Get into the laboratory and make me some steak!

My blog on manufacturing diamonds reminds me of what great marvels can be achieved when there is a promise of fantastic rewards at the end. It turns out the Apollo method of manufacturing diamonds will scale nicely to making semiconductor wafers based on diamond. Being a fantastic conductor of heat (the best it turns out) diamond microchips will be able to run very fast, generating lots of heat and yet still staying very cool.

So while lovers and geeks are salivating at the thought of getting their hands on the new laboratory manufactured diamonds, I'm left wondering why people aren't turning their manufacturing skills to other every day items. First and foremost on my mind is why there is not yet any largescale manufacturing or growing of realistic, if not genuine muscle protein. You know, that stuff that's normally sizzling on the BBQ every weekend this time of the year. Yes folks, I'm talking beef, pork, chicken, bacon and all those other things know to be tasty snacks for hungy carnivores and omnivores alike, and lets face it, tasty - yet repellant - to a good deal of vegetarians too.

Now I've eaten a good number of meat substitutes in my day. Most are nothing like the real thing, some come remotely close, some are even tasty in their own right, but damnit why do we still need to keep raising and killing animals, and I'm talking fish, birds and mammals - yes mammals - just to hack the flesh off them and eat them?

I'll be the first to admit, that if I had to hunt for, kill and eat my own meat and had an alternative I probably wouldn't. I just don't have the stomach for it. I'd never last ten minutes at an abortoire, even clubbing a fish to death is a bit much for me. I once shot a rat with a B-B gun, that's about my only claim to fame on the animal killing front. Although it pleased my mother no end, I didn't particularly enjoy watching it thrash away its last seconds as a consequence of the lump of lead I had smashed into it.

The problem is I'm an omnivore - thats the kind of beast I am and that's what my body evolved to eat. I also know I'm an unusual omnivore in that I actually have the choice not to eat meat, or as I'm often reminded by some of my English, Scottish and Irish friends - to eat only meat and no vegetables. The problem is I have a taste for the stuff. Animal flesh, ummmm, love the stuff. I wish I didn't. I wish I found it as repellant and as un-appealing as a plate of feetid mushy peas, or chopped spider legs, or slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails, or whatever your most repellant poison is. But I don't. I was raised eating meat, that's the way I am. And it's a very hard process to just stop doing it when I know that when push comes to shove, killing animals and eating them is the natural thing for humans, left in the wild, to do. Take away our food systems, throw us out in the woods for a few months deprived of protein, and we'll be making traps, chasing deer and trying everything else to fullfill our destiny as the great (white) hunter.

Yes, I know I'm pathetic. I'm filled with awe for my vegetarian friends who have achieved "the switch" (I see some interesting "I switched to plants" Apple parody ads there). Or filled with jealously for the ones raised as vegetarians and find themselves with no taste for flesh or tolerance for eating it. So why oh why, isn't someone helping me out here? Why hasn't someone started manufacturing real steak, real bacon, real lamb (baaaah, we Europeans love our sheep) without actually needing to raise and kill an actually living, sentient animal in between. Just what is the big problem that science hasn't yet figured out?

In the end I think the problem that's holding us up is that not only are huge numbers of people engaged in this process of producing food by raising and killing of animals, its also very profitable for the small number of very large farming concerns doing it. I think we have a situation similar to De Beers locktight-grip on diamonds, only for control of the food chain. There are just too many interested parties for someone to come along and say, yeah, just get this vast vat, poor in some bean proteins we grew earlier, stir, warm, whisk and extrude and three days later, there you have it, a nice slab of New York Strip ready for the grill, and perfect to boot. No captive bolt included, or required. You know if it was really like the real thing I'd pay a premium for it. It wouldn't be like manufactured diamonds where I'd expect to get them for less than "the real thing". I'd actually pay extra for the privilege of not killing animals just as one pays for the privilege of not having ones vege's splattered with chemicals, or ones eggs produced free range, or beef from cattle raised on grass in a field instead of on grain in a stinky dirt bowl next to Interstate 5.

An alternative which some may find sinister or repellant, is the idea of growing meat much as doctors grow skin for grafting. We know it can be done. Its more of a case of finding someone to figure out how and if it can be done on a mass scale. It does seems to me that it should be possible to figure out how to duplicate the qualities of natural muscle fiber without having to grow it from muscle cells. But once again I have to say I find that way less repellant than the current animal slaughter business that I've unwittingly found myself co-opted into. After all, isn't grown a hunk of muscle just growing a hunk of cells, and not really any different from growing a hunk of cells from a plant? Its not like there would be a nervous system and brain in there.

In a previous blog entry I mentioned some of the things I never thought would happen in my lifetime that did. I'd like to formally add: the end of animal husbandry to produce meat for human consumption, most particularly that of mammals. I'll draw the line at getting eggs and milking cows, sheep or whatever by a natural, humane and non-large scale process. While I'm at it I'll also mention the desire to live to see the end of corporate personhood which I think is related. The about it: we can assign human rights to non-human legal fictions created in a court of law solely for the purpose of making and protecting money, yet we cannot assign even the most basic rights to animals. Are we therefore any better than our forefathers who, as late as 1857, decided that people could indeed be designated as property and denied any basic human rights? I think not.

So come on Professor Frink and those of your ilk, get your thinking caps on and your fingers out of your funders wallets. Now get into the laboratory and make me some steak!