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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
I know it’s narrow-minded and provincial of me, but it seems to me that people just shouldn’t be turned into food.
It is neither narrow minded nor provincial. But can you put your finger on why you think that?
Only approximately. I think we need to embrace a certain number of powerful ideas, ideas that might defy rationality and the cold calculus of pragmatism. These ideas are anchors, pilings driven deep into the bedrock of our humanity and to which we cling when the exigencies of the moment might make us do monstrous things.
One of those fundamental ideas is, I think, to consider people as distinct from, and inherently superior to, food.
That’s the best comment in the thread.
Does it trouble you that it’s basically a secular restatement of the Imago Dei from Genesis 1:27?
I don’t know of any rational, secular basis for this concept.
AP, that’s an interesting observation, but my comment was made with no thought of man being made in G-d’s image.
I think it’s quite rational to draw bright, clear lines in situations where the profit from crossing them is low, and the potential costs are high. There are lots of kinds of meat we can eat without placing humans in the food category; there is no compelling reason, barring freak travel mishaps in mountainous environments, for eating people.
On the other hand, there is a compelling reason to maintain a special status for the human species, and to compromise that only reluctantly. A multitude of sins (speaking secularly) begin with dehumanization — it’s a necessary first step in the commission of all kinds of atrocities. Isn’t it sensible to resist processes that encourage the consideration of people as anything less than human?
And wouldn’t slapping a slab of your fellow man on the charcoal grill encourage a certain nonchalance about man’s special status? I think it would.