2025-11-24 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.
I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it’s starting with pork because it’s a large market and products like bacon are fat-rich, but its technology is “cell-agnostic,” meaning it could create beef and chicken, too.
Honestly, Mission Barns’ creations taste great, in part because they’re “unstructured,” in the parlance of the industry. A pork loin is a complicated tangle of fat, muscle cells, and connective tissues that is very difficult and expensive to replicate, but a meatball, salami, or sausage incorporates other ingredients. That allows Mission Barns to experiment with what plant to use as a base, and then add spices to accentuate the flavors. It’s a technology that they can iterate, basically, crafting ever-better meats by toying with ingredients in different ratios.
So the bacon I ate, for instance, had a nice applewood smoke to it. The meatballs had the springiness you’d expect. During a later visit to Mission Barns’ headquarters across town, I got to try two prototypes of its salami as well—both were spiced like you’d expect but less elastic, so they chewed a bit more easily than what you’d find on a charcuterie board. (The sensation of food in the mouth is known in the industry as “mouthfeel,” and nailing it is essential to the success of alt meats.) The salami slices even left grease stains on the paper they were served on—Dawn’s own little mark on the world.
I was one of the first people to purchase a cultivated pork product. While Mission Barns has so far only sold its products at that Italian restaurant and, for a limited time, at a grocery store in Berkeley—$13.99 for a pack of eight meatballs, similar to higher-end products from organic and regenerative farms—it is fixing to scale up production and sell the technology to other companies to produce more cultivated foods. (It is assessing how big the bioreactors will have to be to reach price parity with traditional meat products.)
The idea is to provide an alternative to animal agriculture, which uses a whole lot of land, water, and energy to raise creatures and ship their flesh around the world. Livestock are responsible for between 10 and 20 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions—depending on who’s estimating it—and that’s to say nothing of the cruelty involved in keeping pigs and chickens and cows in unsavory, occasionally inhumane, conditions.
“I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger.”
Getting animal cells to grow outside of an animal, though, ain’t easy. For one, if cells don’t have anything to attach to, they die. So Mission Barns’ cultivator uses a spongelike structure, full of nooks and crannies that provides lots of surface area for the cells to grow. “We have our media, which is just the nutrient solution that we give to these cells,” said Saam Shahrokhi, chief technology officer at Mission Barns. “We’re essentially recapitulating all of the environmental cues that make cells inside the body grow fat, [but] outside the body.”
While Dawn’s fat is that of a Yorkshire pig, Shahrokhi said they could easily produce fat from other breeds like the Mangalitsa, known as the Kobe beef of pork. (In June, the company won approval from the US Department of Agriculture to bring its cultivated fat to market.)
Fat in hand, Mission Barns can mix it with plant proteins. If you’re familiar with Impossible Foods, it uses soy to replicate the feel and look of ground beef and adds soy leghemoglobin, which is similar to the heme that gives meat its meaty flavor. Depending on the flavor and texture it’s trying to copy, Mission Bay uses pea protein for the meatballs and sausages, wheat for the bacon, and fava beans for the salami. “The plant-based meat industry has done pretty well with texture,” said Bianca Le, head of special projects at Mission Barns. “I think what they’re really missing is flavor and juiciness, which obviously is where the fat comes in.”
But the fat is just the beginning. Mission Barns’ offerings not only have to taste good, but also can’t have an off-putting smell when they’re coming out of the package and when they’re cooking. The designers have to dial in the pH, which could degrade the proteins if not balanced. How the products behave on the stove or in the oven has to be familiar, too. “If someone has to relearn how to cook a piece of bacon or a meatball, then it’s never going to work,” said Zach Tyndall, the product development and culinary manager at Mission Barns.
When I pick up that piece of salami, it has to feel like the real thing, in more ways than one. Indeed, it’s greasy in the hand and has that tang of cured meat. It’s even been through a dry-aging process to reduce its moisture. “We treat this like we would a conventional piece of salami,” Tyndall said.
Cultivated meat companies may also go more unconventional. “I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger—what would happen if you did that?” said Barb Stuckey, chief new product strategy officer at Mattson, a food developer that has worked with many cultivated meat companies. “Mixing species, it’s not something we typically do. But with this technology, we can.”
