Being on a list of journalists that do interviews affords me opportunities to talk to a wide variety of people. Some public relations agencies do not differentiate between someone like me and a woke corporate media journalist. That’s why I occasionally get asked to do interviews with people who I oppose ideologically, just as I did this morning.
“Within a decade, the only beef most people eat will be lab-produced,” a woke vegan scientist gloated to me. “I’d go so far as to say we’re being very conservative in our estimations if enough states get on board with the revolution.”
This was one of many shocking quotes I received, mostly without prompting, from a scientist/ambassador for a vegan women’s group that approached me for an interview. I will not be posting the name of the person I interviewed because I did it under opaque circumstances. She assumed based on what her PR company said to her that I was a “food journalist.” I’m actually a conservative journalist who happens to own a beef company, but who’s counting?
Nevertheless, it was all their fault. It was their PR company that reached out to me for the interview, so it wouldn’t be right to embarrass them by name, nor to out the very nice but misguided vegan scientist who talked to me about it.
With that said, I was still very annoyed by what I was told.
“Around half the people who try it can’t tell the difference from slaughtered meat and most of the ones who can tell the difference say they enjoyed it anyway,” she said.
Rather than calling it “fake” meat versus “real” meat, she kept referring to it as “humane” meat versus “slaughtered” meat.
What struck me most was how certain she seemed to be about the righteousness of her endeavors. By their reckoning, those of us who bitterly cling to “slaughtered” meat need to simply be educated about all the harm we’re doing to the environment as well as all the benefits of “humane” meat.
Here’s a portion of the press release they are putting out later this week. I’ve redacted identifying information for the aforementioned reasons, but also because “who” doesn’t matter. This is not an isolated condition. The people who are pushing against real meat are widespread, diverse, and growing in numbers.
The ************* is proud to announce the world’s first showcase of women founders in the future of food on May 19th in **************. This showcase will allow select attendees, including press, consumers, and investors, to be among the first in the world to try lab-grown wagyu beef, mycelium chicken breast, and next-generation plant-based oysters, eggs, and sashimi. These women-founded products are not yet available on the market with many debuting to the public for the first time.
The showcase will include several innovative, women-founded brands pioneering the use of cell-cultured and plant-based alternatives. This includes **************’s cultivated wagyu burgers, **************’s mycelium chicken breast, **************’s eggs, **************’s oysters on the shell, and **************’s tuna sashimi. The showcase is an in-person extension of **************’s annual pitch competition, **************, which has reached over 1,300 women founders across 31 countries since launching in 2020. ************** and ************** are alumni of the pitch competition from past years.
“We are thrilled to debut our future of food showcase at the ************** – with a full roster of women-led products,” said **************, Founder and CEO of **************. “Our goal with this showcase was to bring together the most innovative and exciting brands pioneering sustainable and ethical solutions to the food industry. Not only are we proud to be debuting these cutting-edge technologies to the public, but every single brand is led by women – in an industry full of male CEOs. Our attendees will have the opportunity to taste some of the latest and most exciting cell-cultured and plant-based animal alternatives from women founders – some for the first time in history!”
************** will bring their cultivated **************, which is a blend of plant-based meat and wagyu cells, to the public for the first time. The European-based **************, which develops whole-cut meat and seafood alternatives from mushroom mycelium, will be showcasing their clean-label chicken breasts, made of 80% mycelium and natural ingredients, while European-based ************** will be showcasing its egg alternative. ************** will be offering plant-based clam chowder and oysters on the shell, and ************** will be bringing plant-based tuna sashimi. This will be the first time all of these brands will be featured at ************** – and the ************** debut for each brand.
The press release continues, but you get the point. They’re very proud to be preparing the nation and the world for their “revolution.” This is all about acute wokeness as envisioned by mad scientists and climate change cultists. And it’s spreading.
What makes all of this worse is that there are pieces of legislation being pushed around the country that could shield these companies from having to identify the nature of their meats. In the near future, you may be eating what you believe to be a Wagyu beef burger when in reality the meat was never actually part of a cow. It was grown, and the label may not reflect that.
Then, there’s the concern about taxes. My interviewee had “heard from a trusted ally in government” that they will be rolling out tax proposals for “slaughtered” meat that will make it cost-prohibitive to not accept the lab-grown versions.
This, perhaps more than anything else, is why we decided to launch our freeze-dried beef company. We wanted to offer Americans an opportunity to get high-quality beef from premium cuts like Ribeye, NY Strips, and Tenderloin, and store it away for a decade or longer.
Their goal is to keep us from eating meat that came from an actual living, breathing animal. It’s an abomination from multiple perspectives and I refuse to participate.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.