We live in a time when "good" can mean "actually bad but we'll pretend" and "safe" can mean "actually toxic but safer than alternatives" and "aid" that's actually a burden and "positive action" that has negative consequences, you'd be excused for thinking we're in the plot of 1984 or some Kafka-esque plot...
This is going to be a bit longer an article than I usually write. But this is a HUGE topic and really nees me to try and and condense 20-30 posts' worth of concepts and ideas into just one.
Was just listening to a podcast about agriculture and the use of factory manufactured meat products among other things. It struck me just how very little we actually know about the biology of eating and absorption yet, how we're pinning hopes on this new hope on the horizon.
And amid a push to make "unimal" meat (like what I did there? From "animal" to "unimal?" I have reasons...) are a few of us saying "Hold up. WHAT exactly is that that you're making? Is it REALLY safe? Are you sure it's just like real animal protein?" and watching the space carefully.
Take chicken. We don't even know all the enzymes, endocrines, trace elements etc in a piece of chicken protein. Chicken meat comes from a whole chicken not just off a thigh or breast. There are other organs that pump nutrients into the bits we eat. So just cloning the cellular structure won't magically fill that protein with all those micronutrients. And unless you basically (and very macabrely!) grow and lay out all the other chicken organs as well and plumb them together with tubes you are NOT going to get a "real" piece of chicken.
Also - is that grown protein going to grow as fast as it does in a (factory) chicken? Even with the best nutrient system in the business, those cells will only grow as fast as chicken muscle cells grow. And with the factory chickens, we're already so impatient and greedy that we pump them with growth hormones to make them grow faster. Is a potential manufacturer of artificial meat really going to ignore the benefits to their bottom line of GH? Of course not. Hidden in the list of nutrient ingredients, it'll be there. Anything to make it bigger faster more. More bottom line, less time.
Believe me - I HATE the killing of animals for the billions of us alive today. But I also hate the deaths of millions of us every year due to starvation, poor nutrition, malnutrition, and plain fraudulent food poisoning.
I think our species developed tolerances for certain foods - we switched from fruits and grasses to meats and vegetables and cereals over millennia - and then from raw food to cooked foods, which we're still in the process of adapting to. And we're changing the diet again, already. I keep mentioning how technology has seriously hit a vertical climb rate, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing.
It's bad because we're changing our environment and diet and social structures all at the same time and are poorly equipped to adapt that quickly. But it's also good because the hope is that better knowledge will allow us to make changes that we'll be better adapted for, and fix some of the disasters we've created along the way.
I'll just mention some stuff off the "bad" end of the scale:
- We thought we'd made a good tranquiliser/anti-nausea drug. What we had was thalidomide.
- We thought we had a good cooking oil. We had soybean oil.
- We thought we should avoid natural animal fats and made our own. We made hydrogenated trans fats.
- We thought fats were making us fat. It was sugars.
- We decided sugar was too expensive so we found an alternative. We made HFCS and metabolic syndrome.
- We thought we'd found a way to make cooking containers non-stick, carpets cleaner, and flame retardants more flame-retarding. Instead we have PFAS, PFOA, and PTFE.
- We wanted to use cars with higher-octane fuels so we developed tetraethyl lead additive for fuel.
- Farmers wanted a broad spectrum herbicide, we made glyphosate.
- Farmers also wanted their stock to be healthy and grow fast so the animals get dosed with antibiotics and growth hormones.
- We wanted convenience and we made plastics. I don't think I need to put in any examples of how badly that's ending for us.
Are you getting a picture here? We muck up so much of what we try to do with the natural world. We still don't have any clear idea of how nutrition works at the micro level but we're going to make unimal meat.
Despite knowing how little we really know, we're forging ahead with unmeats. I can see the concerns of some of the researchers, who plainly want to end the suffering of animal slaughter. But I can also see the greed on the people higher up in the chain of command who can only see dollar signs and not the suffering of the people who have become ill and died, and will become ill and die, of the unknown unintended consequences of basically experimenting on the customers.
