Back in May, Ron DeSantis became the first state governor to sign into law a bill prohibiting the production and sale of lab-grown meat in an entire American state. This is great news, as far as I’m concerned, even though I think government interventions in the food supply are generally misguided at best and dangerous at worst. Because the simple truth about the so-called “plant-based agenda,” of which lab-grown meat is just a small part, is this: it’s not being driven by consumer choice. Instead, it’s being driven by governments working hand in glove with corporations and the corrupt medical establishment to deny us access to the life-giving foods—nutrient-dense animal foods—that are essential to our full physical and mental development. This is being done in the name of saving the planet and feeding a massively increased global population, but the real beneficiaries will be corporations, whose control of the food supply will be massively enhanced.
Such an agenda, which takes no notice of consumer choice, can’t be fought with consumer choice. What we need is a broad-based political movement to fight for our basic right to animal foods, and this new legislation could be the beginning of that, I hope. You’ll find the fullest description of such a movement in my book The Eggs Benedict Option.
Over the last year, I’d gotten quite comfortable ragging on Ron DeSanctimonious—sorry, Ron DeSantis—especially about those cowboy boots and that strange Chucky smile-type thing he kept doing every time a camera was pointed at his face. But now that he’s put down the blind, three-legged horse that was his presidential campaign, it’s much easier to praise him for the good things he’s done and is doing as governor of Florida. And one very good thing Ron DeSantis has done recently is to ban the production and sale of so-called lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State.
He did this back at the beginning of May, to a certain amount of fanfare. Under the new law, anybody who produces or sells lab-grown meat in Florida will be subject to a second-degree misdemeanour charge.
After putting his signature to the Republican-led bill, DeSantis said that his aim in doing so was to protect his state’s “vibrant agricultural industry” against globalist elites who want to finger traditional farming, especially livestock-farming, for climate change and abolish it.
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“What we’re protecting here is the industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants to finger agriculture as the problem, that uses things like raising cattle as destroying our climate,” DeSantissaid.
“This will be people who will lecture the rest of us about things like global warming, they will say you can’t drive an internal combustion vehicle, they will say agriculture is bad, meanwhile, they’re flying to Davos in their private jets.”
Of course, the liberal media were on hand to say that the governor’s claims were all sound and fury—just another “culture war” distraction designed to rile up the Republican base, which is full of ignorant white dudes who associate the consumption of meat with outdated, toxic notions of masculinity and potency. At this point, such criticisms might as well be boilerplate.
But DeSantis is right. There is an ideological agenda at work here, and if it succeeds, we’re going to be farming and eating very differently in the near future.
It’s a central plank of my work, and of the work of great scientists like Weston A. Price, that humans need to eat nutrient-dense animal foods—things like liver and butter and eggs and milk—to fulfil their physical and mental potential. Without them, we simply don’t develop properly. If we want to be human, we must fight back against determined attempts to deprive us of these essential foods. As far as I can see, one of the most powerful ways we can do that is through laws designed to protect traditional agriculture and ensure animal products remain on the shelves.
Now, I’m normally not one to argue for government regulation of what people eat. In fact, I’d be the first to say that government intervention in people’s diets has been a disaster over the last century. Take the lipid-heart hypothesis, for example. With the backing of margarine money and a government that was desperate to do something about rising rates of heart disease, the American Heart Association and a quack “nutritionist” called Ancel Keys helped convince the medical establishment and the general public that the cause of heart disease was the consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat. This led to an unprecedented shift in diets in America and throughout the developed world, as people abandoned the traditional animal foods that had sustained their ancestors and upon which true health must be built.
Scientists at the time knew that the lipid-heart hypothesis was baloney—Keys suffered ridicule at the hands of his colleagues when he first presented it to them—but with enough money, you can make just about anything stick. The lipid-heart hypothesis became the credo quia absurdum est—the “I believe it because it’s absurd”—of modern healthcare, an article of faith to which government experts, scientists and physicians held firm even as evidence piled up that it was actually harming us. Look up the Minnesota Coronary Experiment if you want to see the lengths to which scientists went to avoid confronting the evidence right before their eyes.
Seventy years later, the lipid-heart hypothesis has been debunked, but its baleful effects remain. We now live in a world where people dread to consume even a single egg because of the cholesterol contained in the yolk, but happily glug litres a week of vegetable and seed oils that were once considered fit only to be used as industrial lubricants and paint thinners. A world where corporations control the food supply to an unprecedented extent, and a majority of the population derive the majority of their calories from ultra-processed foods of a kind that never existed before. Illness is now the norm, rather than the exception.
