A major campaign is under way demanding that the European Union engage in massive public investment in techno-food to “make Europe a world leader in sustainable proteins, like plant-based, precision fermented and cultured meat and dairy” (see TECHNO-FOOD BOOSTING below for definitions of all three). And it’s already claiming to have scored “a big win”, with the EU pledging to invest €50 million ($54.9m) next year in synthetic biology (“precision fermentation”) startups as part of its support for “radical technological innovation with possible disruptive effects on existing markets”.
WePlanet (formerly RePlanet) – the ecomodernist group Mark Lynas co-founded – is behind the Fund the Future of Food! campaign. With the help of George Monbiot’s endorsement, its petition calling for “moonshot investment” in so-called alternative proteins has already attracted over 60,000 signatures, on the basis that by eliminating the need to farm animals for food, the techno-food revolution will help solve the climate and biodiversity crises. The involvement of Monbiot, by far the UK’s best-known environmentalist, has doubtless also encouraged a number of celebrities, scientists, and even other well-known environmentalists to sign onto the campaign’s open letter to the European Commission’s President calling for the EU to undertake a “€25 billion ‘moonshot’ investment between now and 2030”.
But our two-part Techno-Food Reviews will show that this campaign is based on a series of dangerous fictions. At the same time as governments are being urged to follow Silicon Valley-type venture capital in pouring vast sums of public money into these “groundbreaking technologies”, an ever-growing chorus of voices are warning that this sector offers some of the worst technology failures going.
We will delve mostly into SYNBIO FOOD in Part 1 and then provide an overview of other forms this food tech is taking, like LAB-GROWN MEAT and GROWING MEAT IN PLANTS, in Part 2, focusing particularly on the many reasons for concern about public money being wasted on techno-food. After all, €25 billion could be far better spent helping farmers transition to more sustainable agricultural practices, scaling solar and wind, or otherwise directly tackling the worsening crises we face, rather than on mythical silver bullets.
TECHNO-FOOD BOOSTING
WePlanet launches campaign for “moonshot” public investment” in techno-food
WePlanet – the lavishly (and dubiously) funded ecomodernist group that promotes GMOs, nuclear power and techno-food – has launched a major campaign, as part of its Reboot Food agenda. In an Open Letter, backed by a petition, it is demanding that the EU and the British government engage in massive public investment in techno-food. Europe must “embrace the transformative power of new sustainable proteins or lag behind as the rest of the world takes the lead”. “Precision fermentation, cultured meat and plant-based products are increasingly being recognised in government strategies to reboot our food system,” WePlanet claim.
Plant-based meat- and dairy-substitutes are ultra-processed foods that are industrially formulated and which may or may not include genetically engineered ingredients – the Impossible Burger is an example of one that does. Cultured meat (aka lab-grown meat) and dairy involve growing (“culturing”) animal cells via tissue engineering techniques (for more on this see LAB-GROWN MEAT in Part 2). “Precision fermentation” is a marketing term for synthetic biology (itself a PR term for a radical form of genetic engineering), which involves brewing up a mass of genetically engineered bacteria in bioreactors in order to obtain alternative proteins (for more on this, see SYNBIO FOOD below). All the more high-tech approaches have been running into difficulties despite a lot of private investment by the likes of Bill Gates and other Silicon Valley-type investors. This is why WePlanet is keen to help out the industry by securing high levels of public investment. And other ecomodernists, like the US-based Breakthrough Institute, are also calling for “government support for alternative protein innovation”.
Deregulation-drive targets EU legislation on genetically modified microorganisms
While the most visible GMO deregulation project currently underway in the EU is obviously the one involving gene-edited plants, there is also a drive to pull down the EU’s regulatory safeguards that mandate careful assessment of novel proteins generated by genetically modified microorganisms. The European Commission and some MEPs are being lobbied to create an “enabling environment” for any fuels, animal feed and food produced in this way, in order to make EU businesses more competitive. Among those to the fore in this campaign are the biotech industry lobby group EuropaBio and the European Biosolutions Coalition, as well as the Danish biotech enzyme-maker Novonesis, previously part of a BioAg microbe alliance with Monsanto-Bayer.
TECHNO-FOOD: NUTRITIONAL DARK MATTER
There are immense, and in all likelihood insuperable, problems around producing these foods on a large scale, but amidst all the focus on how expensive, impractical, energy-hungry, and dangerous to scale up much of this techno-food is, and how doing so will never make financial or environmental sense, what often gets ignored is the full implications of just how novel these foods are. In countries like the US, in particular, these techno-foods are reaching the market without any safety testing, despite their having no history of safe use and their long-term health effects being a complete unknown.
