Leave it to the scientists involved in the green energy and environmentalist groups to find ways to put everyone out of work. It was bad enough when they began fighting to shut down all the pipelines, eliminating construction and drilling jobs. Now, however, they’re trying to put the cows out of work. Scientists at a biotech firm named TurtleTree have announced that they are successfully producing “milk” in a laboratory without the need of using cows or any other animals, or at least not directly. The specifics of the proprietary process are not being revealed, but it sounds as if they believe they’ve cracked the code and could soon be mass producing this beverage. Why do they need to do this when cows are already so good at the job? Because dairy farming is bad for the environment, of course. (CBS Sacramento)

Milk made completely from a lab could be the future of the dairy industry. It’s a move scientists say is the key to unlocking more nutrition, while helping the agricultural industry go green.

Vanessa Castagna, a scientist at TurtleTree a biotech company, is using mammalian cells from cows and humans to transform how milk is produced. The cells are isolated and stimulated by a proprietary process to make milk outside the body.

“The current agricultural industry is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable for animal health. It’s not sustainable to produce the required nutrients for the entire population. It’s not sustainable for our planet,” she explained.

In case you skimmed through that too quickly, I wanted to draw your attention to one of the few details being offered about this process. They’re starting with “mammalian cells from cows and humans?”

Hold the phone, here. So is this cow milk or people milk? Or perhaps some sort of Frankenstein concoction of both? Their scientist is saying that the cells are being “stimulated,” causing them to “produce milk outside of the body.”

How is it that these scientists who are working on ways to replace real food with fake replacements always seem to wind up including human cells in the process? You may recall a story from last year about those Ouroboros Steaks that are supposed to replace real meat from cows and other animals. What they failed to tell us up front was that the meat in question was cloned from human cells. How that doesn’t qualify as cannibalism is a mystery to me.

And now we have TurtleTree cranking out milk being generated from sources that sound dubious at best. I understand that the dairy farming industry is problematic in a number of ways and we could certainly be doing better. The farms tend to use a lot of water and the runoff causes water quality issues along with mixing hormones and other agents into the supply. But a quick check of the statistics shows that we currently produce roughly 24,000 pounds of milk per cow in the United States. And we have a lot of cows.

Even if you can convince everyone to start drinking this stuff, can you really pump out that sort of volume at any point in the foreseeable future? And how much room will you need to produce it in those quantities? Either way, you’re going to wind up with some sort of “milk factory” situation, and it will need to be powered up with energy. We would need to see a lot more details before being convinced.

But underlying all of this is the question of why so many scientists want to wipe out all of the cows. What did they ever do to you? Milk should come out of cows. (Or in some cases, goats if you prefer.) Steaks should come out of bulls. We don’t need to call in the mad scientist squad to tear down every aspect of normal living.