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Would You Eat a Lab-Grown Meatball?
Let me begin by confessing that, in my lifetime, I have willingly eaten a lot of questionable “foods.” For instance, as a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I consumed a ridiculous amount of Hostess-variety snacks that were no doubt born in a lab, possibly as the result of a botched experiment.
I’m pretty sure the marshmallow coating of Sno Balls was actually a pliant form of styrofoam, sweetened with corn syrup (the coconut flakes were shaved plywood). And the gelatinous goo filling of those “fruit” pies? It’s re-processed waste from a hair gel factory.
And yet whatever it was, I ate it. I knocked back bags of Pop Rocks. I dumped packets of neon orange powder onto my Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese and scarfed it down. When my family bought our first microwave, all of us nuked Cups of Noodles, marveling at how, in just three minutes, you could enjoy limp noodles and spongy re-hydrated peas in styrofoam-laced broth. Science was cool!
So when I read about New Wave Foods’s lab-grown shrimp, the first question that leaped to mind was, naturally: Would I eat it? Ditto for Memphis Meat’s lab-grown meatball.
According to their producers, the primary reason for lab-grown shellfish and beef is to reduce the carbon footprint. Google’s Sergey Brin, in fact, is bankrolling “cultured beef” in the belief that cattle farming harms the environment and contributes to global warming.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t eat engineered meat on climate change grounds. That’s a silly reason, as it not only ignores the evidence against global warming, but the reason why we enjoy meat in the first place: the taste!
Yet even assuming that a meatball harvested from fetal bovine serum was delectable . . . would I eat it?
The truth is, I’m not sure. My palette has matured with age and income, and I’m amazed that I used to not only eat but enjoy such junk. But in my defense, most of the Frankenfoods I used to inhale were all fake pastries and chemically-created plant-based concoctions. I still indulge in the odd pack of Twizzlers which, as you know, are 90 percent plastic and Red Dye #40. Were Hostess Fruit Pies gross? Absolutely, especially the sugar coating that shellacked the pastry shell to the consistency of sheetrock. Yet they mimicked the flavor of fruit and flour, which somehow made them consumable — as opposed to “cell cultures” and “broths of amino acids, salts and sugars that will mimic hormones and catalyze meat cell growth” to form a Franken-meatball.
Speaking for myself, I can pretty easily eat lab-engineered foodstuffs that replace plant-based ingredients. However, the prospect of eating lab-engineered meat, poultry, or shellfish (or, as it’s being marketed, “Shr!mp”), for some reason gives me the heebie-jeebies. Food that ostensibly derives from a living animal ignites my primal bias that — well, that it should come from a living, breathing, feeding/grazing animal. I want my grilled strip steak cut from fat Angus cattle. I want my sauteed shrimp to have bottom-fed and destroyed acres of mangroves. After all, meat/poultry/shellfish isn’t just a combination of cells. It’s the embodiment of a life in flesh, whence comes its flavor and texture.
Should you doubt me, I’ll have you know I have the French on my side. According to Ariane Daguin, consultant for D’Artagnan meats, chickens that live longer lives, roaming widely and pecking at whatever greens, bugs, and snake-bits occur naturally, actually taste better and need no gussying up in terms of sauces, stuffing, and the like. When Sergey Brin’s crew can offer me a chicken wing that tastes like a Brune Landaise raised in the sunshine of a Pennsylvania Mennonite farm, I’ll take a gander. Until then, I’ll take a pass.
Fortunately, the sheer expense of producing lab-grown meats means that it will be years before I have to put my tastebuds to the test. In the interim, it will be fun to see what moral contortions liberals perform to justify lab-grown animal protein. You support Frankenburgers because they reduce cattle flatulence? But wait — aren’t you also against genetically-modified seed crops?
What about you? Does meat grown in a petri dish gross you out? Or are you like my husband, who professes he’ll “eat anything as long as it’s good?”
Published in General
If it tasted good I’d eat soylent green.
I admire your position for its simplicity. But how good does it have to be for you to consume your fellow humans? Snickers bar good, or the best meal of your life good?
