(Natural News)—The fake meat industry is now demanding public subsidies to prop itself up, given that customers have spoken with their wallets and said “no” to lab-grown meat.
Data from AgFunderNews cited by the National Pulse reveals that the industry is in dire straits due to dwindling money. Funding for the lab-grown meat sector peaked at $989 million in 2021 but dipped slightly to $807 million in 2022. This dropped by almost 80 percent to just a mere $177 million last year.
“Industry experts claim they need substantial government assistance to survive, with various sectors within agrifood tech seeing a steep decline in investments since early 2022 and private capital for [lab-grown] meat almost vanishing,” the Pulse pointed out. “The decline in funding has prompted many startups to reduce staff, consolidate operations or, in some cases, cease operations altogether.”
Robert Jones, vice president for global public affairs at Dutch startup Mosa Meat, highlighted this issue during the Future Food-Tech Summit in late September. He told participants: “There’s a valley of death we’re not going to cross as an industry without a massive infusion of public investment.”
Andrew Ive, founder and managing general partner at venture capital (VC) firm Big Idea Ventures, echoed Jones’ sentiments. He emphasized that VC money won’t be funding capital expenses for large-scale commercial facilities for fake meat production.
“I think it’s going to take [a country] like the Netherlands or the [United Arab Emirates],” he told AgFunderNews, stressing the immense capital needed. “Maybe Saudi Arabia. It could be … Japan.”
Ive continued: “For me, what makes sense is [the mix of] cultivated with traditional meat – a bit like adding ethanol to gasoline for cars. So I think the way this will ultimately be rolled out in the marketplace will be where 20 percent of the meat content of a dumpling in China, for example, will end up being cultivated meat as opposed to traditional meat.”
Customers have decided: Fake meat is a NO for them
According to the Pulse, the economic case for lab-grown meat is “deteriorating rapidly.” In the same manner, the environmental and health cases for it are also on a decline.
Recent studies have suggested that fake meat is far from being a green alternative to the traditional livestock farming it ostensibly seeks to replace. One such paper by scientists from the University of California, Davis found that lab-grown meat produces up to 25 times more carbon dioxide (CO2) when scaled up to the current supply in the market.
According to the paper, the environmental impact of fake meat “is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production.” The increased CO2 levels would be necessary for the purification processes that supply nutrients to cultured cells. The study defines this process as “the removal of cells from an animal or plant and their subsequent growth in a favorable artificial environment.” (Related: CLIMATE FAIL: Study finds lab-grown meat generates up to 25 TIMES MORE CO2 than conventional beef production.)
“The use of refinement methods contributes significantly to the economic and environmental costs associated with pharmaceutical products since they are both energy and resource intensive,” the study authors wrote.
Aside from this, concerns about fake meat being a product of “immortalized cell lines” that replicate in perpetuity – cancer, in other words. A February 2023 op-ed in the Pulse by the Raw Egg Nationalist, which cited a story from Bloomberg, warned of the dangers of eating such edible cancer cells.
“The problem is that the materials used to make the product – ‘immortalized cell lines’ – replicate forever, just like cancer. Which means, in effect, that they are cancer. Although these cell lines are widely used in scientific research, they’ve never been used to produce food before.”
Head over to FakeMeat.news for more stories like this. Watch Jefferey Jaxen and Del Bigtree discussing the free fall of the fake meat industry.
This video is from the HighWire with Del Bigtree channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- What they don’t want you to know about lab-grown meat.
- Fake meat firms collapsing due to lower sales, anti-woke backlash.
- Study: Vegan FAKE MEAT products linked to cardiovascular issues.
- Immortalized cell lines used in lab-grown meats can cause CANCER.
- Fake meat companies are failing as consumers abandon processed plant-based alternatives to real meat.
Sources include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
