Envisioning a world of lab-produced meat and guilt-free carnivores.

Earlier this week, Will Saletan covered PETA's latest initiative: a $1 million dollar prize offered to anyone who develops a commercially viable "in vitro chicken-meat product." For the entrepreneur lucky enough to win, phil_white99 already envisions the publicity campaign:

look at the free marketing that this future company already got (and will continue to get) from PETA! Imagine Pamela Anderson chowing down on lab-created chicken breasts on YouTube, while shaking her lab-created human breasts.

p_w99's enthusiasm for the idea put him in the minority. Skeptics mostly ruled the roost, so to speak, in Science Fray, egged on by Daniel Engbar's derision of the PETA prize as nothing more than a publicity stunt. Firstearth_wiccan, then quillsinister explain why lab-grown meat will never be comparable to the real thing. sepiaprincess gets queasy over "Frankenmeat," while lotsy00 evokes "Chicken Little," the lab meat product in 1953 sci-fi classic The Space Merchants.

Even assuming the success of such an experiment, "what happens to all those 40 billion pigs, cows, fish and chickens?" asksMara5525? (The answer here from Trebuchet: they will be set into the wild, and "make good hunting in a few generations. Hopefully they won't evolve into killer chickens!")

Wouldn't "true vegetarians" be repulsed by the taste of meat anyway, "no matter what form it comes in," wonderscmarinelli? Self-proclaimed "animal rights activist" Chicachew agrees, while veg-partisan infornographer says "the prospect of lab-grown meat has me incredibly excited." Read why.

LeRoy_Was_Here zooms out to the global picture:

Part of the reason for soaring food prices are the growing affluence of countries like China and India, and a growing taste for meat among the middle class in those rapidly-developing nations. But meat requires a large amount of grain, and water, and land.

This issue actually goes far beyond the putative health benefits for humans of a vegan diet, and the ethical issues of killing animals for meat. It is deeply connected with the much broader issue of sustainability.

And if we believe ejherb's assertion that "the beef, pork, and poultry industries contribute massively more to global warming than automobiles," lab-based food production would mean a lighter carbon footprint.

More to be found in Human Nature Fray. AC … 12:15pm EST

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

There wasn't even agreement on whether the article was pro-Hillary or anti. Linda Hirshman's " Yo Mamma" on Clinton and U.S. women's mothers brought out close arguments, ranging from the (slightly predictable) [Hillary] " reminds me of my ex-wife" to several readers who said she reminded them of Richard Nixon, to a Republican feminist's claim that "If I continue to hear the patronizing attacks against her based on the pitch of her voice or her appearance or her husband, I may just have to vote for her. Girls need to stick together sometimes."

There was some meta-discussion of why analyses like this appear. Jenniferwhatnot said, "Where are all the articles about men afraid to openly support Obama out of fear of offending their feminist girlfriend? That's right, there aren't any." And thank you KHpoliticalinnuendohere for this defense ofSlate:

The majority of Slate readers are educated and in touch with politics, especially those who post here on the Fray. These are the people who exhausted their attention to policy long ago. We know what the differences and similarities are, we've gone over both Obama and Clinton's with fine-toothed combs, so to expect an op-ed type of publication like Slate to rehash them over and over again is to completely misunderstand their goal and function.

The most controversial line in the article was this: "Only women seem to need to separate and destroy in order to start all over again with each generation." Many readers wanted to argue, Dickey Roscombe from literature:

Nothing says boomer narcissism like identifying a particular problem in one's own sphere of understanding and deciding it must be entirely new and unique. … It would take far too long to detail how western history and literature (from Oedipus to Henry IV to HW Plainview) has faithfully told and re-told the story of men rejecting the worlds and lives of their fathers. Certainly, it is a failure of Western culture to have for so long ignored the parallel stories of mothers and daughters, but to attribute to that story a uniqueness that denies the experiences of fathers and sons is to remake the mistakes of the dead white men that the second-wave feminists worked so hard to debunk.

Ian Kamaku's view was on a different plane, and possibly more provocative to half his readers—well not exactly half:

Just how does 52 to 54% of a population become a minority? Laziness? Stupidity? ... If only you [women] could unite around a leader ... ah, but therein lies the problem, but also the answer ... women will not follow a powerful leader. They will drive the hag out of their kitchens. There is a chance, perhaps a small one, but a chance none the less that when given an order by his father, a 30 year old man might comply. If a woman of 30 is given a direct order by her mother, the chances of her obeying are the chances of the sun moving around the Earth.

Still trying to win friends among women, the same poster said this:

Have you ever noted that when a man wants to get a laugh, he will put on a dress; when a woman wishes to be taken seriously, she will put on a man's uniform? My, my, what does that tell us?