Cakeless Cake and the Great Gaslighting.

You are being gaslighted. You’ve been told how wonderful meatless meat is, how delightful dairyless dairy is. It’s going to save your body, save the planet, and doesn’t it feel good too?? It’s 100% a lie - a boondoggle. Not just a little bit of it, but all of it. Hear me out.

This week, the Washington Post published an article titled “Moooove over: How single-celled yeasts are doing the work of 1,500-pound cows.” The subtitle says it all “Cowless dairy is here, with the potential to shake up the future of animal dairy and plant-based milk.”

What we are seeing here is nothing short of complete and total insanity. Why? The problem isn't cows, but how they are managed. Yes, 98 million cows in the USA, living on concentrated animal feed lots – CAFOs – is unethical, unhealthy, and just plain wrong. But is it the fault of the cows or the fault of the methods by which we “farm” them?

Let's take a quick inventory of our chosen quality of life, shall we? We have meatless meat and dairy-less dairy. I suppose one could easily continue this list... sexless sex (porn and masturabtion), riskless risk (bank bailouts, insurance, and frivolous litigation), vowless vows (look at the current divorce rates in America), youthless children (see the Tiger Mom trend forcing kids to become adults when they've hardly even become kids yet), workless-work (research the tidal wave of entitlement overtaking our younger generations who expect everything in return for giving little), reality-less reality (see the latest obsessions in gaming and virtual reality for those days when reality itself just isn't good enough), alcohol-free beer and “zero proof” liquor, and not too far from now, we're going to have lifeless life. It is a quick ascension to the Great American Vapidity. Apparently, in this country, we are all entitled to have our cakeless cake and eat it too. What a dream!

We can't ignore the elephant – err cow – in the room. Meatless meat is NOT meat. Dairy without dairy is NOT dairy. Nor are any of the other techno-facsimiles the real deal – by definition. What these things truly are, however, are full-fledged delusions grounded in a stunning display of enthusiastic ignorance charading as some sort of ethical superiority or modern enlightenment.

It's pretty easy to accomplish too, in three(3) easy steps. First, vilify something as old-fashioned, unethical, or spiritually unenlightened. Second, propose an alternative that appears to be modern, tech-savvy, ethically superior, and enlightened but make sure it cherry-picks marketable elements and utterly ignores reality. Third, vilify and demean anyone who doesn’t agree with your new panacea and build a strong we-vs.-them clique around it... you may even consider unfairly politicizing the issue and yelling about it with posters on street corners – the more passionate and outraged you appear the better.

How many times in how many sectors are we going to witness this elementary school behavior play out in our society? Is this the culture we have built in America? Is this our legacy?

But wait you say – isn't getting rid of all those cows is going to save the planet? Well, the fake meat and fake dairy don't just appear like manna from heaven now does it. It must come from somewhere. The lab-grown “meat”, (spoiler alert), is composed almost entirely of GMO soybeans saturated with residual pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers – most of which are unethically sourced to the detriment of ecologies and people far from your kitchen.

The monolithic, ultra-industrial mono-crop fields created to grow this soy have wiped out hundreds of thousands of square miles of natural ecology, displacing and killing millions (if not billions) of fish, fowl, mammal, and insect, breaking water cycles and causing flooding, desertifying and satisfying the precious remainder of airable land and eroding everything else, and destroying more than 80% of the continent's riparian areas.

This is the “enlightened” and “more ethical” basis of your meatless meat and your Impossible Burger. The same is true for almond milk, soy milk, and now the latest bouquet of fake dairy fermentations. Funny how you never hear the proponents of these faux foods mentioning the untold ecological and nutritional fall-out side of the equation. They lump all agriculture into one box and make a shiny but utterly empty argument that the world would be better off without these animals. Yes, that is indeed true for the ignorant and myopic mind.

Let me propose a different angle to you – one that is based in reality, evidence, and as-of-yet, unbreakable logic.

There is nothing wrong with cows. There is nothing wrong with eating meat or drinking dairy. However, because we all demand rock-bottom prices and instant gratification instantly received, the product of agriculture – our food – has been commoditized and monopolized by ten (10) major corporations which process virtually all of the food you eat, two of which are the largest corporations in the world. In order to “feed the world”, massive CAFOs have been built – cement lots called Confined Animal Feed Operations. These are not farms. They are hell-holes in which cows, for example, stand in their own feces for the duration of their short lives – pumped full of steroids and antibiotics to stave of the disease inherent in such a system, and force-fed grain, a diet that is not only unnatural for cows but ones that makes them permanently sick. The grain comes from incalculably large GMO corn farms where government subsidies and the Monsanto/Bayer monopoly require (basically at gunpoint) the use of massive quantities of cancer-causing chemicals like glyphosate (permanently banned in Europe).

