On 12/04/2009 09:32 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Rick Monteverde wrote:
Well, let's start with KJ ("mad cow") and go on from there. There's
something wrong with eating your own stuff. There's genes in there.
Code for
proteins that don't fold properly. Other stuff. Yuck. In fact eating
pork
(chimpanzee, etc.) might have similar drawbacks due to the genetic
similarities.
DNA is destroyed by cooking.
But prions aren't, and that's where mad cow comes from. And what's more
lots of people like their meat "rare" if they can get it that way, and
pretty much nothing's destroyed in the pink parts in the middle of a
"rare" steak (though the filthy U.S. food supply has put a damper on
eating rare meat in recent years).
But in any case test tube meat is likely to be a whole lot safer than
random meat because it will all come from one individual (individual
cow, human, chipmunk, or whatever) and one can *hope* that the
individual used for the "starter culture" will be tested and verified to
be "clean".
Testtube meat could make it possible to serve species which are
otherwise completely impractical to eat. Humans, which we've already
brought up, are the obvious one, because it's considered ethically
unacceptable to chow down on them when you're cooking up "whole humans"
to do it, but there are other possibilities as well: All the animals
which are too small to eat might be culturable into something useful.
Besides chipmunk, there's mouse, vole, shrew ... all kinds of possibilities.
And if we go the direction of "custom made" meat, it might be possible
to take samples from particular individual creatures and "custom make"
steaks from it. You could literally eat your ... well I think we've
gone far enough with this thought, eh?
