{"id":4026,"date":"2023-04-29T14:24:06","date_gmt":"2023-04-29T14:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/?p=4026"},"modified":"2023-04-29T14:29:31","modified_gmt":"2023-04-29T14:29:31","slug":"__trashed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/29\/__trashed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Playbook for GMO 2.0 is Going Exactly to Plan, Brands Step in to Combat it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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(Brave Robot, a GMO synbio dairy company, exhibited at the 2022 Natural Products Expo West trade show.)<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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How Organic Insider operates:<\/strong> We accept no advertising, we have no paywalls and we make our newsletters free to everyone because vital information about our industry needs to get out to as many people as possible. Please consider supporting our work<\/a>, whether you are an individual or a company. Thank you so much.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If you are eating \u201canimal-free\u201d dairy or meat products that taste nearly identical to a traditional animal product, you should be asking plenty of questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And more often than not, what you will discover is that these foods are anything but \u201cnatural.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aware of what consumers may find out and not wanting to make the same PR mistake twice, the GMO industry has intentionally introduced sophisticated and deceptive names such as synthetic biology, cultured meat, gene editing, precision fermentation and cellular-based seafood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further muddying the waters is that these companies have been funded not just by the likes of Bayer and BASF, but by Silicon Valley heavyweight investors who have bankrolled some of the largest technology companies in the world, giving these start-ups instant credibility and a certain degree of protection from criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even more, the organic community is being aggressively courted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are enlisting people like acclaimed farm-to-table chef Dan Barber<\/a> and are purchasing booths<\/a> at Natural Products Expo West, a show that most attendees believe is only for \u201cnatural\u201d products. And these booths are interspersed throughout the show, sharing aisles with USDA organic and natural product companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During \u2018The State of Organic & Natural\u2019 keynote presentation at this year\u2019s Expo West, we were told<\/a> that \u201cThe only way we are going to meet demand, as a planet, is through cultured meat.\u201d Cultured meat is meat produced from cells, without having to raise or kill animals. This is synthetic biology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As these GMO 2.0 companies have raised billions of dollars, with Silicon Valley salivating over the prospect of owning a piece of the patent-protected food supply, their marketing tactics have been an unmitigated success at manipulating the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCompanies call these things \u2018synthetic biology\u2019 and \u2018fermentation technology,\u2019 but these foods are all just GMOs,\u201d said Michael Hansen, PhD, Senior Staff Scientist at Consumer Reports.<\/a> \u201cThey are using terms people do not understand, so that people will not realize these are GMO ingredients.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, the problems with synthetic biology are the same ones that we have had with traditional GMOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are often highly processed foods, which are associated with increased calorie intake and weight gain,”\u00a0according to a study<\/a>\u00a0from the National Institute of Health. And while these companies may be perceived as tech start-ups, the products they produce are designed to fit into an industrial food system, and society is clearly moving against this trend and toward a more agroecological-based food system. Additionally, they are introducing novel, genetically-engineered proteins into the food supply that will have unknown potential impacts on the human microbiome and the environment, and these companies are self-affirming GRAS status with the FDA, a voluntary process\u00a0that is incredibly problematic<\/a>\u00a0and falls very, very short of protecting the consumer,\u201d said Michael Hansen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEW CAMPAIGN TO CLARIFY THE FACTS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gravely concerned about this issue, Albert Straus, founder\/CEO of Straus Family Creamery,<\/a> has partnered with the Non-GMO Project<\/a> on its first-ever, dairy-focused campaign during National Dairy Month to bring awareness to the agricultural and environmental threat of synbio dairy called \u201cHow Do You Milk a Microbe?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSynthetic biology is a threat to our farming system and healthy soils, which take care of our land, animals and communities. As such, it will continue the decline of organic family farms and create a less healthy food supply for our population,\u201d he said. \u201cOrganic dairy farming and milk production are the foundation for a carbon-neutral dairy farming model, something that we\u2019ll achieve on my farm by 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The benefits of regenerative organic farming practices and leveraging the soil\u2019s ability to mitigate climate change somehow get lost in the discussion when it comes to synthetic biology. Overshadowing it is the blindly accepted assumption that because synthetic biology does not use animals or CAFOs,<\/a> its environmental impact is much less deleterious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But is that true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGiven that their patents reference the need for large amounts of feedstock, it\u2019s clear the industry is just ramping up demand for more GMO seed and cheap GMO crops. This reinforces the loss of biodiversity through monocultures and pesticides, while reducing the vitality of our rural communities by concentrating wealth in corporations, \u201d warns Alan Lewis, Vice President at Natural Grocers.<\/a> \u201cThe dependence on petrochemical fertilizers and tillage releases tremendous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The same cows that synthetic biology wants to replace with \u2018sustainable\u2019 fermentation vats are actually critical to recapturing carbon via healthy pasture lands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, \u201canimal-free\u201d dairy proteins have found their way into everything from ice cream to cream cheese to snack bars, but many shoppers, food manufacturers and retailers are unaware that these are actually unlabeled and unregulated GMOs. Further compounding the problem is that consumers may be misled into thinking that these products are \u201cnatural,\u201d which could potentially take market share away from the organic industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The introduction of synthetic biology products will seemingly only continue to accelerate, and according to the biotech industry\u2019s Good Food Institute, nearly $2 billion has been invested in developing \u201cprecision fermented\u201d products like synbio dairy in the past year alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is so much money being directed into this category despite consumers increasingly moving away from GMOs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis appeals to the folks in Silicon Valley because it is a new technology. These companies come up with nice stories to tell, but they do not have to be connected to scientific reality; their stories just have to sound plausible. The people throwing money at this do not fully understand the technical issues. Look at Theranos.<\/a> Any good analytical scientist could have told you that taking a drop of blood and getting all of the tests that they promised was not really technically feasible,\u201d put forth Michael Hansen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/td>\"\"<\/td>With gratitude,Max Goldberg, Founder<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The GMO Monster @ whatseatingyoukid.club<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“These are often highly processed foods, which are associated with increased calorie intake and weight gain,” according to a study from the National Institute of Health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[868,153,867],"class_list":["post-4026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gmo","tag-cultured-meat","tag-gmo","tag-natural-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4026"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4031,"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions\/4031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}