all the pigeons gonna run to him:
The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals.
The writer concludes his piece in this rather chilling way:
I then went to my bellwether of techno-optimist thinking, Jesse Ausubel, the director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University. He said there is no reason to doubt that a long-term trend toward more concentrated food production will eventually lead to manufactured meat.
In fact, he said, there is essentially little choice on a crowding planet to pursue technological solutions to feeding ourselves, shifting away from carbon-containing fuels, and otherwise limiting our ecological imprint. Human nature is probably harder to change than technology, he said.
“If behavior and technology do not change, more numerous humans will trample the earth and endanger our own survival,†he told me. “The snake brain in each of us makes me cautious about relying heavily on changes in behavior. In contrast, centuries of extraordinary technical progress give me great confidence that diffusion of our best practices and continuing innovation can advance us much further in decarbonization, landless agriculture, and other cardinal directions for a prosperous, green environment. For engineers and others in the technical enterprise the urgency and prizes for sustaining their contributions could not be higher. Because the human brain does not change, technology must.â€Â
What do you think? Can we change human nature? Should we? [emphasis mine]
h/t Memeorandum
Well, of course, Jane Smiley and George Soros would say yes.
If it’ll get my newly vegetarian wife to leave me alone when I crave hamburgers, then yes, grow ’em in a vat and slap ’em on the grill.
I agree that it is unlikely that human nature would change, but the product of it’s endeavors is not to seek the lowest and most depressing future :) , I hope. I think changing the nature of human life is something that has been tried before and would require an engineer much smarter than the subject. That seems to be a paradox.
Let’s see… if the meat was never alive, then it isn’t dead, right? It’s just sorta undead.
Nosferatu nutrition. I’ll pass.
—
As for human nature, we can’t change it but we could try living up to it.
Soylent Green is PETA!
limiting our ecological imprint.
Every time I read a sentence with the verb “limiting” and a noun like “imprint” or “footprint,” I have this urge to go outside, start my car and let it idle in the driveway, open all the doors and turn up the heat, and grill a big-ass steak.
Rare.
With extra hormones and pesticides.
“If behavior and technology do not change, more numerous humans will trample the earth and endanger our own survival,â€Â
Yea like ANWR is being overrun at this minute.
“Eat recycled food–it’s good for the environment, and okay for you.”
/Judge Dredd
Being a believer <glances over my shoulder for turtles named after fictional monsters> in the dual nature of Man, I assume the “live up to” part of that nature would have to be the higher, better one.
It’s dangerous to assume the lower, base part of human nature isn’t every bit as natural to us as the other, but of course, that’s the one too commonly lived down to…
Beef Ka Bobs tonight! If they can’t tell me where the food originated with “test tube”, I don’t want it
“without” damn…..
If the “Illiad” moves you, the story of an illiterate Greeks from the bronze age, then, no, human nature doesn’t change.
“Man can be chained, but he cannot be domesticated.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
There would still be bacon cells, growing live in the bacon vat, and they would die when you stopped feeding them growth hormone and bacongrowthsoup, and then cooked them.
So it would be living, just not hooked up to anything that could really think or feel or maybe theres a hitch…
Just how do you get around needing a circulatory system to push nutrients around?
There might be some tradeoffs.
But the best thing is that this would be FUTURE bacon, which would hover.
Imagine hover bacon growing in a vat!
You-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, you may say I’m a dreamer . . .
Being a believer in the dual nature of Man, I assume the “live up to†part of that nature would have to be the higher, better one.
Yes. I believe that Man has two choices: to think, or not to think. Living up to his higher nature means choosing the first. As Goya said, “The sleep of Reason produces monsters.”
There would still be bacon cells, growing live in the bacon vat, and they would die when you stopped feeding them growth hormone and bacongrowthsoup, and then cooked them.
So it would be living, just not hooked up to anything that could really think or feel
Mmmmmmm… Frankenbacon.
I’ll pass on the Frankenfurters though.
Wow…if you can grow simple meat from cell samples, the sky’s the limit! Unlimited veal! Whale steaks! Pandaburgers! Even Long Pig!
(Can’t forget Frankenburgers.)
Ards…wouldn’t Frankenbacon require digging up a dead hog, reanimating it, then killing it for its bacon?
This science fiction food thing has been presented since the 1920’s or 1930’s. Will someone actually make it work – cheaply enough to make it work?
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/Living/in_vitrio.htm
#5 Cowboy – me too. car is still running. and air conditioning is on.