There are quite a few items on the "good" list too - I probably don't need to itemise them because we're quite good at trumpeting those, whereas the bad examples above are still not really being talked about all that much. We tend to gloss such things over so as not to harsh the mellow too much. When things like the global warming happen, it's as if, by consensus, we avoid discussing it until we can't any avoid it any more. And that point seems to only just being reached...
The encouraging thing about that is that, once we get cracking, we usually manage to overcome whatever it is. The discouraging thing is that it's also been documented that people watched and discussed a tidal wave rolling in and stood their ground, only to have to run for their lives when it finally became obvious that the wall wasn't going to stop it. . .
Food System Concerns:
Going back to that podcast. George Monbiot has done the food research. He mentions the global standard farm and the global standard diet, and then says that food miles and being a locavore are less important than getting food. But he and his family own shares in a local orchard. He says that only the rich will eat if the food system collapses but that's not true. Only the rich and those that grow their own food and have a local network will eat. He's made sure he has a local network but to hell with anyone else.
He says the Michael Pollan truism about not eating anything your great-grand generation would recognise as food is bullshit and our diets have "changed enormously" in the last hundred years. And he's right. But he says it's also tastier and healthier than my great-grandmother's diet had been and in that he's wrong on both scores.
Agriculturally, our soils have become so impoverished by the standard farm and the standard diet that there's a very distinct and very measurable difference in the nutritional values of foods grown now compared to fifty years ago. And medically, our foods from that "standard food system" are more toxic than food grown fifty years ago, and far FAR more toxic and bereft of nutrition than foods grown 100-200 years ago.
Our soils on farms has changed beyond recognition.
Monbiot mentions the microcosm in the soil as a bit of a miracle beneath his feet and how that's the way agriculture works. But it doesn't. Standard farm farmers drench that microcosm with pesticides and fertilisers and contaminated animal manure and remove all the local flora and fauna that nourished that soil. And he then touts the regenerative farmers as the way forward but - it's a proven fact that we can't sustain the kind of volume that standard farms produce by regenerative growing - because the standard food needs standard farms and in fact if anything's going to cause the collapse of the food system it'll be insistence on doing this.
The changes to the soil biome are deep, radical, and detrimental. Once upon a time the small farms would be pretty much still integrated with the local ecosystem. There were literally thousand (tens of thousands) of species occupying that land, animals, bacteria, fungi, worms, other plants. And as George also points out, the soil was derived from the microcosms around the root systems of all those plants, the biomes around them.
But when you raze the ground and remove entire ecosystems, your soil become impoverished just by that one action. Then the microbiome around crop root systems is impoverished, and fertilisers is added. The natural predators of pest of the crop are not there, and the diseases and predation increase, and pesticides and herbicides have to be used. And now both the microbiomes around the roots of the crop - and by extension the microbiomes of our gut - are impoverished and out of balance and what we see in our digestive tracts today will be a pale shadow of what there was a scant few hundred years ago.
I'd like to believe George has the answers but unfortunately he doesn't. I'd like to say I consider him wise but I can only consider him educated - but also very foolish. There's no easy answer despite he saying there is and it's artificial meat and more standard farming and standard food processing and - anyway... I mourn the person I once considered an example.
What we actually need is for actual unsolicited research to be done. Not something generated at the behest of a food corporation that's only trying to prove that their particular brand of not very well researched, designed, and manufactured foodstuff is less toxic than "the stuff those other manufacturers pump out."
And we'll only start getting such unbiased and concentrated research happening as the crises accumulate and come up against the seawall and wash over it...
