And for everyone else, too. DoD wants to have this stuff for our soldiers to the tune of a $450 million budget increase—increase, not an initial funding—for BioMADE to produce meat in a petri dish for our military’s chow halls and, presumably, for what passes for MREs these days.

The Department of Defense is funding a bio-industrial manufacturing company that has proposed feeding US troops lab-grown meat to help “reduce the CO2 footprint of food production.”

BioMADE’s proposal includes

growing meat and other kinds of food by “utilizing one carbon molecule (C1) feedstocks for food production.”

There are plenty of reasons to object to this expenditure and to this food “development” program. One thing not being addressed, though, is the simple fact that there are some few lipids—fat molecules—that our bodies cannot make from scratch and must be eaten intact. They are essential lipids in precisely the same manner that essential amino acids cannot be made by our bodies and must be eaten intact by eating…meat. (I’m eliding here the question of whether these essential amino acids will be produced in the petri dishes.) These essential lipids are best taken in by eating…red meat. Which is not the petri dish meat—which isn’t really meat, but protein—that BioMADE wants to inflict on sell to our troops.

Will BioMADE be growing fat in adjacent petri dishes? Or will our troops’ diets suffer, and their health be heavily endangered, by that lack?