Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Bill Gates' Self-Serving Absurd Statement on Synthetic Meat

Everybody has been making fun of Bill Gates' almost comically wrong statement about eating synthetic meat.   Everybody talks about the easy quote, that the bottom 80% of income countries won't be eating synthetic meat, so rich countries should eat nothing but synthetic stuff.  You'll get used to the taste!  Honest!  But nobody has talked about the rest of the quote:
“Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”
My turn to make fun of it. 

First off, how is this different from the Massachusetts environmental officer talking about breaking your will to keep you house warm in winter, or driving a car somewhere?  Gates is saying they're going to use regulation to break your will to eat meat.  The Masshole guy was forced out of office.  The only difference is that Gates isn't a public official who can be forced out of office. 

Gates' reason for breaking your will is that tired, old claim that cattle release too much methane, which everyone refers to as cattle farts when they're really burps, but the claim is disputed by actual agricultural scientists who have investigated it and is widely considered nonsense. 

One of the memes going around is that people say it's remarkable these companies take all sorts of plants and stuff and make it taste like beef, but cows must be smarter because they've been doing that forever.  When I say "all sorts of plants and stuff" I mean it: 


There's at least six ingredients in that list that I wouldn't put in my body, but the issue is deeper than that.  I actually did a blog post on this topic back in 2019 (two years and five days ago), which I'm going reproduce here. 

The Bullshit About Cattle Farts

If you pay attention to the Green New Deal and the incessant screaming from the vegan community, you'll think that cattle farts containing methane are the worst threat to the climate.  The UN has backed this lame idea before but their claims have some serious mistakes in them.  Mistakes or lies.  I have several good sources on that, but The BlazeTV released a short video of an interview with Dr. Sara Place, an academic researcher in animal science and sustainability.  This is only five minutes long and gives a good start.


First off, the methane from cows is 1.8% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US.  Second off, methane doesn't come from cattle farts, it comes from cattle burps.  I realize that might be a minor distinction, but the EPA, those high priests of junk science, jumped on the "regulate cattle farts" bandwagon under Obama.  The UN claims cattle create 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than comes from transportation - but they're lumping in all livestock, not just cattle, to include poultry, lamb and all sources of meat.  They're also including the effects of animal feed production, feed harvesting, feeding the animals, the farm vehicles that tend to these animals and everything up to the emissions from the slaughterhouse.  A third of that 18% is blamed on deforestation specifically in Brazil.

Both of those summaries are dishonest.  First, it's not fair to blame methane production in chicken farming on cattle farming, and it's unfair to include everything that the goes into food production to just the tailpipe emissions of vehicles rather than the equivalent entire life cycle associated with transportation.  Second, the part about deforestation is dishonest for two reasons; the easiest being that there's no equivalent deforestation in the US, or in other parts of the world.  In the US the story is reforestation.  We have more trees today than a hundred years ago.  The other reason is that not all grassland could be forest and not all forest can convert to grasslands.  There is some relation between the two, but it's not simple subtraction.  Simply, much of the planet can't be dense forest and can only be grassland. 

One of the most interesting videos from Ted talks about science is a 2013 talk about desertification by Allan Savory.  Dr. Savory talks about discovering that large herds of grass eating animals restore grasslands and reverse the damages to the environment.  Yes, herds of life stock "save the Earth".  It's a story of how a hundred years of following the agricultural scientists' best recommendations and removing livestock converted lush grassland to wastelands, and how reintroducing livestock has restored millions of hectares of that wasteland to productive grassland.  The before and after pictures toward the last few minutes of the video are jaw-dropping. 

Dr. Savory recommends eating the livestock, which naturally makes the the vegans haaaate him with a white hot, burning hate.

An interesting guy I've heard talk on this subject several times is Dr. Peter Ballerstedt, who calls himself a leader of the Ruminati.  He's an infrequent blogger, and regular speaker at various conferences.  Here's a quick summary of the basis for a new video, We Need A Ruminant Revolution.
Human beings exist because of ruminants. Today’s societies rely upon them. Humanity’s future depends upon improvements in the productivity and efficiency of worldwide ruminant animal agriculture. Like the general public’s confusion of what constitutes a “healthy diet,” tremendous misunderstanding exists regarding the environmental role of ruminant animals. Human beings didn’t evolve to eat meat, they evolved because they ate meat - and because they learned to cook and process meat and other foodstuffs. Unsurprisingly then, diets rich in butter, meat and cheese have been shown to promote human health and development. Of significant worldwide impact, such diets can correct the symptoms of metabolic syndrome, offering hope in arresting the current worldwide epidemic of chronic diseases.
The dire predictions from Anorexia Pistachio Kotex and her Democratic Socialists of America comrades that say we need to end cattle farts would be laughable without the need for a single fart joke.  Except it's not funny, it would kill many people and make the planet worse off because the planet needs livestock.  The planet needs ruminants.  You can say they were designed for each other or you can say they co-evolved this way, but the result is the same.  Like everything the socialists say, this argument is demonstrably wrong.

I think I'll leave the last words to an MD who advocates for high quality meats and minimally processed foods (which that synthetic meat is most certainly not).




10 comments:

  1. I, being a complete jerk if not 'the south end of the digestive tract', have no problem voicing my concerns in the grocery store as to what had to be done to the poor soybean to make it taste like cheese, meat, anything except cattle feed.

    Done it in a 'health-foods' store.

    Gotten into debates, and won, with vegans and vegetarians.

