Would Vegetarians Eat Meat if No Animals Were Killed?

Welcome!  Or welcome back, as the case may be.  Today's blog is about the things we eat.  If you don't want me to frank about food, please stop reading here.  I'll do my best to be as un-frank as I know how.  I might try being jim about it... or maybe steve... I like steve.

One of the key problems of human existence is that we need to eat to live, yet some of us have developed sympathy for the creatures we consume.  This is one of the main drives of the vegetarian movement, an attempt to limit the amount of animals killed by eating less meat.  That's like trying to keep a democrat or a republican from being elected by not voting for them; You have a slight effect, but it's really just for you.  Vegans are people who take it a step further and won't even have anything with animal products in it, like eggs, milk and cheese.  Vegan is such a strange term that I find it easier to call them herbivores, which is a term I learned about when studying dinosaurs for a creature that only eats plants.

Moo?

As a point of argument, everything we as humans eat came from something that was alive.  Meat, eggs, yeast in bread, grain in cereal, apples from trees.  Plants just don't have faces or make noise when you take their sexual organs off their branches and stalks* and generally don't die when you harvest off them, so it's more bearable.  There is precisely one exception I've managed to find to this rule, which is salt.  Salt is a naturally occurring resource that is mined the world over to make french fries and popcorn taste better... Except in France of course.

What it all boils down to, as I see it, is that some people say that eating animals is "wrong" or "unnatural."  All of that is inherently funny because animals, frequently, eat other animals.  In fact, certain species of ant will invade a termite colony and capture the termite queen so that she produces more termite larvae.  Not to raise them, just to eat them, kinda like cattle farming.  Of course, no one will win an argument using ants, they aren't people.**

However, here's an interesting thought experiment: What if we could have meat without killing any animals?  The ethical argument would go away completely and we could enjoy some guilt free prime rib.  Plus, if we had a way of producing it without using animals, we could remove the costly and land consuming need for huge livestock farms and put that land to better use in the future.***  A couple different scientists around the world are trying to accomplish that very thing.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110130/sc_nm/us_food_meat_laboratory_feature

Cluck?

As you may read in the article, assuming you READ the article, you'll notice that the programs outlined in the headline are currently unfunded.  However, it's theoretically possible to take a gene from the meat of a cow or chicken, grow it in a laboratory and produce animal meat without the animal.  The same techniques are being tested to grow new organs for people using their own genes.

Imagine it, the ability to "grow" food without having to grow plants, feed those plants to an animal, wait for that animal to grow to the right age and size, kill the animal, remove the important meat parts and then have dinner.  I'd be curious to see how many ex-vegetarians we'd have in this country.  I'm sure PETA would still have a problem with it, exploiting animals for our own usage, but who really cares about PETA anymore?****  I'm a Person Eating Tasty Animals.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think about growing cultured meats (meaning meat grown in a lab, not meat that can tell you which operas are the best to attend) and I'll try to keep the interesting stuff a-comin'.  Time to go hunt and gather some fried chicken.

*Which is essentially what fruit and vegetables are.  Think about that next time you have a salad.
**Unless you have an aunt in the slaughterhouse industry.  Then the analogy works... sort of.
***Well, better use than a huge manure production facility, I suppose.  There will always be a need for bull shit some where.
****Aside from crazy celebrities who are in it for the media attention.