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Lab-Grown Long Pig?
The latest episode of The Remnant features Jonah Goldberg answering questions from listeners, including one about Jonah’s views on veganism and animal rights. In the answer to that question, they talk about lab-grown meat. As an aside, they note that scientists are close to growing lab-grown human meat.
Say wha..? Now, I haven’t investigated this at all, but the science of it is utterly irrelevant to what I’m about to ask: How would you react to lab-grown human meat produced for human consumption?
Would you try it?
Would you consider eating it to be cannibalism?
If so, is it the kind of cannibalism that is morally abhorrent? Or, is it an okay kind of cannibalism because no humans were killed?
In all honesty, I have no idea what my own answers to these questions are. This is a problem that I’ve never thought about before. But I figured it would make a great Ricochet discussion topic.
Published in General
Lab meat has been around for some time (2013) and those that have consumed are pretty unanimous. You’re better off eating a cardboard box since it has much the same flavor and texture.
The flavor of meat comes from fat and blood, neither of which is present in the Petri dish. And the flavor is also dependent on diet of the animal. The most current boast I could find among proponents of the process is that they’ve gotten the price down to $33/lb.
As for growing human muscle it is unethical for anything else other than medical research. If you can replace muscle lost to an IED explosion, I’m all for it.
Ba-a-a-ah!
Seawriter
There’s the only really useful purpose; growing replacement parts with a zero rejection rate.
I don’t get what makes it human meat? The DNA? I can’t taste DNA. It’s just muscle. I would have no problem eating it if it didn’t come from a real walking, talking, voting human. (Although that excludes baby, the other white meat. Now available at Planned Parenthood!)
But muscles from animals have all sorts of flavor profiles and levels of tenderness based on the fat marbling and how “used” the muscle was. Flavor and nutrition is strongly influenced by the animals diet. All those animal muscles have the same DNA within the same critter. So many of the differences are based on environment rather than heredity. What animal part is my fake lab meat going to mimic? Can I get a filet mignon? A flank steak? Or just some generic muscle tissue only good for ground beef?
Christ says it is adultery merely to think (willfully) about sex with another man’s wife. Why? Because life is about choices — it is about becoming a loveful person or not — and willfully indulging fantasies of wrong behavior is choosing to become a person who enjoys sin. We should not be ashamed of accidental dreams and fleeting fancies. But the thoughts we actively choose to indulge reflect who we are.
What is the purpose of eating artificially produced human flesh other than to dare the taboo of cannibalism? Why not stick to artificial reproduction of cows and other livestock? Similar to the scenario of adultery, it seems to be a fantasy of sin.
Furthermore, it treats as mundane and trivial the glorious gift of the human body. We are not beings with bodies, but rather beings of bodies and souls.
I believe there are certain health considerations in eating human flesh or specifically any animal eating the flesh of its own kind. Biology has certain barriers in that many viruses, bacteria, diseases and such have difficulties crossing species lines easily. Thus things a cow may have are relatively harmless when consumed by another species such as human. But these barriers are weakened when a species consumes its own, thus there is a higher likelihood that something maybe passed on. There are a few disease that are known to be passed this way and have been tracked back to cannibalism.
I was hungry?
I think you’re right, but would vat-grown meat be susceptible to the same issues?
But does that taboo attach if the flesh didn’t come from a person it was instead grown in a lab?
More seriously, I think there could be situations in which it would be feasible to eat artificial human flesh, but that none of them apply at the moment. I don’t know how the whole process works, which might make those scenarios unnecessary.
I’m not so sure it does, unless you grow an entire person in a lab.
Is the cow still mooing?
What is the purpose of eating sushi other than to dare the taboo of eating raw fish?
Taboos exist for good, empirical reasons, but if it’s possible to neutralize those reasons when why continue to cling to the taboo?
The taboo against eating raw fish is because of the risk of parasites and other forms of food poisoning. If those risks can be eliminated, then why not eat raw fish if you want to?
The taboo against eating human flesh is because murder is wrong and also because eating neural tissue from one’s own species has serious health risks (see: mad cow disease). If both those factors can be neutralized, then why not have a go if you want to?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JgDnHCRrw0
No.
No.
Yes.
Your question seems to assume that there’s a kind of cannibalism that is not morally abhorrent. On the other hand, classifying it as “cannibalism” seems to imply the answer.
I’m going to offer one of my bizarre family sayings as an answer. This really is a family saying, from my paternal gransfather. “Have a nice piece of squid. It’s just as good.”
If eating lab-grown human meat is OK, why would it not be OK to eat normal human meat, as long as you didn’t kill the person for that purpose? If it is OK to eat human meat, then we’re wasting a bunch of perfectly good calories by burying or cremating our loved ones, and inefficiently disposing of a bunch of medical waste, including aborted fetuses.