At the same time they are being enthusiastically championed by people as diverse as Bill Gates, who has called for rich nations to “move to 100% synthetic beef”, and George Monbiot, who, in his book Regenesis and his campaigning with WePlanet, champions synthetic (or synbio) food as an ideal source for much of the world’s protein requirements. What such boosters fail to address is the complexity of the nutritional issues this gives rise to. We’ll look more at this critical issue in the SYNBIO FOOD section that follows but here are two items that identify some of the key concerns.
Not so precise fermentation: Lab finds 92 unknown compounds in synbio milk
A laboratory discovered 92 unknown compounds in a fake dairy product produced using so-called “precision fermentation” – a radical form of genetic engineering (see SYNBIO FOOD below for more on this technology, as well as more about these findings). Iowa-based Health Research Institute (HRI) tested a Bored Cow product. Although the product is sold as “real dairy without the cow!” and “identical to traditional dairy”, HRI, by using full spectrum molecular analysis technology, found 92 small molecules in the product that are unknown to science. “They’re completely novel to our food,” according to Dr John Fagan, chief science officer at HRI. “They are things that we haven’t consumed as human beings.” Fagan scanned the scientific literature and databases to determine whether the molecules had nutritional or other beneficial properties and found nothing. “I couldn’t even find the scientific name for the vast majority of the molecules present in the Bored Cow product. They are nutritional dark matter.” HRI’s testing also found residues of a fungicide in the synbio milk at a substantial level. This may have been put into the fermentation to try and prevent contamination by fungi other than the genetically engineered one (for more on why contamination is a major issue see SYNBIO’S SCALING UP PROBLEM).
Webinar: A conversation on cell-cultured meat (video)
In a webinar looking at lab-grown meat (see LAB-GROWN MEAT in Part 2 for more on this technology), Dr Michael Hansen of Consumer Reports says, “This is going to be so primitive compared to the real meats that my question is: What's going to be the effects on the microbiome of people eating [it]? I would suspect [these lab products] are going to have quite an impact on the microbiome. What are the epigenetic effects of these new foods? Those questions need to be asked in addition to the traditional toxicology questions: ‘How much does it take to kill you?’” Regarding the lack of regulation, Dr Hansen says, “The companies themselves were talking about [getting] to decide for themselves what's safe and maybe tell the FDA [the US Food and Drug Administration] and maybe not. For such a new technology that’s horrendous that [FDA are] even considering allowing that. And it’s a dereliction of FDA’s duty if they do that.”
SYNBIO FOOD
(also known as synthetic food, precision fermented food, GMO 2.0 food, and manufactured food)
Synbio (or synthetic biology) food ingredients are produced by genetically engineering microorganisms (yeasts, fungi, algae, or bacteria) to excrete edible proteins and fats. This is achieved by inserting a gene for an animal protein, for example, into the cell of the microorganism. The engineered microorganisms are then grown in bulk (“fermented”) in biotech vats (bioreactors). The resulting synbio food ingredients – obtained by separating out the excreted substance from the microbes and “cell debris”- are often marketed as biologically identical to animal products, such as milk protein, animal fats, collagen, egg whites, etc.
Companies racing to produce and market these synbio foods have been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Bill Gates. And WePlanet, in their Fund the Future of Food! campaign calling for “moonshot” public investment in these “alternative proteins”, singles out synbio food for special praise: “Precision fermentation, in particular, holds incredible promise as it allows us to create proteins that are identical to those found in meat and dairy products.” They also say, “Precision fermentation is a cutting-edge technology that harnesses the power of microorganisms to brew proteins that are biologically identical to those found in animal products.”
These claims reflect those of industry, with the synbio milk producer Perfect Day claiming, “our animal-free dairy proteins are identical to those found in cow’s milk”, and, “Our animal-free whey protein has the same nutritional profile and culinary functionality as whey protein from cow’s milk”. But as we have seen (TECHNO-FOOD: NUTRITIONAL DARK MATTER above), HRI’s analysis of Bored Cow’s synbio milk, made using Perfect Day’s synthetic “dairy” proteins, has shown this is not the case.