Should we really be blaming the cow or perhaps we ought to be looking more closely at the management system?

It's also fascinating to note that without exception, every single pasture-raised beef operation that has had its air quality tested actually has LOWER quantities of methane in the air above the farm than in the surrounding areas and thousands of times less than industrial operations. What does this mean? It means that cow farts, only created by force-feeding cows an unnatural food source, are non-existent in properly managed systems such as Regenerative, Biodynamic, and Pasture-based operations. Those systems, rich in deep, loamy soils, organic diversity, and biomass (grass, shrubs, and trees) sequester the methanol and carbon through photosynthesis and other processes.

But why look toward nature for guidance on how to properly raise our food when we can attempt to create some new technological marvel that will allow us to continue our infantile abuses of the natural order instead?

On the surface, these things look great – just like a shiny new Tesla. In reality, it is a false ethic subsidized by hidden costs – like starving, slave-labor children in the Congo working 18-hour shifts mining lithium and cobalt for your electric car batteries. But hey, fewer cow farts and more soy lattes man. Peace and love.

Here's a truth to chew on with your fake meat. Rarely in history has a technological panacea proved to be the world-saving advancement promised. I'm all ears if you can prove otherwise. A technological solution is certainly not a quick fix for an environmental, management based problem. From the historical record, these “improvements” have almost universally given a quick high followed by a whole new set of problems – kind of like taking pharmaceuticals to address one problem only to create ten new problems.

The problem isn't the cows, meat, alcohol, sex, etc. The problem is management. How do we manage farming as a society? How do we manage the alcohol we consume as individuals? How do we manage the way sex is portrayed in our society and used in our personal lives?

It doesn't take more than a moment or two of quick thinking to see that any solution seeking outside of an improvement in the way we manage these things is nothing more than a pitiful divertissement, an excuse to avoid the real problem. Then again, in these same-day-delivery days, we don't really have time anymore to take a moment for reflection on how our behavior and choices affect the world around us let alone ourselves. “Look!” we say “Look at all the effort we are putting into fixing these problems! We've got science and money and thoughts and prayers too!”, all the while we continue to eat cancer-causing processed foods at alarming rates – many with proportional relation to cancer and heart disease rates. Nah – let's just blame animal fat as the problem. After all, mankind has only subsisted on animal proteins for 40,000 years while barely being able to find sugar in nature. Sugar and processed carbohydrates, all but non-existent for the past 100,000 years certainly couldn't be the problem, right?

We continue to binge ourselves into an inebriated fog. We continue to portray the sacred act of sexual union with putrid, licentious flippancy. We come up with comprehensive insurance plans, airbags, and seatbelts but we raise the speed limit to 80 and text while we drive. We wave flags and cry at the sacred sacrifices of our youth in battle but mock religion and hold little in life sacred beyond our own opinions and precious 'individuality' and supposed “freedom”.

We are hypocrites looking for the easy way out and worse, we're too small to admit it so we have to cover it up with the dog and pony show of an endless stream of fruitless technological marvels that we tell each other will fix everything – few which have ever fixed anything.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for science, but using science as a go-to fix-all for problems of human management will never work. The problem is not technological but human - and what do humans do when you boil it down? We manage things. Sometimes poorly, sometimes efficently. As far as agriculture is concerned, humanity has been a complete and total management failure. But look how much corn we can grow! And wheat! We can feed the world! Surely, it is true… for a while. But look at the hidden costs. It is estimated that thanks to ignorant farming practices like tillage and chemical fertilization, the world has less than 50 years worth of fertile soils. Why should we think a technological solution would work when it was a human management issue to begin with?

Sometimes the easiest solution is to stop for a moment and take in the natural order of things – to compare our behavior and modes of operation with the way the cosmos functions. When we do this the problem becomes immediately apparent – there is nothing wrong with the cow, or with dairy, or with any of it. There is everything wrong with the way we are managing it. But just like we do in our personal lives, attacking whatever is “out there” - the other person, the other thing – is infinitely easier than introspecting to see the true fault within ourselves, lest we have to admit that we are wrong, imperfect and not as infinitely “free” and “individual” as we fantasize that we are.

In conclusion, you can either go sip on a cup of fermented pesticides while you gag down some pesticide-ridden soymeal steak or you can get real and admit that making the right choice is harder – a choice that is right on all fronts, for your body, for your community, for the animals, for the ecology, for our future generations.

Shop local. Shop regenerative. Think for yourself. Check our farm store and join our email list to stay informed and updated!