skinny girls & mayonnaise

Some friends of ours had German guests visiting, and were going to take them to In & Out Burger. “I hope they have soy burgers,” said friend Amanda. “Our friends don’t eat any meat.” I suggested she get them regular burgers and tell them that they were soy burgers, and that they’d made incredible advances in soy technology. Germans are gullible that way. Suffering a national cuisine inferiority complex with France and Italy as neighbors, they’re likely to act overly knowledgeable and tell you they already knew that.

Meat grown in a lab

I was reminded of one of my younger sister, Siobhan’s, bouts of vegetarianism when we were teenagers. I was trying to get her to eat a chicken breast, and she was protesting. “They don’t have to kill the chicken,” I said, “they just cut the breasts off and they grow back. Like a lizard’s tail!” She glared at me. She also wasn’t buying my contention that to get chicken broth, all you had to do was wring the live chicken out over a pot. (More like “juicing” a chicken.)

Despite my regular celebrating of carnivorism on this blog, I have contemplated becoming a vegetarian at various points in my life. I’m an animal lover — I grew up with dogs, birds and cats, and now share my life with 12 chickens, a bunch of koi, a black lab and a mini-pig — plus an entire food chain of wildlife on the other side of the fence. There are some really bad things done to animals in the name of hamburgers and hot dogs. Plus, the Buddhist ideal of non-harm has always appealed to me. But then I remember that Harvey’s Guss ribeye I had recently…

They’ve been experimenting with growing sheets of meat in laboratories. This idea makes me somewhat nervous. Talk about Frankenfood! One wrong turn and they’ll be hunting down escaped lab meat in the swamps of the south. There can be no question that one day humans will be eating Labburgers. And that may be a good thing for the world. Lab rib-eyes, I’m not so sure about.

Some would argue humans have been eating meat grown in labs for decades. It’s called SPAM.

For the time being, I choose to remain a conscious and conscientious carnivore. Until the new soy technology is improved.