Unfortunately, those hyping synbio food, like WePlanet, Monbiot, Gates and the Good Food Institute (see below), steadfastly ignore this issue. As Dan Saladino says in his incisive review of Monbiot’s book, the way Monbiot ignores “the complexities involved in nutrition doesn’t make his faith in a protein techno-fix convincing”.
Synbio milk products should have risk warning or be taken off the market
In a report in Food Business News, John Fagan said the 92 unknown compounds HRI’s full spectrum molecular analysis found in synbio milk, which have never been part of the human food supply before, need to be studied in depth for food safety and nutritional quality, including by the US Food and Drug Administration. He also said that synbio milk products should either have a risk warning on their packaging or be taken off the market.
Podcast spells out the differences between synbio milk and natural milk
Check out this very informative podcast in which food industry veteran Errol Schweizer talks to Dr Fagan about his research. As part of their conversation, Fagan talks through the Health Research Institute’s comparative analysis of organic and biodynamic milk, which showed how they contain a lot of very essential nutrients that are simply absent, or at best barely present, in synbio milk. Errol Schweizer notes that a striking example of this lack of critical nutrients is tocopherol (vitamin E). HRI’s testing showed the two forms of natural milk both had high levels of tocopherol, while the synbio milk contained zero.
Fagan also notes how Perfect Day claim they’re putting “whey proteins” in the synbio milk but that when HRI compared the amino acids in the two real milks and the synbio milk, “We found they are vastly different”. Fagan says the amino acid composition of the two most abundant whey proteins showed in one case a 57% difference from those in real milk, and in the other a 46% difference. And at the same time as failing to generate even remotely similar proteins, we have the 92 unpredicted compounds. “Whether we're looking at small molecules, or the proteins themselves,” Fagan says, “we’re seeing massive differences between the real milk and the synbio milk.” As a result, you can't truthfully say that synbio milk is nutritionally like milk in any meaningful way.
“Bleeding” veggie burger has no basis for safety, according to FDA
The nutritional and food safety issues with synbio food that Dr Fagan has identified are far from new. ETC Group, which monitors the impact of emerging technologies, was flagging up the fact that so-called “precision fermentation” is anything but precise some seven years ago. That’s when it drew attention to the safety questions around an ingredient that was produced by synthetic biology in Impossible Foods’ veggie burger. In discussion with the FDA, Impossible Foods admitted that up to a quarter of the synthetically produced “heme” ingredient in the Impossible Burger was composed of 46 “unexpected” additional proteins, some of which are unidentified and none of which were assessed for safety in the dossier submitted to the FDA by Impossible Foods.
Freedom of Information Act-produced documents released in 2017 reveal that the "FDA believes that the arguments presented, individually and collectively, do not establish the safety” of the heme ingredient for consumption, “nor do they point to a general recognition of safety”. (See also our article on why a subsequently completed rat feeding study suggests the Impossible Burger may not be safe to eat.)
ETC Group noted that this raised concerns that surpassed this one patty and implicated the whole extreme genetic engineering field of synthetic biology, and particularly the meat, dairy, and other animal proteins being grown in biotech vats instead of coming from an animal. They also pointed out that Perfect Day (which sells synthetic biology cow milk) and Clara Foods, now called The EVERY Company (which sells synthetic biology egg whites) were racing their products to market.
Warning signs from the start
It has been clear since as far back as the late 1980s that there were grounds for concern about the safety of synthetic biology. That’s when Showa Denko used fermented genetically engineered bacteria to produce the supplement L-tryptophan, creating a toxic compound in the process that killed 60 people and disabled hundreds more. There’s more on this at the link above, pp. 175-177.
Perfect Day partnering with big corporates
Perfect Day isn’t just partnering with Bored Cow, which has the first synbio milk to reach the grocery aisle, but with huge multinationals like Mars and Nestlé. Mars’ CO2COA bar, described as a “silky smooth chocolate that uses real dairy protein without cows”, has been developed using Perfect Day’s synbio whey. And food giant Nestlé has begun testing its first synbio milk product, made with Perfect Day’s technology, a drink called Cowabunga. There’s more on which chocolate now has sybio ingredients here.
Don’t be fooled: Synbio foods are not going mainstream
If biotech start-ups bringing synbio foods to market with big corporates makes it sound as if this tech is going places, then it’s worth noting that Mars and Nestlé are just tentatively dipping their toes in the synthetic water, while General Mills has already done a runner. Nestlé’s Cowabunga only went on sale in select Safeway stores in San Francisco. Mars’ CO2COA trial launch in 2022 only involved online sales, with the company saying in 2023 that it was still in test-and-learn mode. And that same year, General Mills, which launched the synbio cream cheese brand Bold Cultr in 2021, partnering first with Perfect Day and then the Israeli synbio whey protein supplier Remilk, suddenly pulled the plug on the project.
