what do you think about Freemilk? It’s super expensive as a cows milk alternative but I’m thinking about buying some for myself as a treat. I’m definitely way less skeptical about it than mammalian cell culture milk, as far as I can tell Freemilk is just whey.
on the topic of cell culture milk though, what do you think about that?
It is another Impossible Foods situation. Strive source their protein from Perfect Day, and Perfect Day test on animals. This is from their website:
“Since the beginning, we’ve been motivated by a desire to bring a more compassionate approach to food manufacturing.But what we are pioneering – making dairy protein (casein, whey) without animals – has never been done before. It’s an entirely new category of food ingredients, not because of what it is but because of how it is made.
While we do not support or condone the use of animal testing, in order to establish that a new ingredient is safe for human consumption, governmental regulatory agencies require extensive food safety tests. For new ingredients, like ours, these tests often require animal testing to ensure safety for human consumption. This step is, unfortunately, an important part of a) securing partnerships with food companies that will use our protein in their products and help us have widespread impact, and b) assuring consumers that products containing our new ingredients are safe to consume.
We fully support replacing animal testing with other validated methods to ensure the safety of new food ingredients and always ensure that these animal testing studies are conducted by accredited third-party facilities that follow proper animal welfare guidelines.”
This is more or less the same thing Impossible Foods said, which is corporate speak for ‘yeah we know animal testing is bad but it was profitable so we did it anyway.’ The FDA doesn’t technically require animal testing, but in fairness they may ask for the product to be tested later. If they did, if you cared about animal rights then that would be a barrier against developing that ‘new ingredient’ using that method.
There are plenty of great plant milks already, they’re cheap, tasty, comparably nutritious and more sustainable than this process will be, so I just don’t really know why this is necessary or who it is for. If the technology becomes cheap and scalable enough to replace dairy for non-vegans I can see an argument, but that seems very unlikely. I see no reason for vegans to buy it, that it is who they’re marketing it to. It’s just animal testing for profit, in service of a product that is completely unnecessary.
Regarding cell cultures more generally. I have a tag devoted to that here. The short answer though is that I think it as huge potential as pet food and for humans who for whatever can’t or won’t give up eating animal flesh, but until we see truly animal free models (with no animal testing or animal ‘donors’ then it is again not a vegan product. It is something I am watching closely because it could make a real difference and save a lot of animal lives in the future, assuming animal agriculture interests don’t continue to successfully shut it down through legislature.
