Crickets Chirping

Eric, Stephanie and I had Korean BBQ Saturday Night. We talked about meat, and whether or not it’s okay to eat it. As we were eating meat.

We all feel guilty about it. Eric wants to try meat from animals slaughtered in a more humane way. I brought up the time Vance and I cooked lobster, which was a traumatic experience to say the least. They beat on the lid of the pot as it heats up, just so you know. You have to hold it down while they boil to death. It was a meal eaten in awkward, contemplative, guilt-ridden silence.

Another conversation I had recently was at lunch with some coworkers. One was defending (in a purely logical, devil’s-advocate sense) Michael Vick. The rest of us charged at him on our high horses, also while eating hypocritically meaty lunches. He said he had to dismiss any criticism of Michael Vick if it came from people who eat meat.

The cruelty and suffering is hard to justify, regardless of whether it is due to utterly fucking sick subhuman pieces of shit like Michael Vick, or to the out-of-sight yet institutionalized, mechanized disassembly of living creatures that provide so many good, decent people with so much of the food we eat.

The problem is that we don’t want to make other animals suffer, but meat is so good!

There is a solution. But we don’t have the technology to implement it yet. It is years, perhaps decades away.

Synthetic Meat. Meat tissue grown artificially without a nervous system and therefore without a conscience, incapable of experiencing pain and suffering.

There are some challenges synthetic meat has to overcome in order to be a good substitute for the real thing. The texture is one of those problems. In order to get an authentic meat-like texture, the muscle cells must be stretched, broken and re-formed into strands. This requires mechanical manipulation. In nature, the growth and exercise of the animal provides this mechanism. In the laboratory, we’d have to duplicate this process.

Picture this: an artificial, robotic cow skeleton with synthetic meat grafted onto it. Walking and moving like a cow, but without skin or a brain or other organs normally found in a cow. Just the muscle tissue and some fat for flavor. The robotic skeleton stretches and exercises the muscle tissue until it is the texture and consistency of actual cow meat.

You could even have specialized meat robots that only produce certain cuts of beef. Imagine long tubes of filet mignon! Without ever hurting an actual animal!

Here’s the kicker Eric came up with: Because the robotic skeleton is metal, it can conduct heat. The artificial cow could cook itself from the inside out. You grow the “cow” for some period of time, flip the BBQ switch, wait till it’s done cooking, pull the delicious cruelty free BBQ off of it, eat your meal, clean the skeleton off and start all over again with some new meat cells.

Self-Barbecuing Cow!

This is inevitable.