Would it be legal to eat cultured human meat?
<p>A common trope in science fiction is that in the future meat is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat" rel="nofollow noreferrer">grown as a tissue culture</a> in vats rather than as part of a living animal. This is obviously more humane as nothing with a brain has to be slaughtered.</p>

<p>This is now moving out of science fiction, with some laboratory demonstrations of vat-grown meat. At present this is very expensive, but the hope is that industrialisation will bring the price down to something comparable to in-vivo meat.</p>

<p>From this its an obvious small hop to the idea of growing human meat by starting with a small biopsy from a willing volunteer. Two works which include this are the short story <em>The Food of the Gods</em> by Arthur C. Clarke (in which a meat manufacturer reveals the dark secret of his competitor's hit product) and a passing reference to the "<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LZkuooaCb3cC&amp;lpg=PT60&amp;ots=LWAJemsi3k&amp;dq=%22morningside%20cannibals%22&amp;pg=PT60#v=onepage&amp;q=%22morningside%20cannibals%22&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Morningside Cannibals</a>" in <em>Rule 34</em> by Charles Stross (in which the police had busted a group of friends who dined on cultured meat grown from each other, but then couldn't figure out what to charge them with).</p>

<p>So the question is: would it be legal to eat cultured human meat produced in this way? And if so, would it be legal to sell it?</p>

<p>I'm not including a jusridiction here, so feel free to describe the law anywhere.</p>

<p>In the US, cannibalism per se is generally legal, although murder is not, and there is the possibility of civil action for desecrating a corpse, or a low-level criminal prohibition against <a href="https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=68.50.130" rel="nofollow noreferrer">illegal disposition of a human corpse</a>. Chicken Little scenarios overcome such legal impediments given existing US law, though there's no reason to think that when the technology develops, the laws will remain the same. Idaho maintains a <a href="https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title18/t18ch50/sect18-5003/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">law against cannibalism</a>, but that prohibition forbids consumption of "flesh or blood of a human being". This would get us into the sticky matter of determining whether stuff manufactured using human cells is "flesh of a human being".</p>

criminal-law hypothetical