I can’t wait for lab grown meat. The possibilities that industrialized in vitro meat production brings are not only ecologically and socially conscious, but potentially deviant as the day is long. The long march of science nearly vibrates with the science community’s eagerness to make human hocks, chimp scampi, rhino roasts, and sure, ethically obtained beef. Yet while supermarkets lined with freezers full of laboratory delights have been the stuff of science fiction for some time; the hour of orgiastic over-indulgence in SmartFlesh is nigh.
Recently, at the In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, an economic analysis was presented that indicates meat grown in tanks would be cost competitive with European beef prices. So while the benefits of lab grown food are blatantly obvious to anyone that stops to think about it for more than a minute, it’s a similarly obvious fact that the almighty dollar (or euro as the case may be) is what really speaks, and the sweet, sweet song of bio-science gone oh so right is tickling my tympanics.
But doubt runs rampant among freak meat elite, with experts revealing skepticism as to whether “there is a large market of early adopters who want to eat test tube meat for environmental, health or ethical reasons.” I am here to calm your quaking. Not only is there a market for it, but if the readership of any number of blogs in my feed reader is an indication, the market is not only large but eager and deeply, deeply disturbed.
With a little luck — and a basement full of “missing” puritanical no-fun-niks — the first Ectomo barbecue will be vegan friendly.
I grew up in a small town in southern Delaware called Milton. The town now boasts a population of 1,657, which was lower when I lived there years ago. There were a ton of antique stores crammed with all manner of dusty, random junk that I absolutely loved. We had a farmer friendly grocery store and a number of small, family-run shops for whatever else you might need. When news of a corporate chain moving into a lot of vacant land began to surface, there was an incredible uproar from community members. At the time I couldn’t understand it, anything new that came to town meant something to distract from my “boring” days of hanging out on my favorite felled tree by a peaceful, quiet lake in my tiny, picturesque Victorian town.
One of my favorite questions to ask militant vegans is whether or not they would eat meat grown in a lab, and cultured from animals in ways that don’t inconvenience them in any way. The reasonable vegans are usually OK with the idea, the less reasonable ones give me exactly the reaction I was looking for in the first place.
All baiting aside, this line of inquiry raises some interesting questions. If we could grow beef, chicken, or pork in a lab from innocuously harvested cells could we not also grow human meat? And if so, would there be a market for it? Considering the horrific deviancy of our readership (and oh how we love you for it) I say an emphatic yes is the only reasonable answer. Apparently a student at Cranbrook (a college of art and science) agrees.
Thanapong Vudhichamnong, the aforementioned student with a jones for auto-cannibalism, and the best name I’ve seen in a long time, has created the consuME Meat Make; a speculative design that would grow a small donut-shaped piece of meat fit for consumption from a biological sample. While this would do wonders for global stability as far as consumption of resources is concerned, I can’t imagine this device would be available for very long before someone made a human sample.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
