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Saturday, February 08, 2014

On Fake Food

I was reading the other day about this scientific team that had created a hamburger in the lab, and then invited some food critics to come and taste it and tell what they thought about it. For the most part, the critics said, "Yeah. It's pretty good. Not quite the same as real meat, but close."

That's pretty cool, I think. Of course, right now, the process is not cost-effective to do on a large scale. But think about it down the road... This meat is nutritionally equivalent to real meat and tastes pretty good. Yet it did not come from any animal. So there are no moral qualms about killing. Because it didn't come from an animal, there are no diseases (mad cow, ecoli, etc) associated with it. Because it's created in a lab and not bred, raised, slaughtered, prepared, and shipped, it will be cheaper than animal meat.

So, this protein-intensive food could be used not only in place of animal meat (for a variety of reasons) but could also be used to bring nutrition into famine-stricken areas or sub-poverty level areas of the world. Win, right?

But there's apparently a lot of controversy around this kind of created food. There are some that say that by ingesting this lab-meat, we run the risk of causing other problems (like the way added growth hormones in meats may have caused early sexual development in children who eat it). And that may be. We'll have to see the data on it.

But for the most part, the objection to lab-grown meat mostly seems to be that it's lab-grown. It's not real meat. It's fake.

Listen, I'm going to tell you a story. Like a lot of women, when I see some actress on a made for SyFy movie, with boobs bigger than my head bulding unnaturally out of her cami (And why do all the women in these movies--regardless of whether they are soldiers, scientists, politicians, journalists, or whatever--wear the same camisole top?), I am guilty of pointing out (or at least thinking) "Yeah, but they're fake."

But, a while back, someone let me know a guy's viewpoint on this. "Cool Whip's fake, too." He said. "It's still good."

So, I guess that's my attitude about fake food. (Yeah, I know. I laid a lot of pipe getting to this point.) So what if it's fake? It's still good.


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