importantly, even if cultured meats aren't toxic per se, they're ultraprocessed products1 and therefore likely to cause health problems similar to those caused by other ultraprocessed foods, such as obesity,2 cardiovascular diseases, Type-2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer,3 mental health problems4 and increased all-cause mortality.5,6,7,8,9

On top of that, they're more harmful for the environment than conventional ranching. Since synthetic biology relies on genetically engineered (GE) monoculture, it creates the very things they claim to counteract, namely environmental degradation that promotes climate change.

Synthetic Biology Is Made With Junk Food Ingredients

In the video above, Alan Lewis, vice president of government affairs for Natural Grocers, reviews what goes into the making of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology goes by many names, including "gene edited fermentation" and "precision fermentation products."

While that sounds fairly innocuous, synthetic biology manufacturers rarely ever discuss what goes into the feed they use to grow the target organism, or what happens to the waste at the end of the fermentation process. That's understandable, as both raise a number of serious questions.