(The Organic Prepper)—We’ve all heard about lab-grown meat. But have you heard about lab-grown fruit?
In 2018, Finnish scientists discovered they could create plant cell cultures that were nutritious and delicious, according to taste testers. They have produced pleasant-tasting cell culture lines that can be added to things like smoothies or jam. They’re not at the point yet where they can produce apple slices you could toss in a baggie for a snack, but that is the end goal, and researchers around the world are convinced it’s possible.
How do they grow fruit in a lab?
Growing a fruit from cell cultures in a laboratory involves four steps:
- Step 1: Multiplication—This is where stem cells are taken from the meristem of a desired fruit plant and then multiplied.
- Step 2: Induction of flowering in multiplied stem cells—This is currently the biggest technological hurdle.
- Step 3: Induction of fruit production—This can be done using organic compounds, rather than traditional pollination.
- Step 4: Growing the fruit—This part consists of providing the growing fruit with the optimal nutrients needed for development.
These projects involve cell culturing. Lots of foods like to call themselves “lab-grown” for the novelty factor. Scientists tout the Cosmic Crisp apple as being “lab-grown” because the original development took place in a laboratory. But Cosmic Crisp apples are grown on trees, outdoors, in the sunshine, just like any other apple you’d eat.
That’s not what we’re talking about here with truly cell-cultured fruit. The technology for this is quite advanced and so far, scientists have not been able to come up with anything that actually looks like a piece of fruit. The ultimate goal is to grow edible-parts-only pieces of fruit. So apples without cores, citrus without peels, and so on.
Given the technical difficulty and expense in development, you may wonder, why bother? There is a big population that has an ethical problem with killing animals for food, but the group of people with moral qualms about plucking an apple from a tree is vanishingly small.
Additionally, livestock rearing is pretty foreign to the average urban or suburban dweller. Growing your own fruits and veggies isn’t. Neighborhoods all over the country are dripping with fruit at certain times of the year. I feed lots of dinged neighborhood fruit to my pigs because homeowners literally can’t process it.
So, what’s the official excuse for these high-tech expenditures?
New Zealand’s Newsable discusses this with Ben Schon, Senior Scientist with the New Zealand Plant and Food Research. He sees lab-grown fruit as an additional source of food as the world’s population expands, not as a replacement for traditional agriculture but a supplement to it. Dr. Schon is a firm believer in man-made climate change and coming problems with overpopulation. He sees developing the technology to produce food in closed environments as a sort of hedge for traditional agriculture in case of climate disaster and thinks it may be more sustainable in the long run.
Lucas van der Zee, horticulture and product physiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, sees growing only edible fruits in laboratory environments as a way to remove land from agricultural use. His Fruit of Knowledge project aims to grow only the edible portions of fruit in laboratory environments with the express purpose of allowing farmland to revert to its native state.
Proponents of this technology, in general, see it as a way to avoid food wastage. Why have a whole apple tree with all those leaves and branches when you really just want the fruit?
(Never mind the fact that the trees are beautiful, provide shade, and smell heavenly when in bloom. But technocrats don’t like to deal in intangibles.)
Avoiding food wastage is indeed an admirable goal, but why not pump more money into home economics classes, rather than shutting them down for ever more STEM courses that most high schoolers won’t use anyway?
Treating home economics as an important life skill and imparting the values associated with thrift and a happy, comfortable home would go a long way toward fixing many of society’s ills. Thrifty adults waste very little food. Older people who grew up broke are often full of ideas for how to use food before it goes bad. But the government seems to have zero interest in any solutions that involve a confident, responsible citizenry. All solutions must be profitable for favored industries.
So, again, why?
Is lab-grown fruit just about the money?
Yeah, but it’s a LOT of money. In President Biden’s Bold Goals for U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing report released in March, he promotes food and agriculture innovation, and as we discussed in our article here, an emphasis on lab-grown food will be part of that. Between taking market share away from traditional farmers and the patents that will probably be involved, the favored biotech industry will see nice new revenue streams if this technology moves forward.
Cell-cultured food products could also be a convenient vector for getting mRNA into food. We’ve discussed the efforts to grow heads of lettuce with mRNA vaccines in them. Research is being done on vaccines that can be inhaled.
I’m sure this sounds crazier than it should, but the fact is that powerful entities, including various governments and large industries, are trying to get mRNA into absolutely everything.
You can really go down the rabbit hole trying to figure this one out, but numbers alone reveal a push in consumer behavior that cannot be ignored. In March 2020, Moderna posted a profit of $520 million. After peaking at nearly $23 billion in June 2022 at $10.65 billion in June 2023, they’ve still shown incredible growth in the last three and a half years.
When companies (especially companies with shareholders that include legislators and heads of state) start making huge profits, they don’t want those revenue streams slipping away just because everyone’s getting healthy on their own again. You can see the push for mRNA vaccines in everything. mRNA vaccines for flu, Zika, RSV, HIV, CMV, and cancer are in human trials.
There is also a push to get mRNA into livestock. An RNA-based vaccine platform has been in use for commercial pork since 2018. While no mRNA vaccines have been used in beef production, they are being researched.
Similarly, for poultry, while no mRNA vaccines are currently in use in the U.S., French pharmaceutical companies are conducting trials for mRNA in their poultry.
Our federal government has made commitments toward promoting biotechnology and biomanufacturing, and interested parties are trying to make money by getting biotech (like medical treatments using mRNA platforms for delivery) into everything. And, of course, this is all done in the name of public health, but if this was truly about health, they would be telling us to eat less processed food, not more.
Hiding food production from consumers facilitates all kinds of tampering with the food supply. This is not for our benefit.
Lab-grown fruit isn’t in stores. Yet.
Fortunately, the technology to grow things that actually look like pieces of fruit is a long way off. If you go to the store and buy an apple, you know it grew on a tree. And even when it comes to jams or smoothies, foods in which it would be easy to add cell culture lines instead of real fruit, the cost is prohibitive right now. Cell-cultured fruit is too expensive to sneak into other foods.
But it’s worth following this technology. And if you’re not in the habit of cooking from scratch, there will never be a better time to start. The less you have to rely on grabbing a bag of “whatever” to fill you up, the less you have to worry about eating something you may not be comfortable with.
What are your thoughts about lab-grown fruit? Would you knowingly eat it? What pros and cons, if any, do you see? Do you think this will make its way to grocery stores?
Sound off on this story on the Late Prepper Substack.
About Marie Hawthorne
A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.
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.