It’s only natural to want get the best possible meat at the grocery store. But beyond reading the sell-by date and checking the item for freshness, it can be difficult to actually know the conditions in which our meat is raised and harvested.
Creator Lilly Gibson (@lillygibson19805) has advice about buying chicken that might give some people the ick.
While shopping, Gibson picks up a package of chicken to make her point. She says that you should always make sure a package of chicken says it was hatched. If it doesn’t say hatched, Gibson says “you know it was lab-grown.”
She adds in the caption, “WARNING!! EVERYONE WHO BUYS CHICKEN FROM ALDI AND THIS STORE IS GOING TO BE SICK!’
There’s just one problem. This isn’t true.
The rise of lab-grown meats
It’s no secret that the livestock industry is terrible for the environment.
Much of the Amazon rainforest has been cut down to make room for cattle farms, for example. Runoff from an industrial-scale livestock operation can also be a powerful pollutant.
And if you’ve ever been within sniffing distance of a large chicken farm, you know that anywhere is better than downwind from that.
This, plus the cost of raising livestock and getting it to market, has made lab-grown meat an increasingly tantalizing option. In recent years, scientists have figured out ways to grow beef and chicken in labs. Advocates say this type of meat has a much lower carbon footprint than traditional sources.
Many consumers are grossed out by the idea of lab-grown meat, however. There’s no data that suggests it’s bad for humans; it just feels wrong somehow.
But before you go and throw out all your chicken, rest assured that the United States Department of Agriculture requires lab-grown meat to be labeled “cell-cultivated.”
This might not be the most transparent way of informing people that those cutlets were grown in a steel tank rather than a farm. But at least consumers with a little knowledge can avoid lab-grown meats, should they so choose.
A conspiracy to get us off meat
Gibson believes that the grocery industry is involved in a vast conspiracy to feed us meat that was grown in a lab. She also thinks that livestock is intentionally mutated with hormones to convince people to stop eating meat, rather than to simply make a larger chicken or cow.
@lillygibson19805 Part 1 WARNING!! EVERYONE WHO BUYS CHICKEN FROM ALDI AND THIS STORE IS GOING TO BE SICK!!!#squirrel #news #breakingnews #fyp ♬ original sound – Unless US
“This is the direction we’re supposed to be going,” Gibson says, adding, “They want us to go away from the meats.”
Her post has nearly 2,000 comments as of Wednesday afternoon. Many are from people who share her views.
“It’s the hamburger law,” one wrote, urging, “Look it up.”
Several said that every grocery store sells lab-grown meat and suggested people buy directly from farmers instead.
“They can put anything on the plastic label,” one person commented.
The USDA and the Food and Drug Administration have strict guidelines about what food labels can and cannot say.
Gibson did not respond to an inquiry sent via TikTok direct message. Aldi didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry sent Wednesday morning.
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