As Prime Food-Producing Land and Sea Areas Are Sacrificed to ‘Green Energy,’ Fraudulent Foods Are Filling the Market

From artificial fish to mock milk, the proliferation of unnatural products is here, there and everywhere you look.

Screenshot from the Dayton Daily News.

It’s a story right out of a low-budget sci-fi movie. Cows are deemed to have doomed the planet by belching toxic gases, making the invention of laboratory-created milk necessary for Earth children to survive. Meanwhile, millions of acres of prime farming land are usurped by developers to build colossal solar farms – supposedly to save the Earth from overheating.

Meanwhile, giant swaths of seabed are slated for humongous wind turbines (again, to save the planet), despite the realization that they will potentially destroy the seafood industry in the process. But that’s OK, now that we have scores of artificial products meant to look and taste exactly like the tuna, scallops, and fish filets we have long enjoyed.

What are these new concoctions? Can humans indeed survive on laboratory-created foodstuffs? Are these invented consumables somehow related to the ongoing destruction of our farmland and the sea as we know it, or just a bizarrely timed coincidence?

Laboratory-made “foods” may not be anything new. What is new is our Brave New World of heralded inventions promoted as do-or-die requirements.

Don’t have a cow

Perfect Day wants you to “let go of the old way of doing things that no longer serve us.” To that end, this food technology company based in California has a method of “precision fermentation” that produces “pure animal protein without ever touching an animal.”

You can’t read the material the company puts out for very long without encountering the word “green.” They say the company’s genetically engineered proteins can save the Earth by emitting up to 97 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than “traditional milk” from all those methane-burping cows.*

“We’re changing the process, not the food,” the company states on its website. But that simplistic statement doesn’t really tell what this product is. After all, most milk comes from a cow, whereas Perfect Day’s “ProFerm” protein comes from its manufacturing plants in India, where cows have long been considered sacred.

As to what Perfect Day is manufacturing, that’s a bit more complicated.

The process involves taking the DNA sequences of a dairy protein, such as whey, and inserting it into genetically engineered yeast which is “precision fermented” along with other ingredients to create a “proprietary animal-free milk protein.”

Perfect Day doesn’t produce any consumer products – those come from food manufacturers with some pretty big names, such as Breyers (Unilever), Mars, and Nestle. But by far the product that has received the most publicity is a widely distributed “animal-free dairy milk” called Bored Cow.

Made by Tomorrow Farms headquartered in New York City, the drink was revealed in a 2023 report by the Health Research Institute (HRI) to contain 92 unknown small molecules that HRI Chief Science Officer John Fagan told The Organic & Non-GMO Report are “completely novel to our food.

“They are things that we haven’t consumed as human beings,” was how he put it.

Fagan, who referred to these ingredients as “nutritional dark matter,” said he was unable to find a scientific name for most of the molecules.

Perfect Day insists its end product is not only safe as can be, but also does not contain a trace of detectible GMOs, and therefore does not need to adhere to labeling under The National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Law. The Non-GMO Project, however, sees it somewhat differently: “No one in the world believes gene-edited products are non-GMO except the companies trying to sell them.”

Farms vs. fermentation tanks

Perfect Day isn’t the only company manufacturing these synbio (synthetic biology) proteins.

Remilk, an Israeli company, has its own “precision fermentation” method of producing “milk” without a cow, “emitting a fraction of the harmful greenhouse gases,” according to company co-founder Dr. Ori Cohavi. “Animal-Free Remilk is part of the solution to stopping climate change,” reads a headline in the Times of Israel.

Remilk’s methods appear similar to Perfect Day’s -- copying a milk protein-producing gene from bovines and inserting it into GM yeast to produce a synbio protein. Remilk also has a bevy of companies lined up to use its product such as General Mills.

As far as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration is concerned, you might say it doesn’t plan to get involved. Put simply, it has “no questions,” at least for now.

The FDA’s long-standing mechanism of “self-determination” of GRAS (or Generally Recognized as Safe) status provides manufacturers with sweeping powers to put novel food-like inventions on supermarket shelves with little regulatory oversight.

