Sunday, June 25, 2023

Who doesn’t love things from vats?

Soon you'll be able eat a chicken whilst looking it right in its beady, uncomprehending eyes. Which, I mean, is a horror show on the surface, but I don't know, hurray for science?
What? They wouldn't know. In fact, my incredibly low estimate of bird
intelligence is a key factor in my (usually) being comfortable eating chicken.
Articles about this keep describing the vats
as something like what brewers use, but I'm not
sure that's making this any less gross sounding.
To be clear, I would never do such a thing, and really, no one would. I'm just saying it will soon be theoretically possible thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture giving their approval to two companies to market lab-grown meat. Lab-grown meat, for those who are either unfamiliar or horrified at the very premise, is still meat, just cultivated from cells that are taken from a living animal and then grown in a tank full of nutrients. Next, the "meat" is formed, uh, somehow, into something approaching the texture of meat without the quotation marks.

Not that a situation being unsustainable
has ever stopped us before. Like, not once.
See? Horror show, right? Well, yes, but as unappetizing as that sounds, bear in mind that gruesome way meat has been produced up until now. Like, don't do this--sweet merciful God, don't do this--but you could do a search right now for a video on how slaughterhouses work. So between the environmental impact of the meat industry, and the ethical issues that come along with eating animals (no matter how dumb they are), meat is looking increasingly unsustainable. 

Do I sound like I'm trying to convince myself? Because I am. And I mean, it's probably safe. A similar cultivated meat (another, not really better term for it) has been available in Singapore since 2020, and nobody's mutated into bird-people, so it's probably fine. 
Fine, nobody's mutated yet.


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