    Not the least, it's a known scientific fact, from over a century of medical studies, that only animal fat will allow a baby's brain to develop fully. That means high-test milk, non-lean meats and so forth. Not to mention that meat proteins are required for the development of the brain and other body parts.

    You can live a healthy and full life eating only meat. Not so much when grazing.

    And... farts? Guess who farts far more, the meat eater or the vegan? If you said vegan, well, you are correct.

    Not to mention, human digestive tracts are classified basically as mid-length in comparison to our bodies. Which means we are omnivores, capable of eating pert near anything short of grass and other worthless plants and getting a modicum of nutrition from it.

    Short digestive tract animals are carnivores, the shorter the tract the more obligate the carnivore is. Like your local house cat. Very obligate carnivore. Can't process vegetable proteins at all. Going vegan on a cat will kill it. Slowly. From starvation and organ death.

    Long digestive tract class animals are herbivores, because it takes a looong digestive tract to extract any nutrients from crappy level nutrients found in leaves and grasses.

    There are others, like sloths and koalas, that eat low-nutrient foods and just take a long time to process as their systems are designed to slowly digest bad food levels. It's why the sloth moves so slowly and the koala sleeps so much.

    Meat good. Meat very good. Be a processed vegetarian.

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    1. I hang with 100% carnivores (well, online) who never let vegetative matter cross their lips. Virtually all of them started it as an elimination diet to find the cause of something that bothered them. Then they stick with it.

      You're spot on about digestive tract length leaning more omnivore than plant eater. Our teeth also say omnivore.

      With the exception a stunt or two, nobody takes meat and makes it look and taste like veggies, but virtually every vegetarian/vegan wants veggies that taste like meat. The Beyond burger (above) and the Impossible burger are Frankenfoods. Not me, man.

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    2. Also the connection of soy based isoflavones, which is essentially a plant synthesized estrogen. Those Phytoestrogens might be a contributing factor in the declining masculinity of the Starbuck$ swilling population. The egg heads at Harvard say it is a myth, but what would you expect from a staunch liberal establishment.
      Feeding the male population a chemical that reduces the level of testosterone, even a marginal amount, is bound to have effects - long term.
      While I am not a Biologist, I did stay at a Motel 8 last summer. Seems good enough to enact national policy, so it should work for me, as well.

      Leigh
      Whitehall, NY

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  2. Bill Gates can eat what he wants, no problem. It's when he tells me what *I* have to eat that he has a problem.

    I make minimal use of his products, and I'm sure not buying any "food" he says I have to.

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  3. Would you trust a man known for releasing buggy (pun intended) software with making your food?

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    1. Especially if that man also just invested heavily in a synthetic meat company and also bought up lots of farmland.

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  4. Very interesting information. I will need to read/view some of these.

    It is always curious that vegetarians/vegans want foodstuff that tastes like meat but is not. Most of them seem to have a "moral" reason not to eat meet and for vegans use animal by-product that is generally rooted in Gaianist and other pagan religions or pseudo-atheism. The only exception I know of are the Seventh Day Adventist who hold to a pre-Noah dietary rule from Genesis.

    The Socialist just want to kill off as many people as possible, especially those Conservatives. I wonder if they are not somehow involved in the goal of reducing world population to a more "sustainable" level, maybe like the 500 million goal on the Georgia Guidestones.

    I second Leigh's statement on the Phytoestrogens. I have heard that for years. The information I have read states that they most effect young male children. I have had tofu and have no great desire to eat it though I will.

    Why is it that Bill Gates and other very wealthy people think that just because they made a lot of money, sometimes underhandedly, they have a right to dictate what others should do? As a Christian, notably now at the beginning of Lent, I am reminded that all humans are the same -- "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of our self made success makes us no different to He who counts. Alas, most of these people have no religion or faith but that of themselves.

    (BTW my blog which is pointed to is temporarily down as the power supply in the computer it is hosted on bit the dust when the power went down here in South Central Texas and I can't get one for a few days.)

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    1. "Why is it that Bill Gates and other very wealthy people think that just because they made a lot of money, sometimes underhandedly, they have a right to dictate what others should do?"

      I think it's from sycophants that surround them. They're always complimented and told how wonderful they are by people hoping he'll just drop a million or two on them. Eventually they believe it. And maybe I have no idea and I'm just way out of touch.

      The "moral objections to eating meat" and motivations could be pages of blog posts. It's no big secret that W.K. Kellogg, who founded the cereal company, invented corn flakes to make young boys more docile in classes, and especially to stop them from masturbating. So we get a country full of girls like Denise Minger who goes vegan and ends up with teeth needing to be pulled, hair pulling out in clumps and other disastrous symptoms of malnutrition because everyone knows veggies are good for you, right?

      The state of food science is so screwed up that I think it can't be unscrewed. Too many people jumping to conclusions that aren't there, too much throwing out data that doesn't fit the theory instead of trying to understand them. Too much confirmation bias. Not to mention outright corruption.

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  5. I've had more than one vegetablist friend chirp to me about how wonderful their fake steak was. My response to that is generally that if your body and palate were satisfied by that, it wanted a steak.

    All of the women in my family had cravings for stuff when pregnant. Stuff their body wanted - bacon, dairy. My daughter can't usually eat dairy, but with every kid she's had, she's craved it and it was tolerated when she ate it.

    I had a doctor tell me that I should eat natural foods. Closer it was to how God created it, the better. For instance, rare steak instead of processed meat patties.

    God didn't create fake meat. That is the work of the evil one.

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