Lab-grown meat might solve pollution problems, but it's a tough idea to swallow
Every generation has its antiquated ideas that it holds onto like a terrier holds onto a sock, refusing to let go even as time and events pass them by.
I feel myself approaching that age where, even though I understand my position may no longer be valid, I hold onto old beliefs simply because they are my beliefs. It’s like if you’re 85 and you’re still using Windows Vista, you understand there are better systems out there, but at this point, so what?
For me, this started with recycling. I hold to the 1980s view that it pays to recycle metal and it pays to recycle paper; everything else, forget it. If a plastic bag or bottle is buried in a landfill at least we know where it is. That’s better than wasting the copious energy it takes to process it into some other product or shipping it halfway around the world where it’s just as likely to wind up floating in the ocean or blowing down a street in Rangoon.
And it’s all the worse because garbage companies all act like a 5-year-old girl. We don’t want our paper to get wet because it’s yucky, and eww, don’t get any cheese on that pizza box, and we’re not going to touch that dog food can until it’s washed out with soap and water.
You’re a garbage company for heaven’s sake, deal with it. We’re paying you to take this stuff away, yet we’re the ones who have to do all the work: “Don’t cry, little trash hauling princess, Daddy will flatten your cardboard for you.”
Wimps.
But the hill I’m really going to die on is this whole “proteins” debate. I know in theory that it’s just great that a century from now there will be no cows or pigs, and all the nation’s meat will be grown in sprawling metal buildings by people wearing latex gloves and hazmat suits.
So there will be no animals to consume the world's grain, no cattle to belch out methane, no chickens to pollute the Potomac and no high-rises jam packed with miserable swine. We will be trading in our factory farms for — factory farms.
Instead of a ranch, our food will be coming from a lab. I can’t get past that. I don’t want my hamburger produced by the same company that’s growing human ears.
And basic meat, produce and dairy are some of the last things you can buy at the supermarket whose flavor hasn’t been manufactured by a chemical plant in New Jersey. So people with agendas want to eliminate what’s natural under the cover of climate change.
The unfortunate upshot of this position is that it puts me on the same side of the argument as Marjorie Taylor Greene and her peach tree dishes. I strongly suspect she knows the difference between Petri and peach tree and gestapo and gazpacho, but she has learned a cockroachian adaptation to post-truth America: Stupidity pays.
Say something brutally dumb.
Get attacked by the left wing.
Accept another wave of cash contributions from the right wing in return for agitating the left.
Until we can take the profit out of stupid, we’re doomed. Although I secretly admire the ingenuity. If I could have gotten paid every time I made an idiot out of myself I’d be living in Fiji.
One question though, as we trudge along our inexorable path toward dinners that are churned out by 3D printers: Does lab-grown meat include bones? Or is it just flaccid pucks of pink flesh? Because I’d really miss chicken wings, ribs and turkey legs.
Instead of natural bones, I’m sure there will be plenty of corporations happy to sell you doggie treats packed not with marrow but with butylated hydroxyanisole. And finally, how in the name of Julia Childs are we supposed to make good stock out of a peach tree dish?
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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Pollution debate puts columnist on same side as Marjorie Taylor Greene