To heck with turducken. I wanna stuff a spotted owl in a bald eagle and stick that inside a pterodactyl.
Ards…wouldn’t Frankenbacon require digging up a dead hog, reanimating it, then killing it for its bacon?
Isn’t that basically what they’re doing? They have cells from a presumably dead hog, they get them to grow, and then they kill them for food. They just skip the burial part, and they don’t go whole hog with the reanimation. :)
To heck with turducken. I wanna stuff a spotted owl in a bald eagle and stick that inside a pterodactyl.
If they crossed Long Pig with spuds, they could invent Duncan Idaho Potatoes.
I wanna stuff a spotted owl in a bald eagle and stick that inside a pterodactyl.
I’ll bet you could fit a passenger pigeon inside the owl, too.
¿Que?
This has been a staple (!) of SF since there’s been SF, as Mikey NTH points out. It’s how H. Beam Piper’s characters get fresh food on a spaceship that takes thousands of hours to get anywhere, and “…Tante Cordelia wouldn’t eat it if it didn’t come from a nice clean vat…” according to Lois Bujold. If it can be made to work, it’s how our descendants will get meat to eat, and the elite among them will consider actually killing an animal for food barbaric and/or unclean.
I want it, not least because it offers confusion to the Euroweenies. No more cruelty to animals; at worst the culture degrades over time (as Piper’s do) and you have to go to a living donor animal for a tissue sample. But the Europeans have made such a big deal out of “Frankenfoods” that they can not accept this — which leaves them whacking cows in the head with a hammer while others have, as they say, moved on.
Regards,
Ric
They can’t accept the concept, true. But then, they can’t bear the thought of McDonalds either. Except for when they’re eating there.
sligs! yay!
Remember that Larry Niven story where the aliens paid well for DNA samples from Earth? Turns out they were using them to grow meat. Including human meat.
They just didn’t get why the humans were upset by this — they were making sure to grow the suckling roasts without heads, after all.
I think it’s a great idea. We can fund the research by eliminating grazing subsidies. Beef prices will skyrocket and the along comes Beef2! at only half the price. People will switch.
Someone (Clarke?) wrote a story about this. It’s a well established practice and someone brings out a new flavor that’s a huge success. Competitor reverse-engineers it and finds out it’s mostly human. The story is told as the government hearing on what to do. Cool story.
“Shut up and eat your vat-grown cell culture, Bobby…”
Nah. It’ll never catch on.
Hopefully, there will be scope for price differentiated “NevrLived” Compactified-Non-Killed-Animal-Goop© – you know, with the good stuff being selectively hand-syphoned from the central part of the VAT, leaving a thin gruel of misshapen, irregular but discountable Grade D cells. Otherwise, how is Taco-Bell to survive?
Jack in the Box is a lot a pioneer I think with their so-good they-quite-possibly-contain-a-meat-like-substance tacos.
“Comment by Ardsgaine on 4/12 @ 10:30 pm #
If they crossed Long Pig with spuds, they could invent Duncan Idaho Potatoes.”
I’m going to hunt you down and slap you for that one.
ghola potatoes? Hah. Gola potatoes are from India. India is the future.
As David Gerrold pointed out in The Middle of Nowhere, there’s a lot more to getting meat — as opposed to vaguely cow-flavored Jello® — from a vat than sticking in a few muscle cells. For one, vat-raising meat would require using a level of hormones and antibiotics — since, among other things, there was no immune system attached to your steak — that passes beyond irony into sheer jaw-dropping “WTF!?!?” territory, given the current tranzie obsession with such things.
I suspect that the elites would still insist on their organic free-range chicken, to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses eating carniculture McNuggets…and invent a whole new ethics (from whole cloth) to justify why theirs is the Morally Superior Way.
Akatsikami is right. When/if meat from living animals becomes exclusive, the limolibs will embrace it as high culture.
Damn you, Ardsgaine! You made me fall off my chair and frighten the cats.
I thought they came from the Golan Heights.
It seems to be human nature for the more prudent, more just, more more moderate, and more courageous to take what they need from the imprudent, unjust, immoderate, and cowardly.
I don’t, quite frankly, care where my meat is coming from. I’d draw a line at directly eating land bugs (flying bugs included) and humans knowingly, but otherwise, bring it on! And if you can do it in a vat, sure thing. As long as it tastes great.
But it ain’t a-gonna happen in my lifetime, and likely not in yours either. So why worry about it?
I like to look my dinner in the eye before I kill it and grill it.