“Fake” Meat?

Here’s an article from Dr. Vandana Shiva (pictured) called: Fake Food, Fake Meat: Big Food’s Desperate Attempt to Further the Industrialisation of Food, which begins:

The ontology and ecology of food

 Food is not a commodity, it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is life. Food holds the contributions of all beings that make the food web, and it holds the potential of maintaining and regenerating the web of life. Food also holds the potential for health and disease, depending on how it was grown and processed. Food is therefore the living currency of the web of life.

As an ancient Upanishad reminds us “Everything is food, everything is something else’s food.”

Good Food and Real Food are the basis of health.

Bad food, industrial food, fake food is the basis of disease.

Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine.”

It’s something of a shame that the word “ontology” is almost never used outside of books and college classes on Western philosophy, and it’s certainly not that it’s a bad choice here.  It means “the study of being,” thus, what is it to say something is?  If you ask what the ontology of food is, you’re asking what is it to be food. Excellent topic for discussion.

My comments:

I would say that at the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece and the Upanishads, the Sanskrit religious teaching in the history of Indian culture, both written in the last few centuries BCE, so little was know about disease and medicine, one needs to be careful of carrying ideas across millennia to a place and time in which they no longer have as much bearing as they did when they were initially put forth.  There is a reason that human life expectancy was about 30 years in those days, and the absence of modern medical technology certainly ranks highly among them.

Having said that, it’s inarguable that our food of today is far more degraded in nutritional value and purity than what existed before the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization and monetization of essentially everything in our lives.  Yet the central problems facing nutrition in the world today have little to do with agribusiness.  Rather, they are a) malnutrition, i.e., insufficient supplies of food and water facing 1.5 billion people in the world today, and b) the fact that a great deal of what people in developed countries eat today is some combination of sugar, salt, and fat, processed and sold in “food” products that obviously are pathogenic.  No one with any sense believes that soft drinks, snacks, fast food, and essentially anything sold in the interior of our grocery stores have any real value as food.

Another existential challenge facing human kind is the growing concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere, which is the driver of climate change, ocean acidification, and the loss of biodiversity that threatens the planet’s entire ecosphere.  Given that technology has been advanced to the point that tasty substitutes for meat are available, this could mean an end to the deforestation associated with satisfying our civilization’s growing demand for beef.

Calling plant-based meat, like Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger “fake meat” is unfair and disingenuous. Science has been able to extract the molecule called “heme” from plants; it’s naturally found in fairly high concentrations in the blood of mammals, but is also found in much lower concentrations in plants, especially the soybean, which contains leghemoglobin (aka “heme”) in its roots.

If your point is, as it seems to be, that using modern science to mitigate climate change and feed the world’s children isn’t a good thing, you’re going to find that a very tough sell in today’s world.