Swift’s Modest Proposal was satire. But then, so was Monty Python’s Loretta skit in Life of Brian. Is this really where we’re headed?
In all seriousness, Fred, you make a good point that echoes Maj’s objection to that Prager video a few days ago. I don’t think that there is a rational basis for human morality, other than moral Darwinism (act so as to maximixe the propagation of your genes into the future).
I do wonder why anyone would want to grow human meat in a lab, as opposed to other types of meat. It is my understanding that we taste like pork, as implied by your “long pig” title. So let’s just stick to lab-grown pig, shall we?
Having customs that not only taboo something undesirable, but also create some distance between normal behavior and the taboo, has a purpose. If lab-created meat is realistic enough to be appetizing to eat, a chunk of it could be mistaken for having come from a real animal, and I don’t see why human animals would be an exception.
Religions that taboo pork probably would be wary of allowing their adherents to eat lab-created bacon, for example, because how well, really, can the diner be expected to tell the difference? Bacon is tasty. Why get used to eating it just because it’s from a lab if it’s otherwise taboo for your religion? While it’s presumably easier to get ahold of meat from a whole pig than it would be to get ahold of meat from a whole human, the difficulty of obtaining “real human meat” doesn’t seem to justify breaking the taboo with lab-created human meat… And isn’t it weird to have something that might be mistaken for murder evidence in your fridge or trash?
I had this nightmare the other night, where someone “rewarded” me by gifting me with an exact duplicate of someone’s corpse after that person had passed. It wasn’t the real corpse, but physically identical. Delivered to my kitchen. What was that supposed to mean, that I should slice off an ear to fry it up and eat it? Panic over the fact that, even though it’s not really the person’s corpse, it’s such a good duplicate that, for all practical purposes, I now had a dead body on my hands? Awkwardly, the body of someone who’s known to be dead and buried elsewhere, so that my possession of the “body” looks like foul play? What do I do, hide or destroy the corpse as if I were a criminal, even though I wasn’t? It was a terrible nightmare…
Yes. If it’s human, then its cannibalism. I see it as another attempt to cheapen the Judeo-Christian belief that man is mad in the image of God. See, we’re just meat!!
Meat is meat, and man’s gotta eat!
j/k.
Seriously though, no, weakening the taboo against eating human flesh because no murder, disfigurement, or (presumably) health risk are involved misses the primary point of the taboo; the elevation of human life to the realm of the ‘sacred’, which would be subtly but extensively undermined by such a societal change (there are isolated religious traditions that sought to conflate the two, such as in Papua New Guinea, but I don’t think that’s a viable outlook outside of small and isolated populations with little respect for reason over mysticism).
Its similar to the hypothetical incest question regarding adult siblings who, for whatever reason, can’t conceive children; its not just about health or abuse concerns (or even property, historically speaking), its about preserving desired patterns of familial relationships, and the way they are believed to shape individuals and society.
[Takes of Hat of Pretentiousness] Also, gross!
Lab grown human meat? I’m drawing a complete blank as to what for. I was just hoping this wouldn’t devolve into a Long Cat thread.
Nobody is considering the possibility of human meat being made with the intent to strengthen carnivores lower on the food chain, for the possibility of them rising up against the humans to take over the Earth. If some of the Greens really want to reduce the human population, they could consider raising wild animals to develop a taste for humans. As far as I know, there’s no taboo against animals eating humans. It’s probably politically correct, if you are a Green.
…do I expose this guy as a gaming nerd now so that he can’t accuse me first, or do I wait for a better moment?
Why did Edison need to invent the light bulb when we already had the proven technology of candles? At this point, there’s probably not much advantage to lab-grown meat but a couple centuries down the road when there are millions of people living on space stations throughout the solar system, it could be very useful.
As to Fred’s question, when this thing really gets rolling I don’t know that the meat grown in vats will be distinctly cow, pig, chicken, eel, etc. They may find that some “original recipe” meats just aren’t that great grown in a vat and the most desirable vat-grown cuts are a combination.
Which then leads to: if your vat culture is 40% human is it only 40% cannibalism?
What percentage of human DNA is shared with other animals? Is eating other animals still that percentage of cannibalism?
Man-bear-pig.
You are quite right, there is no easily cited moral reason to not eat it (though it is worth noting that the DNA in question did once belong to a specific person, so you are technically eating that person in perpetuity).
I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to do it, not even if it could be got at summer BBQ sale prices at the Piggly Wiggly.
Screw that, I want me some mammoth like we had in the good old days! Paleocons ftw!
Quoting it because liking it just isn’t enough.
Personally, I prefer the vision of a man I once knew, Ernest “Chick” Callenbach. He wrote Ecotopia, a utopian novel very popular over 40 years ago, but his really big idea was restoring bison to the Great Plains.
Tasty, too.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KUZ7J3S79SUC/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B008NB2HKY
If you think this particular future is coming soon, here’s an appropriate Christmas gift!