It's Alive - ish!

So what's the latest and sexiest thing from humanity's Reckless Tampering With the Building Blocks of Creation Department?  Artificial Meat!  Or rather thoroughly genuine legitimate meat grown in a laboratory and never having come into contact with anything as plebeian as an actual animal.

It wasn't so long ago (in a geological sense at least) that I was opining in this blog that insects would feature heavily in our future dining choices.  Now it looks like I might be wrong.  In various high tech laboratories and wildly keen start up companies across the world eager biochemists are encouraging otherwise unemployed animal cells to duplicate like crazy until eatable quantities of meat are produced.

It's taking a while but the initial signs are hopeful.  That is to say the cells are indeed duplicating and so far no hideous monsters have lurched out of the various labs to wreak havoc among the innocent citizenry.  So far so good.  Fish, beef, chicken all these things and more are destined to hit our plates without much in the way of involvement from actual fish, cows or chickens.  "Ethical Meat" is the selling point.  Now an innocent animal doesn't have to die in order to provide you with an inedible cheeseburger.  While I have no fundamental issue with killing innocent animals to provide me with semi nutritious food I've got to admit the prospect of them not being killed to do so is rather pleasing on a sentimental level.

Of course once we're all eating ethical meat there will be the awkward question of what to do with all of the millions of food animals we've got gathered across the planet.  I suspect that nobody will be particularly interested in taking care of them now that a profit creating trip to the abattoir isn't going to be the end result.  I can't imagine this will result in a happy outcome for them.  Still the deaths of millions of animals is a small price to pay for not killing millions of animals.

There are a couple of other issues as well.  Brilliant though this technology is it does come at a cost.  It takes a lot of energy so power bills tend to be a little prohibitive at the moment to providing low cost steaks for all.  Still a lot of that will no doubt be fixed by economies of scale.  Once you're feeding entire continents you can probably get away with high power costs and still sell cheaply for a profit.  Besides since we'll have all the dead former food animals lying about the place anyway possibly biogeneration of electricity or cattle fuelled power stations may be the way to go, at least in the short term.  Throw another cow on the fire.

One more issue and since this is a blog entry about food it probably surprises you that I haven't brought up cannibalism yet.  Wait no longer.  Normally we develop a technology to a certain level of maturity before abusing it and doing morally dubious shit that previous generations wouldn't have considered.  It is a measure of how sophisticated we are as a species nowadays that we are considering the abuse even before we've got the technology bedded down.  Yes, I'm talking about ethical cannibalism.  It has been pointed out that, in theory at least, what can be done with animals and fish can be done with humans too.  If we get to that point then the involvement of animals in the process (currently reduced to minor cell donations) can be eliminated entirely and we will literally be eating ourselves.

Imagine a food chain consisting of a single link.  We're on the way there and I'm sure this won't create any significant ethical or psychological conundrums for us to solve because that stuff never happens.  Meanwhile all we need to do is work out how we're going to defeat the roaming gangs of sheep, cows and goats who escaped the executioners bullet and are now marauding on our society.  And of course deal with an ocean so full of fish that we're going to be able to walk overseas for our holidays.