God Awful Things

Well, Spanksgiving is nearly here, which means countless animals will be slaughtered and gobbled up. I’m not preaching, I myself enjoy meat as much as the next omnivore. In fact, I have a very exciting recipe for the next installment of Gourmet Shit [links to earlier entry]. Here is the plan, an annotte paste chicken cooked in banana leaf, then served on pickled onions and some new potatoes, topped with a gooseberry sauce.  I started with pickling onions this weekend.

Brine is for pickling

and onions are for eating

But, the recipe for this will come in later weeks, what I’m hear to talk about today is meat.. more importantly, environmentally friendly meat.  Now I’m sure all of you dozens of well informed readers know how terrible eating meat is for the environment.  From the amount of farmland used to grow feed for animals to the megafarms with chickens, pigs, whatever, crammed into tight quarters and the pollution produced by said animals.  Having spent a number of years working on a farm in Iowa I have seen this first hand.  And been neck high in pig shit (literally).

My brother went vegetarian when I was in junior high (middle school to some of you), whether inspired by farm living or not, I have no idea.  Probably, and probably cos  meat is murder.

Like the Pope of Mope says. But what if you could eat meat that didn’t require the megafarms, or the pollution or the murder? Patties of meat cells just growing in a lab.. Think about it.

Eight Way In-Vitro Meat Will Change Our Lives over at h+ magazine.

2. Urban Cowboys.
Today’s gentle drift into urbanization will suddenly accelerate as unemployed livestock workers relocate and retrain for city occupations. Rural real estate values will plummet as vast tracts of ranch land are abandoned and sold for a pittance (70% of arable land in the world is currently used for livestock, 26% of the total land surface, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). New use for ex-ranch land? Inexpensive vacation homes; reforested parks; fields of green products like hemp or bamboo. Hot new city job? Techies and designers for In-Vitro Meat factories.

As a land baron whom has his own very small farm, I love the idea, housing is so expensive right now in the cities that I’ll never be able to afford one, but all that land opening up again? thats 26% of our land surface right now. I particularly thought this next one was well written.

4. Healthier Planet.
Today’s meat industry is a brutal fart in the face of Gaia. A recent Worldwatch Institute report (“Livestock and Climate Change”) accuses the world’s 1.5 billion livestock of responsibility for 51% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Statistics are truly shitty: cattle crap 130 times more volume than a human, creating 64 million tons of sewage in the United States that’s often flushed down the Mississippi River to kill fish and coral in the Gulf of Mexico. Pigs are equally putrid. There’s a hog farm in Utah that oozes a bigger turd total than the entire city of Los Angeles. Livestock burps and farts are equally odious and ozone-destroying. 68% of the ammonia in the world is caused by livestock (creating acid rain), 65% of the nitrous oxide, 37% of the methane, 9% of the CO2, plus 100 other polluting gases. Big meat animals waste valuable land — 80% of Amazon deforestation is for beef ranching, clear-cutting a Belgium-sized patch every year. Water is prodigiously gulped — 15,000 liters of H20 produces just one kilogram of beef. 40% of the world’s cereals are devoured by livestock. This scenario is clearly unsustainable, and In-Vitro Meat is the sensible alternative. (Although skeptics warn that IVM factories will produce their own emissions, research indicates that pollution will be reduced by at least 80%.) Once we get over the fact that IVM is oddly disembodied, we’ll be thankful that it doesn’t shit, burp, fart, eat, over graze, drink, bleed, or scream in pain.

and then this is something I hadn’t thought of..

6: Exotic & Kinky Cuisine.
In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts — obviously, “DinoBurgers” will be served at every six-year-old boy’s birthday party.

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we’ll just eat people we don’t like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, “The State of the Art” with diners feasting on “Stewed Idi Amin.” But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble their own meat.

Kind of gives a new meaning to the ol’ saying “Eat me!”