Two pieces on fake food, two different final answers

Fast Company offers the latest observations on lab meat. Julie Guthman, in a book excerpt, dismisses the latest round of claims that lab meat can be environmentally more healthy than meat.

It can't. It has massive energy inputs, we know that already, and will require even more at the commercial level.

And, there's the manufacturing sterility issue. That will be almost impossible to scale up. 

All of this has been known to environmental writers who aren't peons of tech-dudebros, and known for years.

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Grist, on the other hand, touts vegan meat to the skies. It ignores how processed it is, that it has higher sodium levels than conventional cheese (as is true of Impossible Burger vegan beef) and doesn't talk about the energy inputs at all. Indeed, I sent it on Twitter a link to my post about Kraft's fake Cheddar on an Impossible-style burger, which incorporated my older piece on Impossible Burgers themselves.

I don't know if Grist has lauded veggie burgers to the skies the way the Genetic Literacy Project did, which was the subject of my older piece. The sodium levels in a veggie burger are ABHORRENT. Also, the FDA has never approved the soy heme mentioned by Grist in what Impossible ferments. And, the GLP told a flat lie about that, by way of becoming Impossible's PR flak.

Even Consumer Reports didn't have energy input costs on veggie meat, but I will venture that, as with veggie cheese, they're surely lower than actual meat, but not a nothingburger by any means, pun intended.

On veggie cheese? Somewhat more sodium than the real. All the fat is saturated.

As I say in both my older and my newer piece, the real answer is that of Michael Pollan. Eat less of the real stuff (I struggle on cheese, but am semi-demi-vegetarian on eating almost no red meat), and eat less of the processed stuff as well (freebies has been the only time for me).

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Bottom line? Guthman doesn't reference Yevgeny Morozov, but she's talking about his "solutionism." Or my "salvific technologism." It's no wonder that rich tech dudebros tout lab meat.

And, although its article was mainly about cheese, it's too bad Grist doesn't seem to look under the hood more.

Per a few paragraphs above, the answer Grist seems to offer: Veggie burgers will satisfy the meat palate now, and the implication of hold on for lab meat, perhaps, just isn't so.