John Klar: Let’s get cows, and our food supply system, right-side-up

John Klar for Vermont

John Klar with his cattle

As discussed in a previous commentary, efforts are underway to create synthetic meats to replace cows. “Science” has discovered increasingly powerful ways to make junk taste like food, for profit. This includes tricking the tongue’s taste mechanisms, which “make food faster than drugs in exciting the brain.” (“Hooked: Food, Free will, and How the Food Giants Exploit our Addictions,” Michael Moss, 2021). To profit from vat-meat, costs must be addressed but also consumers must be persuaded to consume the stuff.

And that’s where the biggest lies about cows come in. The Gates/AOC/PETA effort is to peddle this garbage under the Orwellian label “Clean Meat.” As explained by the American Oil Chemists’ Society:

Also known as cultured meat, in vitro meat, or lab-grown meat, “clean meat” is the term preferred by proponents because the meat is reportedly cleaner than meat from slaughtered animals in terms of both sanitation and environmental friendliness. … The term “clean” may also refer to the conscience of the consumer because no animals must be slaughtered to produce the meat. Instead, stem cells are removed from an animal by a harmless biopsy and then cultivated in vitro to form muscle fibers.

The animals won’t be harmed, they will be eliminated:

Clean meat production is predicted to be about 6 times more efficient than conventional beef production. Because stem cells multiply exponentially, a herd of about 150 cows would be sufficient to feed the entire world, versus the 1.5 billion cows currently on the planet. … Fresh samples of stem cells would be periodically removed from live cows and proliferated, since stem cells can become genetically unstable after many divisions. Several companies are exploring options for maintaining genetic stability so that animals can be removed entirely from the process.

Imagine: Bill Gates and a few corporations will own not only all the patents to soybeans and other plants, but the means of factory production of all meats — and they argue that is a good thing for humans and the planet!

Only, it’s not. It is the opposite of beneficial for the planet. Vat-meat would be dependent on soy, corn or other plant-crops that are currently unsustainable, highly polluting, and poison humans with glyphosate and other chemicals. Industrial agriculture depends on massive inputs of fossil fuels for planting, spraying, harvesting, etc., but also for fertilizers made from costly natural gas. Rotationally-grazed cows (as opposed to CAFO animals) bypass these costs, vats don’t.

But more, cows are the best known way to restore eroding soils, create organic fertilizer alternatives, retain and filter water, and nurture miraculous microbial life in all-important soils. As Nicollette Hahn Niman explains in her 2021 book “Defending Beef“:

The net effect of cattle in the food system is to benefit the world’s waters. There is simply nothing better at absorbing, holding, and filtering water than lands densely covered by grass, and there is no better way to keep those grasslands biologically diverse, hydrated, and vibrant than by periodically grazing them. (p. 92).

It is intriguing to contemplate that the “ethical people” who elevate animals above humans seek to eliminate all cows to “save them” from suffering: “clean meat has the potential to drastically reduce the suffering of billions of common livestock animals such as cows, pigs, and chickens.”

Might humans be similarly liberated from life to save them from themselves? Curiously, the cow-concerned want to exterminate cows from the planet, and humanity’s only shot at preventing desertification and starvation along with them.

The far left are so far out on cow comprehension that they threaten the world. Replacing animals with Gates-patented stem-cell-vats to create steaks is horror-show Frankensteinian stuff, coming to a theater near you. Profiteer Gates must be viewed with skepticism. As Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf pose the issue in their 2020 book Sacred Cow: the Case for (Better) Meat:

One must wonder how a row-crop-centric food system, which hinges on the use of these unsustainable inputs, can be put forward as a solution to global food security. (p. 129).

There is nothing to wonder about: this is all upside-down. Meat comes from sun to grass to animal and then back to soil, not the techno-vat cycle of industrial dependency and cancerous imitations of life. If cows disappear, humans will seek food by putting their heads in the sands that replace their decimated farmlands.

The answer is to free farm animals from industrial confinement, and use rotational grazing on pastures and fields to reduce the use of fossil fuels while rebuilding depleted soils. This will also reduce the need for antibiotics in livestock and thus the risk of foodborne parasites that breed in unnatural confinement facilities.

Let’s get cows, and our food supply system, right-side-up.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2022. All rights reserved.

Images courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Public domain and John Klar for Vermont

6 thoughts on “John Klar: Let’s get cows, and our food supply system, right-side-up

  1. John, the global elites want us to eat Soylent Green and insects. Bet they won’t. They, like the residents of Martha’s Vineyard, are virtue-signaling without substance. Bet they will chow down on steaks while the rest of us crunch insects. They are forgetting one thing, though. God. They will not get away with this. He is laughing up in the heavens at their pitiful efforts to turn His creation topsy-turvy for their own lust for power.

  2. Gates said in 2010 that the population of this planet needs to be reduced and the plan to synthesize meat will give him the means to introduce chemicals that will ultimately turn the human longevity in the reverse direction.

  3. John. As much as I’d like to see you as the Governor of VT, you’d also do the Dept. of AG a whole lot of good too.

    Another point:
    Consider the amount of people today with food allergies- a great deal of them are children with growing bodies.
    Many people are suffering the fallout of vaccines that is affecting their diet.
    Imagine what this chemical laden ‘food-like product- would do to these people?

    A ton of us would simply refuse to eat this junk.
    I predict a whole lot of starvation… but then I suppose the Left would be happy about that anyway since they believe the planet is over populated anyway- and they are in control of depopulation- they feel.

  4. It has been reported that if all Americans gave up eating meat one day a week, the water saved would be sufficient to end the drought in the West. True or not, the fact is this planet does not do too well in trying to carry 8 billion people. As much as I detest everything Bill Gates touches (but he’s rich, so he must be right!), in terms of keeping our global population alive, Soylent Green, insectivorism and proteins from Petri dishes might be in humanity’s inevitable future.

    Here in Vermont, of course, we are insulated from much of the reality the rest of the world faces, but to keep things the way they have been we should pay attention to “investors” buying up our livestock resources they way they are already buying up our housing stock. Once they have it, they can deny it to whomever they choose. Markets, don’t you know?

    • Sorry to disagree with you. When the population was much smaller, we had massive famines, endless wars, plagues, horrible air and water pollution. For example, in 1800, the world wide human life expectancy was 27–and the world wide population was 1 billion. People died of all kinds of ailments, including foul air and water that was often no different than sewerage. Thanks to human enterprise, freed at last after millennia, the world wide human life expectancy is now 73–after only 220 years.. Individual freedom has made human life and the planet far better. But, as in any age, the Elect believe that they know better and the minions need to be controlled. The newest plans by climate alarmists are just another example. By the way, I guess todays environmentalists are happy all the massive herds of buffalo, elk, reindeer, elephants, mammoths and other large mammals have been killed off. Otherwise, the planet would be really hot by now.

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