If It Isn’t Milk—It Isn’t Milk

Whatever the claims about lab-grown milk’s environmental footprint vis-à-vis real milk, the claim to identical nutritional value can be dismissed right now.

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Commentary

The world’s first “lab-grown milk” was debuted last month. In a media report, the credentials of this new confection—nutritional and environmental—were extolled at some length.

According to the article, not only is lab-grown milk, like lab-grown meat, better for the environment, but it also contains all the beneficial nutrition you would find in the milk you’re used to drinking. Using mammalian cell culture—animal cells cultivated in a bioreactor—rather than living cows, lab-grown milk “replicates the nutrition, taste, and texture of traditional dairy.”

Except it doesn’t. Whatever the claims about lab-grown milk’s environmental footprint vis-à-vis real milk, the claim to identical nutritional value can be dismissed right now. If the creators of lab-grown foods don’t know this, they should.

The quest to replicate natural foods in bioreactors is a quest fit for a Don Quixote. That’s unlikely to change any time soon.

The simple truth is that we know very little—almost nothing, actually—about the compounds that are in our food, making replication a fool’s errand. This was highlighted in a 2020 scientific paper by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Harvard Medical School.

According to Barabasi, “Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components”—but there are literally thousands upon thousands of compounds in natural foods, the vast majority of which we know absolutely nothing about. We don’t know what they do, we don’t even know what they are. Nada. Zip. And yet we know they’re there.

Barabasi coined the term “nutritional dark matter” to describe this state of profound ignorance. Dark matter, if you didn’t know, is the 85 percent of material in the universe that physicists say is there but that cannot be seen directly.

An example: A midcentury experiment with rats showed that their livers contain an unknown substance that increases rats’ endurance when they are made to swim to exhaustion. The scientists who conducted the experiment did various tests to try to identify the substance. They showed that it wasn’t one of the B vitamins, but beyond that, they were stumped. They couldn’t find out what it was, but they knew that it was there.

This, of course, has important implications, not least of all because it means that attempts to replicate animal foods using new technological processes will, invariably, fall flat. Yes, you can reproduce certain important compounds—you can get the proteins and the sugars and the fats right, more or less, and get in the main vitamins and minerals—but how can you reproduce compounds that you don’t even know exist? You can’t, obviously.

If you made a lab-grown alternative to a liver, there would be no way of knowing whether it contained that mysterious anti-fatigue factor that made those rats swim so long. And that mysterious anti-fatigue factor is an important part of why a liver is a liver.

This “dark matter” stuff cuts more than one way. Not only are traditional—real—foods full of compounds that haven’t been identified, but lab-grown meat and products made using “precision fermentation” and other molecular and biological processes are also full of these compounds. There’s a whole new realm of “nutritional dark matter” to be discovered in fake foods as well.

One study revealed that 92 unknown compounds were present in so-called synbio—short for “synthetic biology”—milk, which is produced using microbes in a process very similar to beer fermentation. Not one of those 92 compounds has any safety data associated with it. The compounds don’t even have proper names. So again, anybody who tells you “milk” produced by microbes is “nutritionally identical” to cow’s milk either doesn’t know the science or is lying to you.

In both cases, it amounts to the same thing: Consumers are being misled, and their safety is being jeopardized. We simply don’t know what drinking synbio milk could do in the long term. To have some idea of the risks associated with these novel products, we would need detailed scientific feeding studies involving lab animals. At present, that isn’t happening. Regulators are allowing themselves to go along with the convenient fiction that these products are, in fact, no different from their natural counterparts, so long as the production process itself meets safety and hygiene standards.

We might wish to speculate about why regulators are doing this. Corruption? Laziness? Lack of resources? Whatever the answer, it doesn’t really matter. The outcome is the same.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made no mention of these fake foods as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, but, in my opinion, he really should. A central plank of Kennedy’s approach to reforming the food system is that consumers should know what is in their food and what it does to them. To no foodstuff does this apply more than processed or ultra-processed food, which now makes up the majority of daily calories for significant swaths of the population, especially children, and is deeply implicated in the landslide of ill health that has engulfed the United States and the rest of the developed world.

Processed food in the United States is crammed with novel additives such as flavorings, colorings, texturizers, preservatives, and humectants—so many, in fact, that nobody knows the precise number, with some estimates claiming more than 10,000. Kennedy has made it his mission to remove many of these additives from the food supply and to bring more rigorous testing and licensing laws into force.

There has already been some pushback against new lab-made foods in red states, particularly Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has actually made the manufacture and sale of lab-grown meat illegal. Lawbreakers can expect a fine and potentially even prison time.

Free marketeers responded angrily to the Florida ban, saying the market, not the state, should be allowed to decide whether people want to eat a particular product. Like so many of the knee-jerk things free marketeers say, this totally misses the point. First of all, these so-called foods of the future have the backing of enormous corporations, governments, nongovernmental organizations, the scientific community, the media, and celebrities, all of which are pushing them, in a concerted effort, as “healthy” and “planet-friendly” alternatives to traditional animal products.

These products are not being sold to us on an open market but forced as part of a transformative social and political agenda predicated on the need to save the planet from climate change. Carbon taxes and restrictions on animal products may make red meat and cheese a luxury beyond the reach of ordinary people in the coming years. This isn’t a neutral playing field.

What’s worse, manufacturers aren’t even being honest about what their products are. At the very least, the government should hold them to a higher standard and prevent them from misleading the public.

If it isn’t milk—it isn’t milk. I know this and so do you. And nobody should be able to tell you otherwise.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.