In the case of Perfect Day and Remilk, despite these companies making a big to-do that their products have been granted GRAS status by the FDA, that’s not exactly how the process works. Conducting their own research, both synbio manufacturers notified the FDA of their conclusions of safety. The agency responded that it had “no questions” (in what’s aptly called a “no questions letter).” In other words, no safety testing or analysis of these novel products was done by the FDA.

Another example of milk meddling is a new drug added to cattle feed called Bovaer that is advertised as curbing methane emissions from cows to reduce “the environmental footprint” of dairy and beef production.

According to promotional materials from the Bovaer partners, one a Dutch firm called DSM-Firmenich and the other U.S. drugmaker Elanco, the additive is “approved” for use in over 55 countries. As for the U.S. market, the FDA sent Elanco a “no questions” letter in May of 2024, despite the fact the agency also refers to Bovaer as an “unapproved drug.”

Farmers who use Bovaer (which is said to not be allowed in organic dairy at this time) on their herds get special benefits in the form of “carbon credits,” a $20 per cow payment for being “climate-smart” according to the industry publication The Bullvine.

Goodbye to amber waves of grain?

Much like shore communities up and down the East Coast that are currently fighting Big Wind’s plans to industrialize large areas of Atlantic Ocean seabed, folks in rural farming areas of the U.S. are battling Big Solar.

One of the larger groups, Citizens for Responsible Solar, sums it up this way: Rural communities are under attack from big, corporate solar developers (some foreign) who want to build large-scale, industrial solar power plants on agricultural-and forestry-zoned land to take advantage of lower development costs.

The group has been contacted by citizens across the country. For example:

“Our community needs help! Some of the most fertile and beautiful farm ground here in Louisiana is being transformed into unsightly solar farms. About 500 acres are already dedicated as a solar farm. The community demanded a moratorium but another 2500 acres in a 60 mile radius is being considered - with a neighboring parish being looked at for more.”

“I live in a rural Agricultural Conservation District in Delaware and our farmland has suddenly become the most sought-after land by solar developers. I am currently fighting a 580-acre solar field containing over 230,000 panels within one mile of one of the farms my family owns. This is in the Mid-Atlantic Migratory Bird Flyway, the Delaware Scenic Byway, and the land is all zoned Agriculture help Conservation.”

“We live in Virginia and our county has allowed two solar panel farms, and I use the word farm lightly because it’s not a farm but anyway without a solar panel policy they are asking for a special exception to turn agricultural land, 1100 acres, into a solar power plant which wraps around all of our homes…”

Solar development has even managed to take over historic areas such as a Civil War battlefield in Virginia. As Marc Ramsey, a historian and tour guide told the Washington Free Beacon talking about Savage’s Station battlefield in Henrico County Virginia:

“Of all places to put a solar farm, right in the middle of hallowed ground of a Civil War battle is such a shame, and now it’s lost forever. There are solar panels as far as the eye can see. It’s totally industrialized.”

And similar to offshore wind on the East Coast, the true environmental cost of these so-called green land projects is unknown. Where solar is concerned it’s not even clear how much prime farmland is being swapped for solar development.

In 2022 a study by the non-profit American Farmland Trust found that despite the many millions of acres of farmland in the U.S., some areas, especially on the East Coast are being significantly impacted by solar takeovers.

The report states that “one county in the Mohawk Valley of New York with high concentrations of farming could lose almost 35 percent of its active farmland” to solar development.

As with the mainstream media’s reporting on opposition to offshore wind, any resistance to solar development is immediately discredited, such as this story from NPR in 2023 with a headline that reads, An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America.

How the next four years will impact the future of offshore wind and farmland usurped for solar panels remains to be seen. For now, however, the invasion of laboratory-grown foodstuffs is significant (and scary) enough that consumers need to pay close attention to the actual ingredients and not just the “nutrition panels” on processed and ultra-processed foods.

*As explained by NASA, methane, a greenhouse gas, is produced both naturally and by industrial activities. Wetlands, “including ponds, lakes, and rivers,” produce greater amounts than agricultural activities, which comprise more than just cows, but include waste management and rice cultivation.