Manufactured Meat Concerns:
But for instance - how is that cell controlled exactly? We know so much about these mechanisms and yet we know almost nothing about them yet. In the human body, for example, a lot's been said about the "mind-gut" connection. Alter your gut bacteria and what they get to eat, and you change how parts of your brain function, and thus how you function. Why and how this works we're going to learn eventually, but for now, let's go with this: "You are what you eat" is one of those truisms we shouldn't overlook.
Sometimes when my gut bacteria are happy I feel energetic and in a good mood that nothing seems able to break. And when I have poor digestion and only been eating poor foods, I actually can't help feeling depressed and looking at the world through grey-coloured glasses. So for me a serve of meat is a boost.
But why exactly is it? Is it the cells of the meat alone? Is it the trace elements that the meat absorbed from the blood, from the lymph? Is it some traces of a hormone that came from the animal's liver? Or endocrine gland? If I drained out everything that wasn't a structural meat cell and cooked with that, would it taste and smell the same?
The Rabbit Disease Timebomb
Would it produce as much nourishment for me? Or would it be - lacking - something? For example: rabbit is a very easy to grow food source. It was also a very easy to obtain wild food a hundred years ago. But people who lived off the land and ate almost exclusively rabbit and berries would go to town after a year out in the wild, and shit themselves to death. They'd arrive spindly and ill and feverish, and leave feet first.
Because yes, rabbit meat is very good, it's lean and tasty and plentiful. But it has no fats. Well, a negligible quantity. People who lived on this exact diet were said to have caught "rabbit disease." Had they kept some of those rabbits and fed them extremely well before slaughtering them, they'd have survived, because those rabbits would have developed quite a lot of fat. But because the Monbiot-like ignoring of a biological fact - that we need fats and preferably animal fats - those wilderness dwellers died in droves.
And such are my main concerns. We can eat "vat rabbit" for a year or two and feel all right. But then what? Who wants to be the guinea pig for something like that?
Those women who were prescribed thalidomide weren't aware of anything wrong - they felt better for months and months. It was only after the birth that the problems became obvious, and by then it was too late. Some of the people who relied on olestra in food to lower their fat levels developed lifelong digestive illnesses. After several years.
People who were advised to avoid animal fats and consume hydrogenated fats instead for the sake of their health, developed metabolic sysndrome and got Type 2 diabetes and similar illnesses. People who without their knowledge were given foods containing soyabean oil now have genetic damage. Anyone who drinks any water that hasn't been microfiltered to remove PFAS are consuming levels of those substances way above recommended safe levels and at risk of reproductive dysfunction or already have it.
If you ate anything "white" a few decades and up to a few centuries ago it was treated with a bleach - white sugar and white flour chief among them. And the bleach caused oxidative inflammatory damage and made the consumers of those things more prone to arterial plaques, heart conditions, and possibly increased their risk of cancer by considerable margins.
Sorry George...
Our ancestors were subject to food fraud. Bread was routinely adulterated in various ways, crops contaminated with other weeds or detritus sold as pure, any meat you could get was likely to be something else as what it purported to be. (My parents lived in Austria during WWII and they mentioned that if you could buy meat or fish at all, you just didn't ask what it was or where it came from. And really, all that's changed nowadays is that there isn't a WWIII going on. . .)
I can go to the supermarket right now and pick up a piece of "snapper" that more likely came off a species of shark, "Australian" prawns that were raised and farmed in Vietnam and somehow "slipped" into Aussie prawns so now you can't use any of that pack for fish bait because it might spread white spot to our local seafood.
If the garlic isn't a little bit wilted and doesn't have an "Australian grown" label on it then I have no idea where it comes from. I'm going to pray it comes from Spain or somewhere other than China where it's routinely grown in human shit and then washed in what amounts to ditch water before being rolled around with feet into piles where people sit on the ground and fill it into boxes and bags.
Same with olive oil - I know a few olive groves in Australia but I have no idea if ALL the oil they sell came off their trees or was imported from Italy to bulk their own oil out a bit. If the latter then it's over 90% certain that it isn't anything like olive oil they're adding because no other industry in the world can consistently produce twice as much oil as they harvest without there being some bullshit involved.
