The Future of Meat

photo by G Wiv

One reason that the foie gras measure passed so easily in Chicago was that the perceived constituency for foie gras was assumed to be about 50 food snobs. Never mind that you can have a foie gras dog for not much more than a Happy Meal at Hot Doug's; the (disputed) cruelty of foie gras production versus the chance for elected officials to score some rah-rah points with almost no effect on anybody except a few tuxedo-clad effete snobs was a no-brainer for our City Council.

But the same could never happen for chicken, hamburger, bacon or any other meats eaten by the broad spectrum of humanity, right? Well, read this piece in Slate and see if you still doubt we are at the very early stages of an all-out war on meat which could see it go the way of smoking today or drinking in 1920:

Every society lives with two kinds of moral problems: the ones it's ready to face, and the ones that will become clear or compelling only in retrospect. Human sacrifice, slavery, the subjugation of women—every tradition seems normal and indispensable until we're ready, morally and economically, to move beyond it.

Well, the average American is not going to give up his bacon just because some pointy-head says it's the moral equivalent of human sacrifice, right? Not to worry, he won't have to:

We can't change our craving for meat, but we can change the way we satisfy it. How? By growing meat in labs, the way we grow tissue from stem cells... Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We'll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We'll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We'll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming. But 300 years from now, when our descendants look back at slaughterhouses the way we look back at slavery, they won't remember the benefits to us, any more than they'll remember our dried-up tears for a horse. They'll want to know whether we saw the moral calling of our age. If we do, it's time to pony up.

The problem with this polemic is that it contains within it, and deals with, all the obvious refutations that will inevitably spring to most minds. The comparison to slavery is more hysterical than historical? Perhaps, but it's got just enough evident truth in it (slaves were, in many senses, another form of livestock for their owners) to make it hard to refute; the arguments for the "naturalness" of our meat craving had their parallel in the arguments, from classical history, for the naturalness of an aristocratic class supported by slave labor. (Which indeed had the argument of near-universality throughout human history on its side-- just like eating meat does-- until it was stopped.)

Lab-grown steak won't taste like real steak? Well, most people eat meat so full of chemicals and grown and processed under such unnatural circumstances anyway that it's hard to argue that difference. And if you, Mr. Gourmand, insist on eating a steak baptized in the suffering of the animal from whose body it was torn instead of grown in a nice petri dish, why should society support your preference for cruelty?

Lab-grown food takes us that much further from nature, the seasons, the natural order of life and death? Yeah, and so do antibiotics. Find a parent who would give them up today in the name of the natural order of life and death.

In short, it is disturbingly difficult to come up with arguments which will stand up with the broader public against a coming wave of anti-meat activism. What we might call the Slow Food argument can be too easily caricatured as a form of elitist good-for-me-but-not-theeism. When clonemeat is grown in labs and sold at ever-cheaper prices, the masses will buy it-- and it will become harder and harder to preserve the idea that traditional animal-raising and slaughtering practices are not something that should be put back with, in the article's loaded words, "human sacrifice, slavery, [and] the subjugation of women."


photo by Cathy2

Allow me to point you to this great, o.o.p. post-apocalypse yarn(and it's sequel):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/086553 ... e&n=283155

or check out Oryx and Crake, featuring lab-grown Chickee-Knobs (i think that's what they were called). Suffice it to say, chickee knobs did not bode well for society:

Wave of the future," said Crake.

Next they went to NeoAgriculturals. AgriCouture was its nickname among the students. They had to put on biosuits before they entered the facility, and scrub their hands and wear nose-cone filters, because what they were about to see hadn't been bioform-proofed, or not completely. A woman with a laugh like Woody Woodpecker led them through the corridors.

"This is the latest," said Crake.

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.

"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve on a growth unit."

Here's another one:

"Old MacDonald Had a Farm" by Mike Resnick wrote:Surely you don't think Mr. MacDonald would create a sentient meat animal.

Soylant Green is People.

and I had this nugget burning at the back of my brain, but was too lazy to search my bookshelves for the specifics; all hail Wikipedia---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl_tank