RE APEEL
Forty years in the natural products industry. Then natural foods industry veteran, Ryan Sarnataro, read this article on Apeel
First Reaction upon reading:
“Holy shit
99.4% of the ingredient list is undisclosed, aka “confidential”.
What is disclosed are mono and diglycerides
There is no labeling requirement.
A toxic trojan horse.
And not a word about it in the WPO NYT NPR – except – all 3 had stories about the start-up in 2016
So it was a stealth product launch.
Wow!”
In the same vein, when our local theatre had a UCSC-sponsored ‘Impossible Foods’ promo event, we went down there to stand on the sidewalk where people would line up to enter: “Would you like an alternative perspective to the narrative you are about to hear?” we asked. We were met with almost entirely with a quizzical, curiosity pause, followed by, yes please. A very satisfying exercise.
Here is the copy from that handout:
Impossible Foods – Inequitable, Unsustainable, Unhealthy, Toxic
You are about to experience a wolf in sheep’s clothing performance. It will tout the superiority of conventionally farmed ultra processed food (UPF) over organic and regenerative agriculture and whole foods. The company’s model, supported by hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from Wall Street and investor Bill Gates, is to concentrate nutrition in factories, reap government subsidies and externalize as many costs as possible to the environment. The philosophical underpinnings of this enterprise is the delusion that “man” can and must re-engineer nature rather than work with it despite our frightful ignorance of the intricacies of the web of life and track record of unintended consequences.
Impossible Burger Ingredients:
Industrially mono-cropped genetically engineered soy - grown with commercial fertilizers, pesticides and glyphosate / Roundup®. These agricultural inputs have significant chemical pollution and Greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints. The farming method kills plants and destroys the biological matrix of soil through killing microbial life. It indiscriminately kills insects, starves birds and eliminates habitat. Fertilizer used for conventional soy is a major contributor to the dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico. Much of the soy is grown with fossil well water, unsustainably drawn up from aquifers at a pace far in excess of what nature can replenish. Dropping water tables have resulted in the desiccation of surrounding land.
The health effects of consuming glyphosate are not well understood due to a lack of research, however exposure to the chemical has been proven to cause cancer requiring Monsanto / Bayer to pay over $10 billion in compensation to harmed individuals. The mechanism of action, interfering with fundamental biology, is potentially the cause of many ailments other than cancer. Glyphosate poisons your gut microbiota and cellular mitochondria through the same biological pathway that it uses to kills weeds.
Refined Conventional Sunflower Oil. In addition to the harms caused by conventional monocropping, sunflower oil is polyunsaturated linoleic acid (LA), the overabundance of which in the standard American diet (SAD) is implicated in many chronic diseases. LA was virtually unknown in the pre-industrial diet. It is chemically unstable and easily oxidizes resulting in toxic oxidized LDL cholesterol and damaged mitochondria. Impossible foods does not disclose the extent to which this oil is refined and bleached which removes natural anti-oxidants which partially protect the oil causing inflammation and ageing.
Fake blood – soy leghemoglobin. Produced through synthetic biology that extracts DNA from the roots of the soy plant and inserts it into genetically engineered yeast to produce the ingredient. The FDA did not require Impossible Foods to conduct long-term safety tests of this newly created artificial color.
Heat applied plastic packaging. Millions of pounds of fossil fuels are required for the production and transportation of the packaging used by Impossible Foods. The recent discovery of massive numbers of microscopic plastic particles in foods and beverages blasted there through the plastic packaging process used by Impossible Foods is the cause of significant concern in the medical community.
By buying the Impossible Burger you:
Support the denigration and marginalization of organic agriculture and small family farms.
Support the chemical degradation of the environment and the sterilization of vast tracts of land and sea.
Support stealth GHG emissions through intensive fossil fuel based agricultural inputs, increased food miles and decreased soil productivity - while collecting commodity food taxpayer agricultural subsidies.
Support the concentration of farm land and food production in the hands of Wall St investment firms.
Support scientifically invalid attacks on animal protein, dairy products, pastured and grass fed beef.
Put your health and the health of the planet at risk.
END