I get our honey from local farm and that only because I'm fairly certain they don't adulterate their product with imported syrup purporting to be honey. Frozen berries that arrive here as "Produced in New Zealand" aren't, they're Chinese frozen berries sent here via NZ because of labelling laws.
Orange juice is not made from oranges but orange juice concentrate (mostly squeezed from real oranges and then concentrated) and if the concentrate you bought was the crop of ten tons of oranges, you'd dilute it with fifteen tons' worth of water and add a chemical flavour pack. Why? "Because the customers want a consistent flavour" is the answer you'll get - but the truth is that the company just succesfully parlayed ten tons of oranges into fifteen tons' worth of orange juice for the cost of five extra tons of water and a bucket of orange Tang.
Milk is similarly adulterated - farmers are paid by weight of milk solids, which are then diluted with water and somehow the milk solids that are extracted out of 1000 litres of milk become 1700 litres of milk on the shelf.
What's The Answer?
Not George. Not Pollan, either. And definitely not any system that depends on capitalism and a "bottom line" rather than consideration, landcare, and stewardship.
Not "bioreactors" and bacteria vats either. There's a reason behind the shapes and tastes and textures of vegetables. They are the way they are because relentless selection pressure has worked in both directions - we've sought them out for their health-giving nutrition, managed them, and finally farmed them. I can with 100% certainty say that nothing we're doing in factories, vats, and "reactors" will actually result in healthy human beings.
George is very gung-ho about bacterial slurry, because he seems to not know or even deliberatley overlook some quite well-established nutritional research results. But as intelligent as he is about soil nutrition (and even draws parallels between the four major bacteria present in both plant and human nutrition systems) he seems to think that while the soil has definite nutrition requirements, human requirements can be safely ignored.
He skirts the issues of manure/fertiliser/sewage that are really simple to break down into a few simple rules:
- Every human ultimately consumes nutrition and energy from the soil and the sun.
- Every human produces in their lifetime as many trace nutrients, fertiliser, and energy as they consumed over that lifetime.
And they are the two great rules. For the purposes of completeness you can substitute anything for the word "human" in each of those rules. We've been ignoring them for hundreds of years and that's the biggest problem with our food system right now.
Do you want to produce vegetables for cities? Do it IN the cities. It's easier to separate out food and human waste right there before it gets mixed in with the entire industrial waste stream. Because the reason for the food system failures we're getting is simple. We currently don't give a shit. Literally. Find the microbiomes around the city (and NOT in the lands spoiled by farms) and start your vertical farm by growing them. Start the way Nature does - start from the basics - trace elements, bacterial populations.
Grow plants in a FULL ecosystem - if have to include insects and animals and supporting plant populations to grow the food crops - that's the price for attaining full nutritive value again. TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Things As A Free Lunch. But we WILL get ourselves back in balance this way.
When families lived on the farm it was pretty easy to. You went and excreted in the field. Your waste food and poop went back out into the garden and the field. There wasn't usually much 'waste' food so mainly poop. And you peed in the field too. Or carried out the night pot and emptied it out there. The thing was that all that nutrient for the soil stayed in the soil. People poop and pee out roughly as many nutrients and trace elements as they consume.
What they don't excrete is the energy that they burn up in moving and living, but luckily the plants that take up all that material add the energy back in with photosynthesis. See how clever it all is, and how simple it all was?
But eventually we had villages where people kept some gardens but their flour and bulk food might have come off local farms. Sort of - kind of - overall - the resources remained in the same general region though. But that's not the case now, is it?
Our excrement goes into the same ponds as stormwater and so collects rubber residues, oils, and detergent compounds, and becomes toxic to the soil. We do sort of use some of the waste for fertilisers but it's mixed up with all the less desirable stuff.
