As a thinking experiment, let us consider that on the 1st of January of 2025 it is announced that an advance making possible growing any kind of animal tissue in laboratory conditions as been achieved and that it is possible to scale it in order to achieve industrial grade production level.
There is no limit on which animal tissues can be grown, so, any species is achieveable, only being needed a small cell sample from an animal to start production, and the cultivated tissues are safe for consumption.
There won’t be any perceiveable price change to the end consummer, as the growing is a complex and labour intensive process, requiring specialized equipments and personnel.
Would you change to this new diet option?
Sit down. Grab a drink, if you’re a drinker. Relax.
Story time.
My country was involved in a somewhat civil war between 1961 and 1974. Grisly thing, fought overseas, in many different scenario. For some, it was a holiday season, as the terrain they were deployed to was essentially peaceful or very low combat prone but others saw very harsh conditions, with even lack of combat rations.
On one particular front, things got so ugly, so dire, that at some point people did resort to cannibalism. Well, a mix of cannibalism and necrophagia, as the fresh corpses of the deceased would be dug up during the night, pieces of the flesh harvested and the corpse returned to its grave. Heads were treated as a delicacy.
According to a man that spent three years on that hell and came back alive to tell the story, and now I quote: “tasted like pork, a little sweeter and a bit more oily but it was better than slowly starving to death”. Soldiers and locals alike were reduced to such last resort solutions.
That’s for the taste part.
For the dangers of eating it, there are prion diseases like Kuru. It is always a concern lifted against the consumption of human flesh. Then there are the autoimmune diseases, pathogens and virus we all carry.
Since the theoretical at hand is based on the premise of all meat being lab cultivated, I risk most of those risks would be diminished.
Personally, I wouldn’t eat it. Religious authorities would jump off their rails just on the simple mention of the idea.
Cannibalism was a last resort solution in extreme desperation. Have some nightmare fuel on me.
I appreciate the response. I’d heard that it’s similar to pork, and I’ve heard of prion diseases like kuru being a problem (which might be a non-issue if lab-grown maybe?)
It makes sense for religions to have a problem with it, possibly all meat made this way and not just human as it’s “unnatural” or whatever. I’m no expert on religions of the world, but I’m not aware of any explicit directive to not eat human meat, but it wouldn’t surprise me either way really.
So I guess assuming it were safe to eat which was my assumption, only secular people would really consider it. But maybe a lot of religious people wouldn’t bother with any of the lab grown meat in the first place, so it’s possible that lab grown human meat would be tried by as many people as any of the other options.