No details were given as to why General Mills had ceased funding Bold Cultr, but in July 2023 Perfect Day laid off nearly a sixth of its workforce (by email!) when it shuttered all its consumer-facing brands: Modern Kitchen (cream cheese), Brave Robot (ice cream), California Performance Company (whey protein) and Coolhaus (ice cream and frozen novelties). Those job cuts followed other rounds of layoffs that occurred over the previous year.
The possibility that its investors, who’ve pumped almost $750 million into the business, might be breathing down its neck was further suggested at the beginning of this year when Perfect Day’s founders both walked away from their operational and leadership roles at the company without retaining board seats or sharing details of their financial position.
SYNBIO’S SCALING UP PROBLEM
George Monbiot and WePlanet aren’t championing synthetic biology for the sake of niche confectionary, but as the main generator of the world’s food in what Monbiot calls a “Counter Agricultural Revolution” that he claims will mark “the beginning of the end of most agriculture”, other than for fruit and vegetables. Producing enough synbio food to feed all of humanity would, of course, require bioreactor-based production to be ramped up on a monumental scale. But there’s absolutely no convincing evidence that synbio is capable of being scaled up for the kind of mass production needed to feed the world, even if people were willing to subsist on such a diet. Here we focus on just two of the major practical obstacles, plus a key reason such a future would be extremely undesirable politically and economically, even if it were possible.
Never mind the frozen novelties, how’s it going to feed the world?
Unlike the plants that provide so much of the world’s food and fodder, energy-hungry bioreactors don’t get their energy for free from the sun but require electricity – and lots of it. Chris Smaje, social scientist, small-scale farmer, and author of the book Saying No a Farm Free Future – a riposte to Monbiot’s Regenesis – has done a superb job of breaking down the scale of the energy required, which looks to be at least four times what Monbiot claims on slender and partisan evidence in his book. You can read Smaje’s detailed analysis of the evidence here and here. And as Smaje notes, his energy calculations actually draw on studies that are “broadly sympathetic to precision fermentation, and yet they still show the high energy costs involved”. They also exclude “the considerable energy costs of building, maintaining, decommissioning and rebuilding the industrial and electricity generating plant needed in the [synbio food production] process”. His conclusion is that brewing up vats of synbio food “using electricity in factories isn’t going to cut it as a mass global food strategy”. This is particularly the case because synthetic food’s massive requirement for additional electricity generation comes on top of the already large energy requirements needed to manage the transition away from fossil fuels. As Smaje notes, “Currently, over 80% of global energy consumption and over 60% of global electricity generation is fossil-fuel based, and humanity is using more fossil energy per capita than ever before.”
Something nasty in the bioreactor
Even if energy generation didn’t make feeding the world on synthetic food a non-starter, there are other major hurdles to scaling synbio up – like contamination. As the emerging technology and food systems analyst Jim Thomas notes, “Wild bacteria and yeasts are a constant foe of fermentation processes. Once they get into a bioreactor wild type microbes can change and spoil the production and if you contaminate a batch of bacterial protein or speciality engineered foodstuff that may bring safety issues.” Contamination could shut down a facility for months. Jim Thomas says contamination problems are a key reason why synbio start-ups that promised to engineer bacteria to produce biofuels, plastics, food ingredients and more are either no longer with us or have ended up pivoting away from attempts at mass production to focus instead on niche products that “could be profitable in small tightly controlled volumes. The bacterial food future that George [Monbiot] dreams of is not such a small manageable niche. It will pose a significant technical and feasibility challenge to scale up bacterial protein without the problem of contamination.” (See Jim Thomas’s article for more on the obstacles to scaling up.)
A synbio food system will ramp up corporate concentration
There is another massive problem with sourcing much of the world’s food from biotech factories. As Jim Thomas points out, that would require “a reorganisation of the food system to be highly centralised, arranged into corporate-mediated value chains flowing from industrial processing facilities.” And that will produce an even more extreme version of the corporate monopolisation of the industrial food chain that already causes us so many problems. In fact, Dan Saladino, in his review of Regenesis, points out that Monbiot in his book first raises concerns about the concentration of power in the current global food system and then glosses over them when he sets out his Counter Agricultural Revolution: “In a gripping analysis of the food system, he describes how corporations such as Cargill and ADM exert huge influence over the world’s grain and livestock sectors. Yet it is these same companies that are becoming the most powerful investors in the race to develop new alternative proteins. ‘To the greatest extent possible, farmfree food should be open source,’ Monbiot states. The reality is the opposite.”
