I am commenting on an article in Expansión with quotation marks, and my comments without inverted commas are an attempt to detoxify.
"Meat consumption has reached alarming levels". This is a lie. Consumption has fallen, as has milk consumption. Thousands of farms were closed in Spain last year.
"Livestock farming accounts for 14.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions and takes up two thirds of agricultural land (with the consequent water consumption)". Another lie, goats and sheep do not pollute, they fertilise the fields and avoid the use of chemical fertilisers, they clean the mountains and consume the stubble, preventing fires and are necessary for the correct use of agricultural land after the harvest. They are part of sustainable agriculture.
"The WHO recommends reducing the weekly consumption of red meat to below 500 grams and minimising the intake of processed meat". And isn't what they want to sell us ultra-processed?
"In this context, it is not surprising that the search for alternatives to meat consumption is one of the big businesses of the future. That's what it's all about, doing business, whoever falls, but first the demonised propaganda against its consumption.
"This segment could be worth more than 127 billion euros over the next decade, according to Barclays. Another phrase to attract followers, in case any of them are clueless, a figure that shows that whatever is necessary will be done to eliminate the competition that has led to the existence of animals.
"Against this backdrop, the Spanish meat industry is already taking the necessary steps to minimise the impact of this trend on its business. I would say that they are sinking the industry, making it self-conscious and trying to demonise it for their own benefit; by eliminating meat, we would remove the competition.
"Today's start-ups are imitating beef (whether in sausage, steak or burger format) as well as pork and chicken. Other companies seek to emulate the taste and appearance of fish (Mimic Seafood) and even egg (Just Egg)". If you haven't noticed when you buy a cheap empanada, you should know that there is no meat or cheese in them, they are substitutes and they want to get us into the same trap.
"These products have the advantage of being more environmentally friendly and can help in the transition to healthier and more sustainable diets. Again the rattle, the deception and the siding with the healthy and environmental. Which is already livestock farming on the loose in the countryside.
"The other big niche market is cultured meat. It involves taking a few cells from an animal, giving them plant nutrients and growing them. In this way, you get the same meat from one animal as if you had slaughtered hundreds or even thousands.
See the trickery of the language and the subtle intoxicating message; that there are too many animals, that one is enough and that we should stop killing them. "This allows, among other things, to better control the quality of each piece, thus minimising the risk of pandemics such as mad cow disease". This is a fallacious, twisted argument, which suggests that by feeding ourselves with meat we risk pandemics, in order to influence our minds and consume through the purity of artificial meat, the absence of evil.
"The 'fake chicken' is on the rise".
Yes, like the fake democrat, the fake politician who manages the budget with his mind thinking that money is nobody's, children are not their parents' and twisting history to support his thesis. The 'no meat' business took its first steps in the United States a decade ago. One of the first to break new ground was Beyond. Founded by Ethan Brown, the company's first product was 'Chicken-Free Strips', chicken strips... without chicken.
"Disease-free steaks'. Another shot in the arm for animal husbandry and the truth.
"Can you imagine a hamburger without fat, healthier, with the same taste (and the same price) as a conventional hamburger and also respectful of the planet? It does this by extracting animal cells and providing them with plant nutrients so that the tissue can reproduce, generating more meat. The system allows for more exhaustive controls, selecting those animals that have not been given antibiotics and minimising the risk of pandemics of animal origin". Another ill-intentioned ploy to turn us away from animals and trust, to crush science, to do away with meat for good and to throw us into their business with its exhaustive controls to keep us away from all evil, the invented future for their pockets. By the way, fat in food is essential for our organism.
We think of meat as eating proteins, and we are right, but it has thousands of varieties of them, which within the cells have a multitude of functions, such as structural support, enzymes, immunoglobulins, transport, forming part of respiroma, etcetera. All these components, in addition to those I will mention, are the nutrients in meat. And no matter how much we are bamboozled, they are so complex that it will never be possible to manufacture them in a laboratory, nor to assemble all these components to form a tissue such as meat, nor that they have such marvellous properties. Even adenosine diphosphoric acid, the energy molecule, which would leave us with its phosphorus after passing through the intestine. Or the tryptophan in ham, which makes us sleep better and lifts our spirits.
The meat of crustaceans, fish, pork, our own, all are composed of cells and within them we have nutritional components among which are organelles such as the peroxisome, the endoplasmic reticulum, the nucleus, the mitochondria, enzymes, peptides, amino acids, hormones, neuromodulators, iron, vitamins. Receptors, membranes, essential amino acids, unsaturated fatty acids, ribosomes where the manufacture of proteins is completed, the number of which in a cell can be seven thousand, and all of them different, lysosomes, phospholipids. In short, an immense complexity impossible to reproduce that they would have us believe can be built in a factory. Even in 3D printing. All of these are components whose nutritional capacity we know roughly, but we have not studied what our body does with all this complexity in detail, what they provide us with, component by component, each one of which is an element that adds to the richness that their consumption represents for our organism.
We stopped being apes when we started eating meat, which allowed us to increase the volume of our brains, let's not forget. The demonic, the evil, is being projected onto meat, as with all fanaticisms and emotional plagues, only in this case it is an attempt to wipe out animal husbandry.
"This was the origin of Novameat, a start-up whose technology makes it possible to create pork and salmon steaks and fillets from vegetable elements. To do so, it uses bioprinting, which has allowed it to create "the first truly realistic vegetable steak". The cynical salesman declaring pork and salmon to be what they are not.
As befits an era in which fanaticism, extremism and hoaxes are dominating our lives and restricting our minds by manipulating our emotions. An era that specialises in making us see black as white. I'll stop now because I have to turn the veal steak from Avila that I have on the grill.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Specialist in management training, group and couple therapies.