Of course, in this new frontier of food, the big question is: Who exactly is this for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it’s divorced from the cruelty of factory farming? Would meat-eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile? Mission Barns’ market research, Le said, found that its early adopters are actually flexitarians—people who eat mostly plant-based but partake in the occasional animal product. But Le adds that their first limited sale to the public in Berkeley included some people who called themselves vegetarians and vegans.
There’s also the matter of quantifying how much of an environmental improvement cultivated fat might offer over industrial pork production. If scaled up, one benefit of cultivated food might be that companies can produce the stuff in more places—that is, instead of sprawling pig farms and slaughterhouses being relegated to rural areas, bioreactors could be run in cities, cutting down on the costs and emissions associated with shipping. Still, those factories would need energy to grow fat cells, though they could be run on renewable electricity. “We modeled our process at the large commercial scale, and then compared it to U.S. bacon production,” Le said. (The company would not offer specific details, saying it is in the process of patenting its technique.) “And we found that with renewable energy, we do significantly better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Whether or not consumers bite, though, remains to be seen. The market for meat alternatives in the US has majorly softened of late: Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based products like burgers and sausages, has seen revenues drop significantly, in part because of consumers’ turn away from processed foods. But by licensing its technology elsewhere, Mission Barns’ strategy is to break into new markets beyond the United States.
The challenges of cultivated meat go beyond the engineering once you get to the messaging and branding—telegraphing to consumers that they’re buying something that may in fact be partially meat. “When you buy chicken, you get 100 percent chicken,” Stuckey said. “I think a lot of people go into cultivated meat thinking what’s going to come onto the market is 100 percent cultivated chicken, and it’s not going to be that. It’s going to be something else.”
Regardless of the trajectory of cultivated fat products, Dawn will continue mingling with llamas, soaking up the sunshine, and getting belly rubs in upstate New York—even as she makes plants taste more like pork.
2025-11-24 02:41:39
Back in February, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) went to great lengths to justify his decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary.
Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, demanded, among other things, that if confirmed, Kennedy would ensure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website did not edit a webpage stating that vaccines do not cause autism.
Of course, under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC did just that this week, as my colleague Kiera Butler covered:
Among other dubious assertions, [the new webpage] informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Despite Kennedy’s flagrant flouting of this apparent agreement with Cassidy, the senator still cannot seem to directly criticize him, or own up to the fact that he played a key role in elevating a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic with no medical training to head the country’s health agencies.
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cassidy refused to face the facts when host Jake Tapper said, “Dr. Cassidy, he lied to you.” Instead, Cassidy doubled down on the very message that Kennedy is undermining: “Vaccines are safe,” he insisted. “That’s the most important message.”
After Tapper pressed him, asking if he was worried about the impact the CDC website could have on Americans’ decisions whether or not to vaccine, Cassidy conceded that the messaging was a problem, but still refused to name Kennedy as its source or express regret over confirming him. “Anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe and that, if you don’t take them, you’re putting your child or yourself in greater danger, anything that undermines that message is a problem,” Cassidy said.
He proceeded to downplay the importance of the website, claiming that he has “never met any parent who wasn’t a pediatrician as well who actually reads the CDC website”—even though, as Tapper pointed out, Cassidy made it a condition of Kennedy’s confirmation that he would not edit the website. After more tough questioning from Tapper, Cassidy conceded: “[The changes to the website] are important, because you need to send the consistent signal that vaccines are safe.” He then pointed to an asterisk that remains on the site, which says: “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with [Cassidy] that it would remain on the CDC website.”
So, in case you’re confused about all this hair-splitting: Yes, the updated webpage now dismisses the claim that vaccines do not cause autism—contradicting the site’s own (correct) heading. This is apparently the extent to which Cassidy managed to reign Kennedy in.
