Certain chefs, for certain, will not be happy. If you intentionally spent your youth sleeping on straw in a Provençal barn, rising before dawn to be screamed at by some ancient head case who happened to be the only living person who knew how to properly sauté the thyroid gland of a pregnant goat, you may find the telephone ringing less often as the Age of Synthetic Meat matures. The game of professional cookery was always to distinguish oneself by the skill and imagination with which one manipulated a fixed set of ingredients. In the new age, laurels will accrue to those who can make the best ingredients—a task that will inevitably place more of a premium on scientific skills, like teasing strands of DNA out of a myoblast, than on roguishly mincing a shallot while nursing a hangover.
But the cooks will get over it. Because cooks can adapt. If there is one single ominous scrap of cloud adhering to the endless silver lining of the coming age, it is the trouble we already know to expect from vegetarians.
Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, informs me that she has been following Dr. Mironov's career and the glacial progress of the "lab-grown meat" movement since its inception. Newkirk is salivating in anticipation of the day she finally gets to eat a chunk of meat that nothing had to suffer to produce—not least because the flesh won't contain the vast quantity of "rectums and nose-skin bacteria" she assures me I've been eating a lot of.
But Newkirk is the right sort of vegetarian: the rational sort. She concedes that not all of her pale fellow travelers share a commonsensical enthusiasm for the coming revolution. "A consensus?" she scoffs, "among human beings?"
The other sort of vegetarian, of course, is the sort whose decision not to eat meat was inspired less by the contemplated suffering of animals than by the contemplated prolonged suffering of parents forced to cook two sets of meals, pack tofu dogs for family trips, and somehow explain to their parents, who tended to have lived through depressions and wars, why little Lisa sat through Thanksgiving dinner frowning over a pyramid of bean sprouts, then asked to be excused and spent the afternoon in her bedroom emitting a muted but unrelenting stream of Ani DiFranco.
To this sort of vegetarian, the introduction of synthetic, guiltless meat is a full-blown nightmare. How will they function at parties if they can't protect themselves from salvers of appetizers with a theatrically pale and desperate wave of the hand? How will they travel between continents if the rest of the plane's passengers haven't watched in envy as they unwrap and examine their special meal? How will they signal the categorical disgust with which they view and reject this entire system of bodies and moral compromise known as The World if not with the powerfully succinct, "Oh, no thanks: I don't actually eat meat"?
By eating themselves. The very technology that will deprive vegetarians of their ethical objections to meat eating will let them make meat of themselves. A few starter cells scraped off one's arm, a night stewing in growth medium, and voilà: a vehicle for passive aggression more poetic than the world has seen since the days when it was still possible to irritate people to the point that they'd burn you at the stake in front of a crowd. Just imagine their faces. Here comes the waiter, sidling up all deferential with a platter full of carrots, tiny lamb chops, and blackened endives stuffed with cheese. You're ready with your line. In your pocket you finger your private Baggie of homegrown flesh. Up comes the tray, up comes the hand, and it's: "Oh. No thanks. I only eat myself."
Previous Blinded by Science Columns:
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Nightmare of Divided Loyalties |
