Pharma Food — Biotech on Your Plate

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports on the “tsunami of fake foods” being rolled out by the biotech industry
Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s; they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed food product that can be controlled by patents
Creating lab-grown meat is “insanely expensive” and plagued by bacterial and viral contamination
Despite the pharmaceutical-style manufacturing, lab-grown meat isn’t considered a pharmaceutical product, which means no human testing is required
Van Hamelen recommends directing your food dollars not to corporate supermarket chains or fake food products but to small farmers growing real food

(Mercola)—Lab-grown meat may one day represent 80% or more of the “meat” consumed worldwide,¹ a dramatic departure from the way humans have eaten for centuries. Speaking with Catherine Austin Fitts of “The Solari Report,” Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports on the “tsunami of fake foods”² being rolled out by the biotech industry — and what this means for human health.

The Dutch government is among those investing heavily in lab-grown meat, using technologies made to develop pharmaceuticals. While fake meat is touted as the solution to save the planet and end world hunger, it’s plagued by technological challenges that make it prohibitively expensive, prone to bacterial and viral contamination and nearly impossible to grow at scale.³

Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s; they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed food product that can be controlled by patents. Remember that if government and corporate entities are able to take control of the food supply via fake food, they also control the people.

How Biotech Grows Meat in Labs

To make fake meat, cell lines are taken from a living organism. They’re then manipulated to grow quickly and consistently. “What are cells that proliferate quickly? Either cancers or fetuses. They have cells that proliferate very quickly,” van Hamelen says.⁴ For lab-grown meats, biotech is cryptic about what types of cell lines are actually used.

Normally, cells grow in a structure in your body. The cell lines being grown in bioreactors in labs are grown in a thin film or growth medium. In the body, the growth medium is your blood, van Hamelen explains, a complex substance that laboratories try to replicate using fetal bovine serum (FBS) — blood taken from living calf fetuses.

“It’s really gruesome how this is harvested,” she says,⁵ pointing out that this negates the narrative that lab-grown meats are made without animals. FBS is often used to grow cultured cells because of the proteins and vitamins it contains. A 2013 study stated, “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS) …”⁶

When lab-grown chicken made by U.S. startup Eat Just debuted in Singapore in 2020 — marking the first cultured meat to be sold at a restaurant⁷ — it was produced using FBS.

In order to develop synthetic “blood” instead, precision fermentation, using genetically engineered microbes, is used, along with artificial hormones, which can’t legally be added to food in the European Union. Micronutrients and minerals must also be sourced, making the process “insanely expensive,” van Hamelen says.⁸

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How expensive? Use of FBS-free medium may cause cultured meat to cost over $20,000 per kilogram.⁹ A report from the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry,¹⁰ suggested that if the cost of FBS-free mediums could be reduced, it would drive down the cost of cultured meat by 90%. This, however, is unlikely.

“[T]he report provides no evidence to explain why these micronutrient costs will fall,” Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat.”¹¹

Contamination May Also Put Lab-Grown Meat Out of Reach

In precision fermentation, GE microbes such as yeast and bacteria are fermented in brewery-style tanks under high-tech, sterile conditions. Contamination must be controlled down to 2 parts per billion, van Hamelen says, “because as soon as there is a contamination … it becomes riddled with bacteria, and you don’t have a cell culture, you have a bacteria culture.”¹²

GFI’s report assumes that cultured meat facilities of the future will be food-grade, as opposed to pharmaceutical-grade — the latter of which would increase costs even further. But a report by chemical engineer David Humbird for Open Philanthropy¹³ found that cultured meat may remain too expensive to ever come to market, assuming pharmaceutical-grade specifications and aseptic “clean rooms” would be necessary due to the slow growth rate of culture cells.

This makes them extremely vulnerable to contamination from bacteria and viruses. Humbird told Fassler:¹⁴

“Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event … There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick.

Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”

Paul Wood, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, added, “We’re saying, guys, it has to be pharmaceutical-grade because the process is going to demand it. It’s not whether someone will allow you [to run at food-grade specs.] It’s just the fact you can’t physically do it.”¹⁵

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Adding to the issues, the human body has vessels that not only deliver nutrients to cells but also get rid of toxins. In the fake meat growing process, there is no vessel system, so the culture starts to generate toxins, and there’s no way to get rid of them.