You are what you eat. If Soylenet came as Doritos,people would consume it with ignorant glee. Rather have a bone to gnash upon that came from a Global Climate Change Activist while lounging about a primitive fire, thank you.
Those fruit pies really were something else.
I’m with your husband. I’ll eat anything as long as it’s tasty. But eating it to fight climate change, count me out.
Google’s Sergey Brin, in fact, is bankrolling “cultured beef” in the belief that cattle farming harms the environment and contributes to global warming.
You know what else contributes to global warming? Server farms. The latest info I could find says Google has 12 of these babies around the world burning through juice at the rate of 260 megawatts.
Also: you weren’t supposed to eat the Hostess Snowballs! They were for throwing at your enemies during Lunch Period.
I’d at least try the lab meat. If it’s not significantly better than the real thing, or good enough but really cheap, I probably wouldn’t eat it again.
I mean, I’ve eaten surimi in a pinch.
There’s not a damn thing wrong with Snowballs. Their classic formula predates the Formica-Styrofoam era. Think of it as a small German chocolate cake mixed with a macaroon. Okay, there was the food color on one of the two, but that was to deflect the endless snickering over the tightly wrapped hemispheres looking like breasts.
Surely God’s most harmless vice.
But all anyone ever talks about are Twinkies, the Marcia-Marcia-Marcia drama queen of Hostess products. Truly those insipid sponges are the food of the devil.
Snowballs are devil’s food goodness.
I prefer to think of it as a coconut covered hand grenade with the name of my mortal foe, Buddy Mills written all over it.
You beat me to it. I still like Snowballs.
Fake shrimp? Not so much.
Back in the day, when they made Twinkies with “real” sour cream, they were pretty good.
As you say, we’ve been eating fake food for a long time. The results speak for themselves.
Gary, maybe it’s because I’m female, but I never thought of the breast connection. The scales have fallen from my eyes!
Thank you for vindicating my favorite Hostess treat (preferred color: pink)
Ah, yes. The “ocean hot dog.”
If we are looking to space travel, then this technology, whatever the creators sales pitch may be (consider that if I were making lab grown meat, I would use the climate to sell it too – climate is big business and the current consumer rage).
The Martian colony would do better growing cattle in labs over bringing cows, at least in the short run.
Count me as no. Dignity requires discrimination.
But I did love those fruit pies. Do they still make them? I haven’t seen any at the supermarket.
I think you can get them at Walmart, but word is, like the new Twinkie, they’re not the same.
Everything went downhill when they got rid of Fruit Pie the Magician.
One of my favorite conversation topics with people who talk about their vegetarianism: would you eat meat if it didn’t have to come from an animal? Like a Star Trek replicator or something? Looks like we’re close to that day, with some interesting parallels to the ESCR debates for the militant vegetarians/vegans: how many steps between your meat and an actual animal is required for eating it to be morally permissible?
If it’s tasty, safe, and less expensive, count me in.
LOl, thanks.
It does have its benefits, right? Another being that lab-grown shrimp is apparently kosher.
Except that part of keeping kosher is also avoiding the impression that you are not keeping kosher, isn’t it?
Yes, I would try lab-grown meat. I will try a lot of weird foods (though not live insects).
Would I pay extra to use it as a substitute for regular meat? No.
There are a lot of real animal products that I will not touch with a ten-foot pole. But if this meat is actual meat, even if it didn’t come from an animal, I can dig it. If I never have to bite down on another bit of gristle or bone again, it will be too soon.
Unless it’s gross: then I won’t.
We need to ask John Yoo about this.
Fruit pies are good for you, I mean they DO have Fruit in them.
But they weren’t as good as the pudding pies
I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat fake meat! I like food that eats salad especially if it’s been bar-b-que’d. (Along with a cold beer… Mmmmmm!)
I’d eat it in a heartbeat. Actually, I’m looking forward to lab grown meat.
In a way, I feel bad that intelligent mammals are slaughtered for my food. (Not bad enough that I stop eating them, but still.) When I look into my cat’s eyes, sometimes I think about how arbitrary it is that he’s a pet and not food.
So I’ll be glad when we don’t have to murder animals any more.
Your cat is thinking the same thing.
He’s thinking the same thing, with regret. Sorry, Basil.