Well, it was just a matter of time, wasn’t it? After all, we’ve been brewing babies at the bottom of test tubes for decades now, so we shouldn’t be surprised that somebody finally got around to manufacturing man-made burgers.
The technical term for making test-tube meat in a lab is “cultured beef.” I guess the only other way to culture beef is to bring cows to the opera, and although you can lead a horse to water, towing an Angus to Aida is another thing altogether.
Anyway, the first faux-flesh patty sizzled on the grill just a few weeks ago — though it didn’t get rave reviews when it was stuffed into a bun and munched down.
It took almost a million dollars to create the first virtual Whopper, but scientists feel that in a decade’s time, we should be able to pick them up at the meat market for a lot less. And in time, they should get tastier, too.
Cultured beef begins with stem cells taken from a real, card-carrying cow, which are then grown in a dish and flooded with chemical nutrients. The burgeoning bovine blob is attached to some collagen, then stretched between Velcro points, causing the cells to start organizing into thin strips of muscle. The strips are then exercised with electricity to bulk them up — which I guess you could call a high-tech form of pumping ions. Finally, a few thousand strands of lab meat are ground up and mixed with a couple hundred strands of test-tube fat, then pressed into a patty.
Is your mouth watering as much as mine is?
Of course, man-made meat doesn’t come without a few wrinkles to iron out. After all, religious groups are already gabbling over whether a bogus burger can be called kosher. Or whether an ersatz slider can be considered a living soul, since it began with a stem cell taken from something that has a face and a family.
And then there are other problems to consider. Once we are cranking out steaks and roasts in the lab, what will we do with all those living livestock herds that we used to slaughter to satisfy our craving for cutlets?
Of course, hordes of hard-hearted pragmatists will insist that once our livestock become pointless, we will have to slaughter them anyway. They will point to the high cost of feeding a cow or a sheep or a pig that has no chance of ever ending up on a plate next to a baked potato.
Some monsters will go so far as to suggest that we discontinue breeding and allow entire races of domesticated critters to lapse into extinction, since they no longer serve any purpose to us. Dodos are defunct, and nobody misses them; why should it be any different with pointless poultry?
Fortunately, those cruel, heartless voices will be stilled by the animal rights activists who will insist that barnyard beasts have a right to live, despite their uselessness. After all, pigs are people too.
In time, I’m sure all these issues will be settled, and we’ll be able to have our cow and eat it too without any blood being shed. We will be able to liberate all those luckless livestock who committed no crime but still had their freedom surrendered. It will be the ultimate Emancipation Proclamation when we shatter the barn-door locks and hinges, sunder the pens and sties, and scatter the herds to the hills.
Imagine how wonderful our world will be when we return Holsteins and Guernseys back to the wild. I’m sure they will settle into the forest peacefully among the whitetail deer without turf wars flaring up. The beasts will reach some kind of accord without clashing antlers and horns. They’ll settle their differences without forming gangs like Hell’s Ruminants or Cloven-Hoof Disciples. They will graze peacefully as brothers at last.
How beatific it will be when pigs prowl the parkways, when lambs loiter on lawns.
How calming to see chickens roosting free on suburban rooftops or nesting behind the hose reel by the garage door.
Plant-lovers will rejoice, too. Veggie-rights activists will breathe a sigh of relief when they can fill their plates with test-tube meat rather than watching the needless slaughter of millions of carrots, peas, and beans being ground up into veggie burgers. The sap-bath can end once and for all.
Still, when all meat is manufactured and all barnyard beasts are freed, I suppose there is nothing we can do about the one downside of it all — the loss of a musical masterpiece.
Because who would ever teach his child to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” knowing that he would have to answer the inevitable questions — “What was a farm, Daddy? And what did they do with all the animals that lived there?”
What parent could bear to listen to their heart-rending sobs in the night if we told them the truth about where we got our meat in the world before test-tube beef?
And how long will it take the children of our idyllic future to learn to read if they have panic attacks every time they see the vowels E-I-E-I-O?
• Author, musician, and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