An exposé in Wired points to a number of the technological challenges that van Hamelen speaks of,¹⁶ direct from employees at Upside Foods, one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S. Wired reported:¹⁷

“One former employee says that between the factory opening in November 2021 and the summer of 2022, they saw dozens of attempts to use the bioreactors to produce sheets of tissue, but they rarely resulted in usable meat. At times, production runs were ruined by contamination that meant the meat was unsuitable for turning into a product, the former employee says.

Former Upside employees describe how batches of meat growing in the custom-made bioreactors would frequently be ruined by contamination and have to be incinerated. ‘Once they had any indication it was contaminating, they would try to just stop the run, get the cells, and get any results out of it that they could,’ says a former employee with knowledge of the process.”

Meanwhile, despite the pharmaceutical-style manufacturing, lab-grown meat isn’t considered a pharmaceutical product, which means no human testing is required. “If this is brought to market, it’s a human experiment,” van Hamelen says.¹⁸

Fake Food Has Roots in Central Control

Van Hamelen also describes a war against Dutch farmers that has emerged, threatening to push them off the land they’ve farmed for generations. As small and mid-sized farms close their doors, governments and corporate entities can scoop up the land, leaving consumers with no choice but to eat the fake lab-grown, animal-free foods they’re offering.

You can hear about this in-depth van Hamelen’s report and podcast for “The Solari Report” — Dutch Farmers and Fishermen: The People Who Feed Us.¹⁹

“In 2021, the European Union’s Natura 2000 network released a map of areas in the Netherlands that are now protected against nitrogen emissions. Any Dutch farmer who operates their farm within 5 kilometers of a Natura 2000 protected area would now need to severely curtail their nitrogen output, which in turn would limit their production,” Roman Balmakov, Epoch Times reporter and host of ‘Facts Matter,’ says.²⁰

Dutch dairy farmer Nynke Koopmans, with the Forum for Democracy, believes the nitrogen problem is made up. “It’s one big lie,” she says. “The nitrogen has nothing to do with environmental. It’s just getting rid of farmers.” Another farmer said if new nitrogen rules go into effect, he’d have to reduce his herd of 58 milking cows down to six.

Nitrogen scientist Jaap C. Hanekamp, Ph.D., was working for a government committee to study nitrogen, tasked with analyzing the government’s nitrogen model. He told Balmakov:²¹

“The whole policy is based on the deposition model about how to deal with nitrogen emissions on nature areas. And I looked at the validation studies and show that the model is actually crap. It doesn’t work. And doesn’t matter. They still continue using it. Which is, in a sense, unsettling. I mean, really, can we do such a thing in terms of policy? Use a model which doesn’t work? It’s never about innovation, it’s always about getting rid of farmers.”

Fake Food a ‘Dangerous Chapter’ in ‘the Great Poisoning’

Once you get rid of farmers, the only food choices left will be lab-grown products, insects and other synthetic foods. According to Fitts’ Solari Report:²²

“Synthetic food and lab-grown meat represent a new and dangerous chapter in what I call ‘the Great Poisoning.’ Despite an economics that makes no sense — and clear indications that these products are repugnant to consumers — money is apparently no object.

Staked by massive infusions of venture capital and burgeoning public-private partnerships, items like cricket flour and lab-cultured ‘eggs’ have already made their way into grocery stores — with non-existent or misleading labeling designed to get past unwary consumers’ defenses.

As Elze’s research shows, this is a multipronged attack, with synthetic foods also targeting pets and livestock. There is every indication that governments, corporations, and others are serious about establishing a tightly controlled food system that replaces real food and real meat with synthetic, pharma-inspired ‘alternatives.’”

One way you can fight back, aside from supporting farmers producing real food using real farming, is to contact your representatives and encourage them to vote in favor of the Prime Act. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act would allow farmers to sell meat processed at smaller slaughtering facilities and allow states to set their own meat processing standards.

Because small slaughterhouses do not have an inspector on staff — a requirement that only large facilities can easily fulfill — they’re banned from selling their meat. The PRIME Act would lift this regulation without sacrificing safety, as random USDA inspections could still occur.²³ Ultimately, the Act would make meat much more affordable and available.

The answer to food safety and security lies in a decentralized food system that connects communities with farmers growing real food sustainably and distributing it locally. Van Hamelen recommends directing your food dollars not to corporate supermarket chains but to small farmers or their intermediaries.

Two Storms, One Harvest

Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.

What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.

Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.

This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.

Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.

Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.

The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running

While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.

The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.

Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.

The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.

Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.

The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?

The System Has No Slack Left

The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.

Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.

There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.

The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.

What Joseph Knew

Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.

Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.

Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.

Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.

None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.

Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.

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