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Opinion

Mr. (and Ms.) Steak

By Douglas Lummis


これは「誰の」肉?

バイオテクノロジーの進歩によって頭も足も皮も内臓もない純粋な「食肉」を生産できるとしたら・・・

Some years ago a friend was regaling me with wondrous tales of biotechnology. He was persuaded that biotechnology could solve the world's food shortage. Soon, he argued, we can grow pure meat, not in animal form, just the meat itself.

"You mean," I asked, "you just have a huge slab of beef endlessly growing in the factory, and you feed it intravenously at one end and cut off steaks and roasts at the other?"

"That's the future," he answered.Recently I read in a newspaper that this mode of meat production has now become technologically possible.

Well, I suppose we should try to think about it from a practical standpoint. Certainly it will be more efficient to grow meat without having to deal with noisy, smelly animals. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens take up space, they must be fed, their waste must be disposed of, and they must be treated if they get sick. If a slab of pure meat ― with no troublesome head, legs, tail, fur, offal, etc. ― can be grown under scientifically controlled conditions, imagine how cost-efficient that will be! And how sanitary!

There is another advantage. Many people refuse to eat meat because they cannot bear the idea of slaughtering animals. And even we who do eat meat feel uncomfortable when we think of the slaughterhouse. But under this method of production, no animal will be killed, strictly speaking. The slab will have a sort of life, but a life more like that of a plant than of an animal. Having no head, and therefore no brain or central nervous system, no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no nose to smell, it will have no awareness of its existence or its surroundings, let alone ability to feel pain. Therefore slicing off steaks and roasts will be no more cruel than harvesting rice.

Consumers might worry that meat that has never moved might not taste right. But this is only a technical problem and a solution will no doubt be found ― perhaps "exercising" the slab by running electric shocks through it, causing spasms.

This technological breakthrough opens another possibility. Cannibalism, once widely practiced, has been declared taboo and almost entirely eliminated. This is not only because obtaining the meat requires killing human beings. Even when the person has died of natural causes we hold cannibalism taboo. But why? Isn't it because we can't bear the thought of eating meat that once belonged to a person with a name, face and identity? But if you set that problem aside, isn't it likely that human meat might be quite tasty? If biotechnology can produce cow meat without the cow, can't it produce human meat without the human? Such a slab, while not dead, would not really be living either, and having no head, would have no identity other than its identity as meat. Let's call it Mr. (or Ms.) Steak. Is there any ethical reason Mr. and Ms. Steak shouldn't be put on the market?



Shukan ST: Aug. 19, 2005

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