The Corporate Push for Synthetic Foods: False Solutions That Endanger Our Health and Damage the Planet

Fully artificial food is an increasingly popular trend focused on developing a new line of synthetically produced, ultra-processed food products by using recent advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. These new products seek to imitate and replace animal products, food additives, and expensive, rare, or socially conflictive ingredients (such as palm oil). Biotech companies and agribusiness giants are seeing the opportunity to move into this promising market of “green” consumption and hence these products are marketed to a new generation of environmentally conscious consumers who are growing critical of the grim realities of industrial food production. As a result, meatless burgers and sausages, as well as imitations of cheese, dairy products, seafood, and others, have begun to flood the market, being found anywhere from fast food chains to local grocery stores.

Although these products market themselves as ‘eco-friendly’, ‘healthy’, and ‘sustainable’, they are no such thing as they do little to truly address the root problems of industrial agriculture and its environmental, and health consequences.