Sue Branford similarly points out in the Guardian that almost all existing bioreactors are patented by venture capital-funded start-ups or the huge corporations whose control of the food system Monbiot laments. Given their drive for profits, Branford says, they are “unlikely to democratise control, and the technology is likely to be used by them to extend their reach over the natural world”.
WHY MONBIOT AND THE FOOD REBOOTERS ARE WRONG
A farm free future is the opposite of what we need
Jim Thomas and Chris Smaje are among the many in the food movement who argue that we need to move in exactly the opposite direction to replacing farming with synthetic biology. As Jim Thomas puts it, “Consider which food system is more likely to fall over in the face of climate catastrophe, dictatorship or cyberattack: a handful of large electrically dependent food brewers or a distributed network of millions of small farms and local food relationships spread across diverse landscapes?” Monbiot has aggressively attacked Smaje’s support for a future based on small-scale low-energy ecological rural food economies, portraying it as an incredibly dangerous romantic idyll. But both Smaje and Thomas argue that this reflects how poorly Monbiot has researched and understood the extent to which people can be, and indeed globally often are, fed by local food. And while Monbiot claims his is the empirical view, Smaje calls Regenesis “copiously referenced, but not well researched”. There’s more on the Smaje/Monbiot debate here.
And check out Smaje’s carefully argued and beautifully written book – it’s both a great read and an inspiring antidote to the dystopian ecomodernist technophilia of Gates, Lynas, and (sadly, increasingly) George Monbiot.
Evidence from skewed sources: Our World in Data
One reason why George Monbiot may not have achieved the insight he claims on the food issue, Jim Thomas suggests, is because he has relied on skewed data that depends on “invisibilising much of the food web” – the small producers who actually feed much of the world, or which exaggerates the potential of so-called “alternative proteins” to do so.
A key Monbiot source is articles by Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data (OWID) – the Gates-backed neoliberal development data website based in Oxford. But Ritchie is also the Business Development and Sustainability Manager for 3fbio Ltd (trading as ENOUGH). This alternative protein firm was co-founded by Ritchie’s father, a former senior scientist at Syngenta, with whom she also co-authored a paper in Industrial Biotechnology promoting 3fBIO’s patented technology as halving the cost of mycoprotein (a type of protein that comes from a fungus) production and so helping “unlock its potential to be a sustainable protein source for growing global populations”.
In an interview Ritchie says of her attitude to food: “I almost exclusively use the microwave. I don’t take time to savour the process: a meal that takes longer than ten minutes is one that’s not worth having. It nearly always comes from a packet.”
Evidence from skewed sources: the Good Food Institute
Another of Monbiot’s repeatedly cited sources is the Good Food Institute (GFI), which rakes in tens of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley backers each year to promote alternative proteins. Michele Simon, the vegan founder and former head of the Plant Based Foods Association, bluntly calls GFI “the ‘alternative protein’ industry’s PR arm”. She is a staunch critic of its greenwashing of biotech processes and products, its lack of ethics, its toxic culture, and how it has skewed the discussion on plant-based foods in a way that serves the interest of GFI’s backers. Despite all this, Monbiot cites GFI and OWID as if they were objective sources, rather than having a clear interest in attracting support for alt meat.
Critiques in French of Monbiot’s Regenesis and of his ally WePlanet
Editions of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis, in which he promotes synbio food as a silver bullet for eliminating livestock-related farming, have not only been published in English but in German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and recently also in French. To coincide with its promotion in France, Radio Zinzine has translated and published online – and in a little booklet, L’Humain Monbiotique – a series of recent critiques of Monbiot’s book and of his alliance with WePlanet that originally appeared in English in The Land magazine. Please do draw these to the attention of any French speaking friends and networks who may be interested. There’s more on Monbiot’s attack on The Land magazine and his defence of WePlanet here.
Look out for REVIEW 567: Techno-Food Part 2 to get the lowdown on LAB-GROWN MEAT, GROWING MEAT IN PLANTS, and other aspects of the ecomodernist dystopia that the Food Rebooters want to see publicly funded.
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