So some re-working of sewers is needed. And if you think that's a lot of hard work, remember that we put the not so great sewer systems in to take away diseases that were killing people in cities, and that was considered worthwhile enough that every city has a sewer system and far less disease. Once it becomes obvious to everyone that we now need TWO sewer systems, we'll do it. Hopefully we'll move before the tidal wave washes over the wall . . .
But once you have this separate system, and a decent food waste service, you'll be more than halfway to being able to farm the food for a city, in the city, using mostly the city's resources. Energy is becoming cheaper. Perhaps we'll be able to mechanise the partitioning of the sewer system, the processing of the fertiliser portions, the composting, and the delivery to local farms.
So do you want to produce vegetables for cities? If you can do that, you can grow good crops in good soils in great enclosed vertical farms. If you can be bothered to use a heat still to distill waste water as well, you'll have clean water to grow the crops with. Cheaper energy, remember? There's one of the keys.
There's a lot of interest in growing vegetable crops in such small, intensive, vertical, and very mechanised farms. A lot of progress has been made in the technology and (I'm going to get so tired of saying this but it's true) technology's pace itself is accelerating so that there are hundreds of times more researchers on each of the targets we'll need to reach, so it seems almost certain that we'll see some changes in farming practices.
The changes that we'll need socially and societally will be a bit harder to achieve though. We'll have to get used to some things like - farmers who operated Standard Farms will need to be recompensed for switching to regenerative agriculture. That's just a given, you can't just shut down existing farmland and tell the farmer "that's it, pack up, piss off, go to town." but what will have to be done is to enforce no more fertiliser and pesticicde use and instead use crop and animal diversity to manage those just as they once were.
We need to lower people's food expectations. Flawless apples and perfect carrots are a Standard Farm product and not compatible. If you want those, the City Vertical Farms will have to manage such produce.
And we need to make sure that the whole economy of farming becomes a bit more distributed and equally shared. Basically, capitalism will have to be dismantled for this to happen. And before you think it can't happen, remember that our modern economy based on that neoliberal free-market-adjusted capitalism only came about in the last few hundred years and isn't a particularly stable edifice itself.
Things Really Boil Down To
We need to become better stewards of our spacecraft. We need to eliminate non-core goals. And capitalism is as non-core as it can get. Really. Just re-read the first sentence of this paragraph. We humans aren't good at seeing big overview pictures, nor at seeing longer-term patterns. But we need to learn, whether that's with or without AI, Gods, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or "financial objectives."
We've become somewhat less than human because we've been less than Earthlings in our handling of the planet. What it takes is intensive study of natural microbiomes, and learning to apply those to our foods again. The link between gut biome health and body/mental health is now established beyond reasonable doubt, but we have work to do.
BONUS: We'll learn how to set up our food systems on other planets. Assuming we still want to colonise those once we understand how unique and delicately-balanced our existence here is and how worthwhile.
This planet is a way for us to move through space. It is in every sense of the word a spacecraft. Without it and the paper-thin shell of atmosphere, we all die horrible deaths. Without the "electronics" inside the planet of rotating magnetic cores generating a shield from cosmic radiation, we'd burn slowly, painfully, over the course of a few hours. Without the life support system, this would be a parched lump of rock and sand, without so much as a lichen growing for food.
That's not some bullshit doomsday scenario. That's the grim truth of it. Look at the other planets, each missing some crucial factor - too close t the Sun, too distant. Scorched or icy. Some rotate too slowly, some too fast. Or have no molten metal core to form magnetic fields to put shields up against the merciless solar and space radiations.
We can't just build a huge cylinder in space and set it rotating. It would take decades to centuries for us to get as far as it would take to find just the material. To shield against the radiation the walls would have to be specialised and thicker than current spacecraft skins. To be able to generate gravity, it would need to be massive. Then it would take decades or more to establish an ecosystem that balanced as well as Earth's.
