The Bloody Secret Behind Lab-Grown Meat
by Tom Philpott

Maybe we can’t have our steak and eat it guilt-free, too.

Lab meat – flesh grown in massive tanks instead of in the bodies of sentient animals – offers the promise of having our steak and eating it guilt-free, too. No vast amounts of water-polluting chemicals to grow feed crops; no low-paid, oft-injured slaughterhouse workers; no climate-warming gases from cow burps or manure lagoons, and no billions of animals slaughtered each year to satisfy our carnivory.

Once a staple only of science fiction, the stuff is poised to land on your dinner plate this year, at least according to boosters of the cultivated-meat industry (to use its preferred name). In Singapore – the only nation to approve lab meat for sale – you can already go to the JW Marriott South Beach hotel and order steamed chicken dumplings made with "real meat without slaughter" in the form of chicken cells grown by a US-based company called Eat Just. And other cell-meat startups vow to bring product to market in 2022, pending regulatory approval.

Yet several obstacles hold back a new era of widely available animal-free burgers, nuggets, and carnitas. The biggest involves something much less appetizing than chicken dumplings: the blood of unborn cow fetuses, extracted from their mothers after slaughter.

Read the full story  Mother Jones

Hope and Hypocrisy: An Update on Northeast Organic Dairy
The Cornucopia Institute, March 16, 2022

Pointing to a decade’s loss of 100,000 small family farms, Organic Valley recently announced a plan that will hopefully distance 80 Northeast organic dairy farms from that bleak statistic.

Organic Valley is offering those 80 farms, most of which were deserted by Danone in its quest for improved financial per- formance, a new market for their dairy.

These small dairies were remaining bright spots within Danone’s Horizon brand, which is increasingly doubling down on milk from industrialized operations that produce high concentrations of manure and are likely reliant on feed shipped across the globe. The cheap "organic" milk coming out of these operations has had a crippling effect on authentic organic farms who deserve our support.

Organic Valley’s announcement offers a glimmer of much-needed hope in the beleaguered organic dairy marketplace. More good news came with the announcement of USDA funding that will provide an infrastructure boost to regional organic dairy. [highlight added –Ed.]

Read the full story  The Cornucopia Institute