In 2024, the company Biotech Foods will open the first large factory meat factory in Europe in San Sebastian. Animals are biopsied and fed in steel tanks to grow. This synthetic meat is then sold to meat processors.

Presenter Pagola presents a dilemma with rigor: "Biotech predicts a sustainable and good food for people, animals and Earth. In the case of cows producing methane discharges, one must look at how streams close to several farms are produced..." Response from Aranburu: “Today messages cannot be paid much attention because the messages used by Biotech are used by industrial farmers and the general public, regardless of what they do. They almost want us to believe that they do so altruistically, just for the good of others.

We need a social debate for the future, how our agriculture is, how we produce these foods and how we consume them. There are three alternatives: to continue with this current development model, for example, the Navarre lands are red burned with glyphosate, since instead of turning to the earth the first thing that is burned is with poison glyphosate, and then directly sow the seed when the effect of the venom is to be produced. They spend less diesel but with a total dependence on the poison. In the case of livestock, if hundreds of animals are associated, most of the time the use of antibiotics is systematic, otherwise there are contamination with colds or diarrhea... Another alternative is the one proposed by Biotech and which is gaining increasing strength, the generation of non-agricultural food. That is, sometimes from bacteria and sometimes from stem cells. But nobody knows the consequences, neither how it will be done, nor what harm it will have, for whom it will not... and the third path is to reflect on the forms of production and consumption and to produce in relation to the culture and the need of each place. In production mode we have a lot to change.

We have to talk about the benefits and harms that each productive system has, and we will realize that eating industrial chicken or industrial pork that is eaten today does not make sense, or that you cannot feed the planet sustainably, etc. ".

Of the meat mafia

Pagola explains who is Biotech Foods, a company of 11,000 square meters that opens its doors in San Sebastian, with a main shareholder like JBS of Brazil, a company with a prominent global weight in the meat industry, with a significant involvement in Amazon deforestation... Aranburu follows: “Who controls this? Mafias emerge. Although we come to the meat industry here, on a smaller scale, there are mafias. The companies that are working on this alternative are the same ones that control the current food system. We believe in a decentralized model, through agroecology, in meeting the needs of the environment with small baserritars. And normally the system doesn't want a decentralized model, it wants a centralized control model."

Livestock for less meat

The current model is that of industrial blocks. Aranburu makes two main criticisms: "Many times we talk about autochthonous, but it is not enough with naturalness, in the case of calves here can be the calves in the fattening, but if they are eating Argentinian corn and Brazilian transgenic soy, that meat has nothing of KM-0. And socially, too."

"With this I'm not going to make new friends, but ..." Olaberria's second criticism has begun. Calls for a reduction in meat consumption: "Looking at what the prior consumption was like to what was called the green revolution can give us many clues to learn how our future food should be if we want it to be sustainable. Meat consumption was much lower. We will note that the mission of the monogastric was to take advantage of the waste and not feed it with cereals ... We would see that no food was wasted, everything was used... In Western societies, meat consumption has grown dramatically in recent years and making it sustainable is impossible. It's uncomfortable to say, but it does. They consume 50 kilos of meat per person per year. 35% is industrial chicken, 30% industrial porcine. We must reduce this consumption and, above all, look at how it is produced".

Five workers with ten cows is possible

Another example is the work of five workers in the Etxeberri Goikoa farmhouse in Olaberria, making food available to the public on behalf of cow cheeses and Goieko meat. While in the Basque Country there is a predominance of increasingly large stables which are similar to factories, in Etxeberri Goikoa there are only ten cows: “We have cows of milk and milk allows it, produce a lot of milk with little land, then make cheese, grow your calves and sell your meat home and to restaurants... Our current challenge is not viability, we have already achieved it, our future challenge is the organization of work and improve our working conditions seeking mutual support,” explains Aranburu.

Aranburu claims custody: “We do livestock, animal care. We keep the animals as best as possible, also the land, our daily obsession is to keep them as best as possible so that they give them the best possible performance. I’m not measuring in liters, but just getting sick, killing a little, giving a lot and good grass to the earth…”.