To be clear - gravity is not optional, if we want to remain human in form. Also if we wanted to make an Ark of it and allow us to take the entire ecosystem (that we depend on in ways we're still not sure of) with us. In short, nothing except a copy of Earth will ever prevent us from turning into a new species - or going extinct. We are truly all that dependent on this exact habitat.
And it sucks to be an astronaut, even within the protective shield of the magnetosphere they lose bone density and critical muscles if they stay in space for more than a few weeks, and recovery and rehabilitation to the planet is strenuous and difficult. In order to become adapted to space in physiology and genetics, we'll have to become something other than homo sapiens in order to do so. Also, in order to live on another planet, it would either have to be within a micropercentage of identical to Earth, or else we'd have to become a different species.
So for US, right here and right now, it's important that the planet can support our lives.
Farming in the right way is one things we need to do right away. Another is to stop using dirty fossil fuels. Remember our magnetosphere, that depends on a core that rotates in a certain way? Well, how much longer is it going to rotate if we've actually shifted the Earth's axial tilt? And remember that while we're reasonably versatile, we're also facing a declining birthrate. Could it be because we've domesticated ourselves?
For the people that don't like to follow the links and read for themselves, the first article is about a growing tension between farmers who recognise that we need to reduce our footprint on the planet and are starting to use regenerative agriculture, and the farmers that are embedded in a capitalistic contract system and want to just make money, make money, and make more money.
The second link is to an article which quotes a study that has found that our pumping of groundwater has caused a tiny shift in the Earth's tilt. And of course our magnetic field depends on the rotation of the core of molten metal inside, which is dragged along with the Earth's rotation - along the equator of its axial tilt...
And the last article discusses how farmed fish are less able to survive and breed in the wild (for reasons still not clear, but I have a few clues a few paragraphs further down) despite being genetically identical.
We really REALLY need to stop capitalism and greed, and start realising that we really are "all in the same boat" and that it's a lifeboat and our lives really do depend on that lifeboat being in good working order and that everything else is so far down the hierarchy of importance as to be risible.
I can offer you one piece of Down Under philosophy 101 to explain a bit about why genetically identical living creatures can lose their natural fitness to survive in just one generation of domestication. It's because we've taken them out of their "natural culture" and now they've lost the other important survival mechanism, their culture.
Those salmon didn't just "magically know" where their spawning grounds are. No matter how much we humans want to deny it, each species has only a certain number of "instincts" built into their genome. The rest is learned from their community.
There's an interesting side concept I'm finding developing here, and that's the idea that culture, language, communication, and myth are all necessary for life to get past a certain stage. In other words, we're more than our genetics, we're also formed by our culture and our conversations and our knowledge. This is worth a whole series of longer posts and I've now started a research and outline on it. Stay tuned.
Anyway - this explains why we're in the situation we're currently in. By not exploring all these linkages before exploiting things, we've disrupted a large part of a larger narrative, if you like, and will need to repair that in order for things to return to a more liveable state.
We need to acknowledge that we're only one group of things called Earthlings, and Earthlings are parts of Earth. No I'm not promoting some kumbaya religious nuttery, I'm saying that every living creature on the planet, every drop of water, and every particle of geological and atmospheric material on the planet.
We can't ever become a part of another ecosystem, we're stuck on this ship. And greed and capitalism almost destroyed it. We are now in the situation where we DON'T HAVE TO be greedy. We DON'T HAVE TO exploit any more of the planet's resources. We DON'T HAVE TO do the hard work any more to survive, because we can mechanise and automate almost everything. And we DON'T HAVE TO dig up new resources or burn resources for energy because we can give the task of recycling, building new renewable energy sources, building more recycling facilities, making more machines to do that and then look after our needs.
And DON'T HAVE TO take food out of another's mouth or the roof from over their heads.
We can do this right now if we eliminate the need to create "profits" and "value" from everything, and just settle for "fixing what we have already."
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