Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Meat

Apparently, scientists are researching how to create synthetic meat. Mind you, not soy-based meat, but real meat, only grown from vats, not from animals. Once this technology becomes viable, especially economically viable, it is conceivable that animal-activists would push for the abolishment of animal-meat in favor of vat-meat.

I think that this particular scenario is quite sufficient material for a short science fiction story. In my story, animal-meat is indeed banned, and all animals previously bred for food are released into the wild.

Of course, the twist is (there always IS a twist) , most of the released animals die. Which in truth isn't so inconceivable, because our domesticated animals (those bred for food) probably have the survival instinct of a target board. The only animals which do manage to survive are kept as pets(imagine a cow as a pet), or evolve back to their feral roots.

A more ironic ending would be that the only survivors of the domesticated animals are found in the secret cellar of a illegal gourmet restaurant famed for "True Meat". Muhahah.

Anyway this was inspired by this article from discover magazine.


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1 comment:

Jackson Tan said...

Firstly, I don't think those animal activists will be successful in abolishing real meat. People will cling on to fresh meat for nostalgic purposes. And in areas that are not so technologically advanced, they'll probably stick to natural meat.

Also, even now, we're having lots of problem convincing anti-GM activists to accept GM vegetables and fruits. I think they'll go berserk with GM meat.

Of course, with sufficient time it is possible. And yeah, that'll make a good story setting. Or maybe we have anti-GM terrorists? Haha...