Changes to the CDC website were not the reason Kennedy made even more headlines this week. There was also the heartbreaking essay from his cousin, Tatiana Schlossburg, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, in which she revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis and excoriated Kennedy for defunding cancer research and clinical trials and attacking vaccines and medications she benefitted from. The 35-year-old mother of two and daughter of former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy—who last year urged the Senate not to confirm Kennedy as HHS Secretary—wrote that she “watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”
Faced with Schlossburg’s unflinching criticism of her own family member, Cassidy still refused to directly criticize Kennedy. “Clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on the record saying something negative,” he told Tapper.
“I know it’s titillating,” Cassidy said later, “but I think we need to move beyond the titillation and actually what matters to the American people.”
Someone may want to tell him that includes protecting vaccines.
2025-11-24 02:29:38
Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.
A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.
What if you were able to just… read them like emails?
That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.
The uncanny execution—a boon to journalists, but so realistic it can leave you disturbed, as if slipping directly into Epstein’s life—was created by two Bay Area internet wizards.
The San Francisco Standard identified the duo as Luke Igel, an AI engineer, and Riley Walz, whom they describe as the city’s “favorite internet rascal.” Before Jmail, he was famous for, among other pranks, creating a website showing the exact locations of the city’s parking police by reverse-engineering the municipal ticket system to reveal, in almost real time, where tickets were being issued (an endeavor that worked for just four hours, according to The New York Times—enough to cement Walz’s internet stardom).
“Many people have made fun of how weird and quirky the whole delivery method was,” Igel told The A.V. Club, describing the Congressional email release. “Someone made an amazing indexed database of those emails using Google Journalist Studio. Problem is that once you click on this beautifully indexed document, it’s really hard to read a PDF. So we just decided to do that, to fix that.”
As The A.V. Club recounts:
To fix it, Igel and Walz used an LLM to convert the plain text in the PDFs back into an email format. Then, once the data was prepped, they used an app called Cursor, which, according to Igel, is an ‘amazing tool that allows you to use AI to code really, really fast,’ to ape Gmail’s aesthetics for a web app.
The two creators selected a list of commonly occurring senders and listed them on the site of their web app: Michael Wolff, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and Ken Starr among them. The inclusion of a “Random Page” button sweeps you into a random portion of the chronology.
While we wait for exactly what gets released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the president signed into law this past week, you can check out Jamil here. And of course, don’t forget Mother Jones’s investigation in which Leland Nally called everyone in Epstein’s notorious “little black book.”
2025-11-24 01:07:54
What will Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) do after her shock resignation from Congress in January, announced on Friday? Good question.
President Donald Trump, for one, already seems to be reversing course on their breakup. Not long after (again) calling her a “traitor” on Truth Social on Saturday, the president told NBC News he would “love to see” her revive her career in politics. (Ever one to put the feelings of others ahead of his own, Trump first advised, “she’s got to take a little rest.”)
But Greene is aggressively shutting the rumors of her return down. In response to a Time story claiming that Greene was considering running for president in 2028, the congresswoman wrote today on X: “I’m not running for President and never said I wanted to and have only laughed about it when anyone would mention it. If you fell for those headlines, you’re still being lulled everyday into psychosis by the Political Industrial Complex that always has an agenda when it does something like this.”
“Running for President requires traveling all over the country, begging for donations all day everyday to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, arguing political talking points everyday to the point of exhaustion, destroying your health and having no personal life in order to attempt to get enough votes to become President all to go to work into a system that refuses to fix any of America’s problems,” Greene continued. “The fact that I’d have to go through all that but would be totally blocked from truly fixing anything is exactly why I would never do it.”
Ever prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere—despite her recent mea culpas—Greene also said she doesn’t believe she would be allowed to ascend to the pinnacle of American political power even if she tried to: “The Political Industrial Complex has destroyed our country and will never allow someone like me or you to rise to power and actually solve the crises that plague all of us,” she wrote. “That would go against its business model.”
Earlier this year, Greene appeared to be considering a Senate run. But Trump claimed, in one of his break-up texts, he had dissuaded her from doing so, which Greene denied last week on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Senate,” she said last week. “I think the past two months of the government shutdown should have shown America exactly why I would never want to be there.”
For now, this is Greene’s story—that she’s done with politics—and she and her allies are sticking to it. A person close to Greene told NBC News: “It’s safe to say she’ll probably take a step back and be a private, normal person again.”
Time will tell.
