By Joel Salatin, as published July 18 2025 by by Marlin Miller in Plain Values’ email. To subscribe to the print version, go to plainvalues.com/subscribe.
Foreward by merlin: Few of you know likely know the first of our three agriculture related labs was a soils lab in ’85. I first met Joel from Swope VA at an Acres USA in ’86 shortly after we returned to OH from the other side of Augusta County. My partner & father-in-law, LaVerne Horst, was quite obvious early on in our partnership of his hopes that I would follow in the trail blazing path Joel was already exhibiting in the regenerative agricultural movement, as he is now a popular speaker, writer and a household name in many circles. Forty years ago though I was preoccupied with other spiritual battles consuming three decades such that filling either LaVerne’s, or even my wife’s dreams, were not front & center for me. Therefore you read of being “Retooled & Thriving” as the foundation for this blog given me by my three sons when I was forced to retire instantly after I caused an accident on 9/18/18. God does have His ways of grace & mercy for slow learners! I include this simply because it confirms so well what happens chasing fake meat (or whatever) rainbows. A different twist to Satan’s deceptions. I seriously doubt if many of you have been so exposed prior. Enjoy!
Joel Salatin
Why are you opposed to innovation?” This is the first response to fake meat promoters when I dare to question their quest. One of the neat things about becoming an old geezer is that I can actually remember quite a few things. Over time, you can put together patterns and realize you’ve heard these statements before.
If anything triggers the “Why do you hate progress?” response, it’s daring to question the technological promise du jour. I’m old enough to remember when agricultural experts around the world began to promote feeding dead cows to cows. The protocol promised to produce cheaper beef and give the industry additional revenue for slaughter wastes. What could be wrong with that?
Farmers like me looked around the world and couldn’t find an herbivore that eats carrion. That presented a problem. Cows are herbivores. Did this scientific promise offer solutions? Or a new package of problems? Those of us who held back received the scorn and finger-wagging of scientific orthodoxy. We were backward, barbarians, Neanderthals, Luddites, anti-progress, and stuck in outdated ideologies. Our arguments about nature offering no pattern for this met contempt and dismissal; it didn’t matter. We were told, “We’re clever, and if we can get a cow to eat dead cows, who cares?”
The results took a while. But several decades later, mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) reared its ugly head and this feeding methodology quickly fell into disrepute. To my knowledge, none of the scientists who promoted the effort ever apologized. Instead, they refocused their attention on discovering the cause of this strange new malady. When they found it, they received credentialed promotion for finding the culprit of their misadventure. Instead of suffering retribution, they received accolades for finding out the cause of this new disease. How ironic.
In another case, although I wasn’t around to see it, Justis von Liebig’s 1837 discovery that all life is simply a rearrangement of nitrogen (N), potassium (P), and phosphorous (K), launched the chemical fertilizer industry that still prevails across the planet. But it’s coming to an end with the ascendancy of biology. From a new understanding of the soil food web to the human microbiome, a repudiation of “life is simply chemical” is creeping into the mainstream.
I would like to think that if I were living at that time, I would have dared to question the artificial fertilizer paradigm as fundamentally flawed because it promised life without death. Nothing in the physical world illustrates this better than a compost pile. Comprised of things that lived, it functions with trillions of microbes eating and being eaten. It’s a magnificent object lesson of the spiritual truth that in order for something to live, something else must sacrifice to feed life.
This principal holds true not only for life through Christ’s death, it even holds true for how we experience the fullness of life. True living requires dying to self and serving others. The notion that things can live without death is fundamentally flawed and speaks deeply into the notion that chemical fertilizer can ultimately offer vibrant life.
That brings us to the idea of fake meat in all its forms. Sometimes it’s called artificial meat and sometimes lab meat, but the whole idea is that it’s meat-like material promising provenance as good as the stuff that grows on an animal. The arguments sound compelling.
- Animals don’t have to die.
- Help solve global warming.
- Better nutrition—no animal fats.
While this all sounds noble, it all has as a fatal flaw: it promises life without death. Venture capitalists have poured billions into numerous companies promising to develop fake meat. But on this one aspect alone, the technology, like feeding dead cows to cows, should be dismissed as either impossible or, if achieved, developing crippling problems.
Interestingly, these companies today are floundering. All of them are nearly a decade behind their timetable promises. By now, they were supposed to capture 10 percent of the protein market. They were supposed to be in nearly all restaurants. They were going to take a big bite (pun intended) out of real beef, pork, and chicken. But they haven’t.
