People Eating People Are the Luckiest People. . . . Lab Grown Meat and the Auto-Consumption of the Self Beyond the Conceptual

 

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There is no more delightful way to start one's day than to be slapped with the fundamental reality that, not too far in the future, we may all be feeding ourselves by eating our own cells. Delicious. . . .and not implausible.  The Wall Street Journal--almost always oblivious to the implication of its own reporting, published a most revealing article about the auto-consumption of the self. Of course they were speaking about the revolution in lab grown meat for the upscale foie gras market: Ben Raab and Wilson Rothman, "Lab-Grown Meat Goes Upscale with Faux Foie Gras," Wall Street Journal (print edition) P. R-2 (The future of Everything). 

Can lab grown foie gras find a niche in the luxury food market? Makers of lab grown, aka cell-cultured, meat have pitched the product as a fix for our food chain's environmental and humanitarian issues. But it comes with its own baggage--it is expensive to produce, it can't nail the protein's texture and it starts "life" as sludge. (Ibid.)

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True enough. But it does have an advantage over prior approaches to auto-consumption, as envisioned, for example in dystopian movies like the cult classic Soylent Green (1973; which was then set in 2022). In that movie the solution to the Earth's food shortage was to harvest  people for the production of what looked like delicious pistachio colored crackers that might, it was premised, offer an infinite supply of food to people by processing people in/as food. People eating people. . . .  In that case of Soylent Green, the movie, the effort at auto-consumption was a collective effort. One wound up eating in those delectable crackers a composite of all sorts of dead people mushed together through the manufacturing process into an aggregated goo that could then be made into more acceptable crackers; crackers that might go well with a nice  pot of tea. 

Technology has made that crude process now potentially obsolete. The article, "Lab-Grown Meat Goes Upscale with Faux Foie Gras,"charts the way by examining the approach of Vow, an Australian based start up (where better than in the birthing place of the Mad Max movies, though the irony appears lost on the article's authors) and in the most innocuous of circumstances. 

Vow's product is made from cultured quail cells that, when combined with aromatics and other ingredients, can evoke the flavor of the real thing. . . At the Hotel Lincoln in the Melbourne, Australia, area, Vow's foie gras is served with parley root, a quince cracker, caper rémoulade and black-garlic puree for the equivalent of $19. For comparison, real foie gras  terrine at the Blue Ribbon Brasserie in New York City goes for $36. Still, before Forged Gras becomes available on grocery shelves, Vow must scale its manufacturing and navigate a complicated regulatory and political landscape. . .("Lab-Grown Meat Goes Upscale with Faux Foie Gras," )

Scaling issues in Soylent Green were overcome  through a public-private partnership in which large vats of pewople were encouraged to part with their bodies (the old fashioned way). The solution to the issue of scaling, however, for cell-cultured meat-type foodstuffs may be just around the corner.  

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Vow begins production by taking a biopsy from a Japanese quail to extract a connective tissue cell, which the team found best replicated the rich, fatty texture of liver. Once the cells have multiplied in a confined container, workers put them inside a 200 liter tank similar to a brewery vat, along with a nutrient broth. As the cells grow, they are transferred to larger tanks, eventually reaching a vessel that holds 20,000 liters. When it is time to "harvest," workers skin the cells--"like the whey in cheese-making" [Ellen] Dinsmoor [Vow Chief Operating Officer] said--and move them into Vow's food production zone, where they are cooked with culinary ingredients. . . The company tests the cultivated cells for safety before using them. Cultured meat is especially vulnerable to contamination during production because the cells lack an immune system. Dinsmore said tainted batches are easy to spot. Contaminated cells die quickly and are discarded. ("Lab-Grown Meat Goes Upscale with Faux Foie Gras," )

 All of the ingredients are here for ultra sustainable living.  Just as one can work hard to scale up production, one might also use the same technologies to scale down production to suit, for example, a family. Harvesting cells is relatively easy, and a family unit, or a group of families might easily manage a vat system, the way families and villagers from long ago managed, say, beer production. 

The point is that feasibility opens now doorways to self sufficiency.  And in this case to the possibility of auto-sufficiency where people can become their own food source.  One need not process dead bodies, one need only harvest and cultivate cells--in the most reduced circumstances one's own cells. One might at this point wonder about the conversion of the myth of Ouroboros into reality.  And that also raises interesting question. And yet that is not quite right.  Ouroboros ate itself--it is of a kind with the thinking in Soylent Green.  But what technology makes possible is the harvesting of cells rather than of body parts. One consumes oneself, to be sure, but one cell (or so) at a time. Of course, the cleverness of humanity will pose questions that must be answered, at least until necessary sweeps them all away: (1) is one really eating oneself (or one's neighbors) if one consumes cell cultured meat?; (2) how do the various religious traditions adjust their interpretive systems in the face of this sort of cellular harvest?; (3) Is this something that people ought to be allowed to do on ether own or ought the State to have a hand in the supervision or implementation of even cottage industry self-harvesting?; (4) does it make a difference if one cell cultures other animals or plants but not humans and certainly not oneself or is this a difference without a distinction at the cellular level?; ( 5) does tech permit the policing against "bad cell" curation (cancerous cells, etc.)?; (6) how would one regulate markets in human cell curated meat and meat products (or even pre-food ready cells)?; (7) how would one deal with waste?. The questions can go on and on. 

What is clear, though, is that these questions cannot be avoided. One only ought to remember that squeamishness is at the end a function of need, and that our species has a long history, in their collective behaviors, be to able to convince themselves of the value of virtually anything. Technology makes no distinction between one sort of cell or another. Technology has no ideology--but then neither does necessity.  It is no easy answer, as the esteemed legislatures of Florida and Alabama among others, in their wisdom decided that the proper response was to suppress this technology or at least its use for the production of edibles.  But human history has suggested over and over that the reflect impulse to suppress never ends well, or at least as hoped. Vow may have it right--the best way of embedding this technology in social collectives is to have it driven from the top down.  People seem to like to mimic their social "betters"--a whole cottage industry of influencers suggest that this can be democratized as well--though the hierarchies of leader and followers remain a central unchangeable component. Today's foie gras at impossibly expensive (though in today's terms $19  is not at the billionaire level) can be tomorrows hamburger at a family cook out.  Family reunions can indeed become more intimately special from outside in.  As long as one can be instructed in the appropriate attitude, and as long as there is some status to the activity, it will likely potentially be possible to draw in the masses. And once the masses crave this, it will be hard to resist.

What may be odd or outrageous today may become commonplace in the future.  We are hardly in a position to determine the trajectories of acceptance.  What is becoming clear, though, is that technology now makes this possible--and unavoidable. It will be interesting, over a long period (absent crisis) to watch the arc of development here.