2025-11-23 21:00:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
If you’ve spent any time on a roof, you know that it’s not especially pleasant up there—blazing in the summer, frigid and windy in the winter. Slap some solar panels up there, though, and the calculus changes: Shaded from gusts and excessive sunlight, crops can proliferate, a technique known as rooftop agrivoltaics. And because that hardware provides shade, evaporation is reduced, resulting in big water savings. Plus, all that greenery insulates the top floor, reducing energy costs.
Long held in opposition to one another, urban areas are embracing elements of the rural world as they try to produce more of their own food, in community gardens on the ground and agrivoltaics up above. In an increasingly chaotic climate, urban agriculture could improve food security, generate clean electricity, reduce local temperatures, provide refuges for pollinators, and improve mental and physical health for urbanites, among other benefits.
“This summer we had cucumbers that were the size of baseball bats, that were perfectly suited to the green roof.”
With relatively cheap investments in food production—especially if they’ve got empty lots sitting around—cities can solve a bunch of problems at once. Quezon City in the Philippines, for instance, has transformed unused land into more than 300 gardens and 10 farms, in the process training more than 4,000 urban farmers. Detroit is speckled with thousands of gardens and farms. In the Big Apple, the nonprofit Project Petals is turning vacant lots in underresourced neighborhoods into oases. “You have some places in New York City where there’s not a green space for 5 miles,” said Alicia White, executive director and founder of the group. “And we know that green spaces help to reduce stress. We know they help to combat loneliness, and we know at this point that they help to improve our respiratory and heart health.”
That makes these community spaces an especially potent climate solution, because it’s getting ever harder for people to stay healthy in cities due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment absorbs the sun’s energy and releases it throughout the night. Baking day after day during prolonged heat waves, the human body can’t get relief, an especially dangerous scenario for the elderly. But verdant patches reduce temperatures by releasing water vapor—essentially sweating into the neighborhood—and provide shade. At the same time, as climate change makes rainfall more extreme, urban gardens help soak up deluges, reducing the risk of flooding.
Oddly enough, while the oven-like effect is perilous for people, it can benefit city farms. On rooftops, scientists are finding that some crops, like leafy greens, thrive under the shade of solar panels, but others—especially warm-season crops like zucchini and watermelon—grow beautifully in harsh full-sun conditions. “Most of our high-value crops benefit from the urban heat island effect, because it extends their growing season. So growing food in the city is actually quite logical,” said horticulturist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies rooftop agrivoltaics at Colorado State University. “This summer we had cucumbers that were the size of baseball bats, that were perfectly suited to the green roof.”
That’s not all that’s thriving up there. Bousselot and her team are also growing a trio of Indigenous crops: corn, beans, and squash. The beans climb the corn stalks—and microbes in their roots fix nitrogen, enriching the soil—while the squash leaves shade the soil and reduce evaporation, saving water. In addition, they’ve found that saffron—an extremely expensive and difficult-to-harvest spice—tolerates the shade of rooftop solar panels. Water leaving the soil also cools the panels, increasing their efficiency. “We’re essentially creating a microclimate, very much like a greenhouse, which is one of the most optimal conditions for most of our food crops to grow in,” Bousselot said. “But it’s not a system that needs heating or cooling or ventilation, like a greenhouse does.”
Growers might even use the extreme conditions of a rooftop for another advantage. Plants that aren’t shaded by solar panels produce “secondary metabolites” in response to the heat, wind, and constant sunlight that can stress them. These are often antioxidants, which a grower might be able to tease out of a medicinal plant like chamomile—at least in theory. “We are sort of exploring the breadth of what’s possible up there,” Bousselot said, “and using those unique environments to come up with crops that are hopefully even more valuable to the producer.”
Down on the ground in New York City, Project Petals has seen a similar bonanza. Whereas agricultural regions cultivate vast fields and orchards of monocrops, like grains or fruit trees, an urban farm can pack a bunch of different foods into a tight space. “If you could grow it in rural areas, you could grow it in the city as well,” White said. “We’ve grown squash, snap peas, lemongrass. In our gardens, I’ve seen just about everything.”
