SHMEAT

If they can make sheets of lab-grown sheep meat, couldn't they also culture human muscle tissue and theoretically sell human meat as food?  I mean, if they wanted to?  Is it fucked up that that's one of the first things I thought of when I heard about Shmeat?

These are the facts I know about Shmeat:

-The technology is the same as that used to produce human skin for grafts.

-Because the process replicates muscle cells but doesn’t tell them where to go or what to do when they get there, they naturally grow into a kind of structureless, wiggly flesh-blob instead of the sinewy, textured, succulent turn-on that we usually think of as "meat."

-Scientists are working to overcome this obstacle by growing muscle tissue on an edible polymer scaffold that will lend a more familiar texture to the food.

-This still doesn't take into consideration the fact that the meat we eat is actually a conglomeration of many different kinds of cells, including fat and blood.

-Apparently Shmeat tastes like ass for that reason.

-I'd thought that Shmeat was created from stem cells, but apparently it isn't.  It's simply made by encouraging muscle cells to replicate by placing them in a nutrient-rich solution similar to blood. 

-In theory, there's no limit to the amount of shmeat that can be grown from a single sample. 

-If they made too much, though, and it somehow developed consciousness, and took revenge on humanity, it could be a pretty cool B horror movie and I would watch it.

-PETA loves Shmeat and has offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who can devise a commercially-viable (i.e. tasty and cheap) chicken-based version.


Now for the speculative parts…

-There's some debate on whether the mass acceptance of Shmeat would be good or bad for the environment.  The industrial farming of livestock takes huge amounts of land, energy, and food.  Over 40% of the grain grown worldwide is fed to livestock, so if we could get rid of livestock, we would have that much more grain to feed hungry humans.  On the other hand, the kind of mass-scale laboratory operation that would be needed to produce mass volumes of Shmeat would take a lot of energy to maintain.

-Again: couldn't they make Human Shmeat?  Do I finally get to know what people taste like?  Is some religious group going to get all pissy about this?

-Is there some spiritual aspect of consuming the flesh of another beast that would be missing if our meat was never alive?

-For that matter, is Shmeat alive?  It's self-replicating.  It doesn’t feel pain since it has no nerves, but it is self-replicating and I'm pretty sure, if I remember 8th grade science correctly, that that's the definition of life.  So eating Shmeat might still be killing, even if it's painless killing.


Would you eat Shmeat?
I would eat Shmeat.