Artificial food and the attempt to redesign creation
The push to replace natural agriculture with engineered proteins reflects a deeper belief that life itself can be engineered.
The war in Iran has exposed the extreme fragility of the world’s food system because of the close link between petrochemical inputs and agricultural outputs.
Global leaders are warning about the possibility of severe food insecurity across much of the world. “Farmers are facing a dual cost shock,” warned Máximo Torero, Chief Economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization last month. “They have more expensive fertilizers alongside rising fuel costs affecting the entire agricultural value chain, including irrigation and transport.”
This is the precise moment alternative protein technology companies have been waiting for; a high-tech solution for food-insecure nations.
The framing is no longer subtle. The race is on to “control the supply chains and strategic industries that will shape the global food system of the 21st century,” according to Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food―and Our Future.
The corporations and governments that figure out how to make the meat that consumers love, but without all the wasted calories and extra stages of production, will take the lion’s share of a $2 trillion economic opportunity represented by global meat and seafood production.
Friedrich frames the global push primarily as a contest between the US and China.
However, an unexpected competitor — Israel — has emerged as a global leader in research and development of plant-based and fermentation-derived proteins, as well as cultivated/cell-based meats, dairy, eggs, and seafood.
In fact, Israel is second only to the United States in alt-protein startups and private investment globally, despite the country’s small size. Israel’s government treats alt proteins as both a national security and an economic imperative. A 2024 report forecasted that, with sustained support, Israel could reach 200+ alt-protein companies, a dozen manufacturing facilities, 10,000 jobs, and $2.5 billion in domestic economic contribution by 2030.
The logic behind this investment goes something like this: traditional livestock production is inefficient, requiring multiple units of feed, water, and land to produce a single unit of edible protein, while remaining exposed to disruptions in energy, climate, and trade. Alternative systems promise to compress that chain, reducing inputs while stabilizing output, theoretically insulating supply from the kind of volatility now visible in the Persian Gulf. In a world where shipping lanes can be contested and fertilizer flows interrupted, the appeal of a system that produces protein inside controlled environments, independent of geography, becomes obvious.
However, the same system that promises resilience also centralizes production, moving it away from distributed agricultural networks into capital- and energy-intensive facilities dependent on intellectual property and technical expertise. What appears as decentralization from land is, at a deeper level, a re-centralization around infrastructure that is more easily governed, regulated, and, ultimately, controlled.
But there is a deeper issue: at its core, this is not just a technological shift but a theological one.
Israel’s dominance in alternative proteins can be read as a modern echo of the ancient and recurring temptation to step beyond stewardship and into creation itself. While some rabbis have bestowed kosher certifications on these lab-grown concoctions, intervening at the cellular level to “create” flesh, milk, or protein is, in essence, playing God. Torah repeatedly warns that when mortals reach for divine creative power, the consequences are catastrophic. The very land promised as a divine gift is now the global hub for synthetic food systems. If Eden’s fruit brought expulsion, what does systemic remaking of creation portend?
Cultivated meat begins with harvesting an animal’s stem cells, then engineers their growth in bioreactors — essentially reprogramming life at the genetic/cellular level to bypass slaughter, breeding, and the divinely ordained dictate to “be fruitful and increase.”
In the story of the Tower of Babel, a hubristic people said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves.” They use advanced technology to defy previously known limits. YHWH responds: “now, they are not going to be withheld from doing whatever they plan to do” — then scatters them and confuses their language. The sin is collective arrogance using human ingenuity to rival divine order.
Israel’s alt-protein ecosystem, presented as the solution to global food shocks, can be seen as Babel 2.0. A cynic might even see the ongoing chaos in the Middle East as a clever device to break millennia-old agricultural systems that have served humanity and, instead, replace them wholesale. The ultimate goal? Drive all the business to a small tech cabal holding nutrition and starvation in the balance.
Henry Kissinger is often attributed as having said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”
YHWH alone created life; human “creation” is derivative, bounded, and prone to idolatry when that important distinction gets forgotten. Israel’s leadership in this space is, in a word, oxymoronic (if not ironic).
Scripture’s dire consequences for hubris — expulsion, flood, exile, scattering — serve as a warning, not a blueprint.