That sort of diversification means a cornucopia of nutritious foods flows into the community. (Lots of different species also provide different kinds of flowers for pollinators—and the more pollinators, the better the crops and native plants in the area can reproduce, creating a virtuous cycle.) That’s invaluable because in the United States, access to proper nutrition is extremely unequal: In Mississippi, for example, 30 percent of people live in low-income areas with low access to good food, compared to 4 percent in New York. This leads to “silent hunger,” in which people have access to enough calories—often from ultraprocessed foods purchased at corner stores—but not enough nutrients.
Underserved neighborhoods need better access to supermarkets, of course, but rooftop and community gardens can provide fresh food and help educate people about improving their diets. “It’s not only about growing our own veggies in the city, but actually too it’s a hook to change habits,” said Nikolas Galli, a postdoctoral researcher who studies urban agriculture at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
In a study published last month in the journal Earth’s Future, Galli modeled what this change could look like on a wide scale in São Paulo, Brazil. In a theoretical scenario in which the city turned its feasible free space—around 14 square miles—into gardens and farms, every couple of acres of food production could provide healthy sustenance to more than 600 people. Though the scenario isn’t particularly realistic, given the scale of change required, “it’s interesting to think about that, if we use more or less all the areas that we have, we could provide the missing fruits and vegetables for 13 to 21 percent of the population of the city,” Galli said. “Every square meter that you do can have a function, can be useful to increase the access to healthy food for someone.”
Without urgent action here, silent hunger will only grow worse as urban populations explode around the world: By 2050, 70 percent of humans will live in cities. Urban farms could go a long way toward helping feed all those people, and could indeed benefit from rural farmers making the move to metropolises. “They’re able to pass it on to the community members like me from New York City, who maybe didn’t have the expertise,” White said, “and helping them to find their way in learning how to garden and learning how to grow their own food.”
Whether it’s on top of a roof or tucked between apartment buildings, the urban garden is a simple yet uniquely powerful tool for solving a slew of environmental and human health problems. “They’re serving as spaces where people can grow, where they can learn, and they can help to fight climate change,” White said. “It’s so good to see that people are starting to come around to the fact that a garden space, and a green space, can actually make a bigger impact than just on that community overall.”
2025-11-22 23:07:08
In an interview published Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times that he’d personally directed the CDC to put a new page on the agency’s website, casting doubt on the fact that vaccines don’t cause autism.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told the Times, lying. He added, “The phrase ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not supported by science.”
Kennedy employed confused logic in his conversation with the Times, telling journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg that he doesn’t believe there’s adequate proof to claim that vaccines don’t cause autism. “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism,” Stolberg wrote. “He is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”
Kennedy also claimed that he was merely offering a more accurate look at “the state of the science,” telling Stolberg, “I think the way to drive up vaccine utilization, ultimately, is to be honest with people,” he said, adding, “My job is not to gaslight Americans but to give them accurate information about the state of the science.”
It’s unclear what possible standard of evidence would satisfy Kennedy, who’s been a dedicated anti-vaccine activist since 2005. Dozens of studies both in the U.S. and internationally have made it clear that there’s no link between the aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and autism, including a landmark Danish study that followed 1.2 million children for 24 years. The study was published this summer in the Annals of Internal Medicine and also found no link between vaccines and a variety of other health conditions, including asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Kennedy has baselessly called for the study to be retracted, which he does not have the power to demand, and which the journal declined to do. According to Nature, the journal’s editor-in-chief Christine Laine wrote in a note on the study’s webpage that retraction “is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here.”
Kennedy’s directive has horrified CDC staffers, one of whom told my colleague Kiera Butler, “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” (As Butler wrote this week, the new “Vaccines and Autism” web page contradicts other information still available on the CDC website.) Public health experts told the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) that CDC’s guidance can no longer be trusted, creating an unprecedented challenge for Americans looking for accurate health guidance from their government.
While Kennedy’s version of the CDC focuses on reviving false claims about vaccines, the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status. Measles cases are at their highest level in three decades, with 45 outbreaks so far this year nationwide. According to—for now—the CDC, in 92 percent of those cases, the patient’s vaccination status was listed as either “unvaccinated” or “unknown.”
