 |
| Synthetic Food is deadly ! |
But they are claimed as such - by a few dishonest scientists and many, many, many journalists.
Meat grow in a test tube from cells is truly an amazing feat - but it is not synthetic food. Like bread and beer - it is merely a processed food : food made out of other food.
If all life on earth died but for Man, humans would soon voluntarily starve to death, rather than go on eating the synthetic 'food molecules ' we can currently make. But all the food we actually do eat and crave to eat, originated in food synthesized by other, more humble, beings.
Only Skygods deny this basic - grounded - fact of life and of food.
Is it a firm rule that all journalists must learn about the Food Chain in Grade 8 and then must forget it by Grade 9 ?
Using light energy, only some bacteria and all true plants actually synthesize food from out of some basic chemical elements : carbon, hydrogen and oxygen mostly.
Actually from carbon dioxide ,water and a bit of minerals - even they can't make food from pure chemical elements.
This is because very few pure elements actually exist in nature : almost everything in the world is built up from raw natural compound molecules.
Plants do the job well enough to supply all our basic energy foods like sugar and starch, the simplest molecules we call food.
But we animals eat plants - the tender parts of them anyway, break them down into very simple molecules and then make some of them into much much bigger molecules , ie more complex food aka fat and muscles/meat.
Some of us animals must at least occasionally eat other animals as well as plants to be fully fed and to survive - humans are one of those kinds of animals.
(Some living things - bacteria and all fungi (aka mushrooms) - survive by eating the tough parts of plants and animals the rest of us can't digest . They break them down further into simple molecules and then re-build some of them into bigger molecules.)
We human animals can and do make in a factory some of the simplest foods molecules - vitamins. But only because the irrational fad for artificial vitamins supports the high cost of making them artificially.
But we do not make the vital complex molecules we need to survive - they are both too big and too uniquely shaped (ie stereoisomers) to be cheaper to manufacture rather than simply letting plants and animals do it for us on a farm.
But note well, these are food molecules, not "food" as we conventionally understand it - ie amino molecules but not meat.
A total array of truly synthetic food molecules ,enough in variety to completely supply our body's chemical needs, can and have been made.
But when people eat them and only them (as during an infamous 1965 space experiment), they soon resolve to starve and die rather than eat them any longer.
Our body craves solid, chewy, fibrous, tasty food - not just the chemical powders found inside them.
Yes, we can take basic elements and make the amino molecules that go into things like meat - and yes we can can make meat-like products from other food materials or from living cells - but we can't yet make,simply from chemical elements, a fully synthetic meat.
Calling synthetic amino molecules "meat" and calling meat made from living cells "synthetic" are simply lies - and scientists, even if they are restlessly seeking grants and fame, shouldn't say them.
(Big shout out to Dr Vladimir Mironov !)
But more importantly, stupid journalists shouldn't report them saying so....