Due to ongoing droughts in the U.S., domestic cow numbers are lower than they’ve been since 1950. If these fake meat outfits actually had something to offer, this shortfall and exorbitant cattle prices represent a golden opportunity to launch into the marketplace. Instead, all these companies are either going bankrupt, issuing apologetic press releases, or retreating to explanations about how much more difficult this is than they anticipated.
Indeed, replicating living things isn’t easy. The Achilles heel of the whole idea turns out to be waste. How does a body handle waste? An animal has a mystical and majestic labyrinth of blood vessels, white blood cells for immune function, liver and kidney filters, and even urine and manure pipes. But a vat of manufactured cell culture enjoys no habitat for protection or functional network of distribution.
Gleaming truck-sized stainless-steel bioreactors adorn the brochures and press releases of these fake meat companies, but in actuality, this shiny equipment is still in fantasy world. The few pounds of material produced have come from vessels no larger than a 5-gallon bucket. Most of it has come from 1-gallon jugs. The reason is that every time these manufacturers try to scale up their production from a tiny vessel to a larger bioreactor, it collapses in waste.
So far, the only mechanism to remove waste material is bubbles, which pick up material and send it through filters. As we all know, kidney dialysis in hospitals work, but they are a far cry from the real thing. People on dialysis suffer debilitating complications and must take handfuls of salt pills or medications to stay alive. Dialysis, as miraculous as it is, remains a far cry from functional kidneys.
Toxicity invades these vessels of protein slurry because the concoction contains no natural immune system. White blood cells don’t exist. Blood vessels don’t exist. Trying to maintain sterility to keep foreign microbes from growing is now a completely unexpected limitation on these fake meat production systems. These outfits thought they could control foreign substances, but it turns out microbes are pretty small, and nature doesn’t like sterility.
The sheer cost of maintaining absolute sterility staggers these facilities under expensive protocols. The body does all this at no cost by sending white blood cells snooping around nooks and crannies to find and destroy invaders. In these fake meat pots, as cells grow, they give off waste. Microbes die, remember. That’s the only way cells can grow. Things eat, poop, eat, poop. It’s a never-ending consumption-exhaust system that an animal handles beautifully and effortlessly.
But in these fake meat vats, the only transportation mechanism is blowing bubbles through the medium. It works, kind of, in a gallon jug. But in a 2,000-gallon vat, such a notion is completely ineffective. The whole batch succumbs to its own toxic waste. It can’t excrete. It can’t vomit. It can’t sneeze. It can’t slobber. As living organisms, we take all these functions for granted. We don’t even think about how they work and how important they are in overall functional health.
But a vat of dividing cells, without any of these options, is doomed to implode on its own filth. Protective and cleansing mechanisms don’t exist, and slowly these darlings that dominated venture capitalists a mere decade ago are hitting a wall of biological reality.
While I don’t wish ill to these investors and these sincere-minded, starry-eyed entrepreneurs, I admit great satisfaction in seeing the “fearfully and wonderfully made” aspect of creation show itself supreme yet again. I never tire of applauding God’s design, His handiwork. While being accused of being stodgy and old-fashioned, we who kneel humbly at God’s pattern and dictate find solace in the death-to-life affirmation.
Over the years, when we see the masses flooding toward an idea, we can easily be taken in with pleasant promises. Who wouldn’t rather put on a bag of 10-10-10 instead of putting the time and energy into messy compost building? Who wouldn’t want to cut $100 off the cost of producing a beef? The world system promises comfort, convenience, and cash for all sorts of alleged progress. In the end, however, all so-called progress must submit to a divine plan and God-ordered pattern.
When we see this principle unfolding before our eyes, I’m prompted to cheer “Go, God!” I apologize if this sounds like bringing God down to soccer field fan-club status, but folks, isn’t it fun to watch God’s plan dominate? To watch Biblical patterns win? As sacred as it is to defend doctrine and theology, I relish the opportunity to defend God’s interests in day-to-day physical living. When we have this dramatic of an object lesson of spiritual truth, we should exult in an awesome win. Too often, we don’t win.
BOTTOM LINE:
Fake meat is giving us a direct, real-time visual aid into the great debate, started by Liebig in 1837, as to whether life is fundamentally mechanical/chemical or biological. Fake meat’s trials and tribulations give the faith community a wonderful opportunity to not only defend God’s greatness, but His order. The ultimate order is attaining spiritual life through a divine sacrifice. What a profound confession.
NEXT UP: Who knows what may surface in the next 48 hours before my next deadline?