Masters of Health Magazine September 2026 | Page 30

Note: Thank you to my dear farmer-friend, Howard Vlieger, for sending this latest technocratic overreach with a core of theatre of the absurd! 

Read the full story that inspired this piece: 

Plastic bottles can be turned into edible vanilla-flavour cookies 

(New Scientist)

Take used plastic bottles, blast them with heat and chemical solvents, feed the resulting slurry to genetically engineered yeast, mix in some fiber and sweetener, 3D-print the paste into cookie shapes, and call it food.

The researchers behind µBites haven’t eaten them yet. They’re waiting for institutional approval to taste their own creation.

Let that sink in: the people who designed this process, who know exactly what goes into it, who understand the metabolic pathways of their CRISPR-modified yeast better than anyone on earth, are not willing to put one of these cookies in their mouth without a committee signing off first.

But somehow, once that rubber stamp lands, the rest of us are supposed to line up.

This is technocratic overreach in its purest form…the belief that every problem created by industrial processes can be solved with more industrial processes.

We’ve spent decades learning that plastic leaches endocrine disruptors into everything it touches, that microplastics accumulate in human brain tissue at alarming concentrations, that the petrochemical industry has externalized enormous costs onto public health while privatizing the profits, and the academic response is “let’s feed it to yeast and call it vanilla.”

The lead researcher, Sandhya Jayasekara, says “it smells good — that’s for sure — like a real cookie.” This is the safety standard. Not toxicology panels, not long-term feeding studies, and not metabolic pathway characterization. It passes the sniff test. Literally.

Her colleague Lahiru Jayakody estimates twenty more years of research before this could theoretically pull plastic from oceans and turn it into “safe and appetizing food.” Two decades of grant money, conference presentations, and press releases before anyone consumes the product. Not a bad business model if you can get it.

They’re “confident” the cookies are safe. On what basis? The metabolic products of genetically modified yeast fed industrial breakdown compounds are not well-characterized. 

Michelle Perro, MD

Dr. Michelle Perro, MD, Pediatrician