Nas Daily has just come out with an amazing video highlighting super realistic & tasty commercially available steak, salmon, milk, eggs & honey all produced without animals.
Watch the video, then read my analysis of the implications below.
https://x.com/nasdaily/status/2001290554710384995?s=20
Implications
1) Commercial
All of these products are produced by Israeli startups and are commercially available in Israel.
Indeed I've eaten the Redefine meat at Meshek Barzilay where this was filmed.
Its about 15 minute walk from my home in central Tel Aviv.
The development of these products was not based on government grants or globalist ideology but was in response to commercial demand from the Israeli & global market.
While ReMilk is featured in this video, it is not the only Israeli non-animal dairy milk supplier in Israel.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lab-grown-milk-set-to-start-pouring-into-israeli-dairy-aisles-cafes/
One of Israel's biggest food companies, Strauss Group, recently launched onto supermarket shelves their Cow-Free milk & dairy products.
2) Regulatory
The story behind this is very interesting. Strauss wanted to purchase dairy farms in Israel to enable it to vertically integrate & control its dairy supply chain. But it was blocked by the Israeli Competition Authority.
The price of dairy products in Israel is high and this has been a major political issue with the so called "Cottage Cheese Protests" in 2011 galvanising the country against high prices partly caused by monopolistic behaviour.
So instead, it invested in R&D to develop a method of producing milk in factories it could own, without cows.
Strass has succeed in its strategic commercial objective and created a new product in the process.
As these suppliers achieve scale, it is quite possible that factory produced milk (currently priced similar to other non-dairy milks like soy & almond) will become cheaper to produce than cows milk.
3) Kashrut
Israel is a Jewish State and Judaism has strict laws (halacha) about food. Most people are aware of the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, but there is another important prohibition which is on eating meat & dairy products together.
Observant Jews not only cannot eat dairy products together (no cheeseburgers, beef stroganoff etc) but have to wait between 1 and 6 hours to eat dairy after eating meat.
There is also another more minor restriction on eating meat and fish on the same plate or with the same utensils.
Given that around half Israel's population keeps kosher, this is a big deal commercially.
These products allow the creation of kosher dishes that were once impossible and are very attractive to Israeli consumers for this reason.
Israel is the only wealthy growing consumer market in the world these days as the fertility crisis shrinks consumer bases globally.
So high tech food products that are attractive to the Israeli consumer market are an attractive commercial proposition.
4) Food Security
Food security is important for any nation and especially Israel which has historically been surrounded by enemies who have sought to cut off Israel's external supply chains in many wars.
It is for this reason that Israel has subsidised its farmers and protected them from external import competition. This has led to higher food prices than would otherwise be the case, but most Israelis would agree that the the strategic self-sufficiency benefit is worth the hip pocket cost.
Also, obviously, farming is land intensive and animal farming requires vastly more land and resources to produce a unit of food than plant farming. This is one of the vegan's arguments. However people like to eat and need to eat animal food products for their happiness and health.
Israel is a geographically small country and land is scarce and expensive.
If Israelis' needs for formerly animal based foods can be met, without loss of consumer experience, by factory produced meat, milk, eggs, fish & honey then food self sufficiency can be achieved in a better and ultimately cheaper and less land intensive way.
That is not just yummy but a strategic boost for Israel and a strategic loss for countries whose size & land area made them ideal for traditional animal husbandry (eg Australia).
[Produced by Grok from my prompt]
5) Mars Colonisation
If you follow @kiwithinker on Hive or SpaceX generally you will know that Elon Musk is putting in place the infrastructure for large scale Mars colonisation. Self sufficiency on Mars is critical as it will still be expensive to move mass from Earth to Mars, even with the many order of magnitude costs reductions created by the Starship program.
I have written about solar energy on Mars and plan to write another post on food production in Mars produced greenhouses.
But to cut a long story short, while it is fairly easy and relatively inexpensive to grow plants for food on Mars, it will be vastly more expensive and complicated to create the conditions that will allow animals such as cows, chickens and bees to live on Mars. Fish are a bit easier but still much more difficult to farm than plants.
These Israeli innovations pave the way for Martian settlers to have a complete and yummy diet with everything produced on Mars from indigenous materials.
As many Martian settlers will be Israeli (due to high Israeli fertility & collapse elsewhere - a topic for another post) they will already be completely used to this factory produced food and will suffer no loss of amenity in the food department by moving to Mars.
Who would have thought a food video could have such major implications!