From: Wesley R. Schwein (wesleyrschwein@unn.unisys.com)
Date: Tue Aug 04 1998 - 12:47:23 MDT
Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> on 07/28/98 06:23:57 PM
Please respond to extropians@extropy.com
To: extropians@extropy.com
cc: (bcc: Wesley R. Schwein/ISG/US/Unisys)
Subject: Re: FAQ: SOCIETY AND POLITICS
Vegetarians have as many reasons for not eating meat as atheists have for
not believing in Bog. Not all atheists have responsible reasons ("It's
cause my parents, man, they're, like, Fundamentalist whackos!"), nor do all
vegetarians. But how many Burger Thing addicts could kill and eat
something themselves, or even stand to think much about the process that
took sunlight and dirt, wrapped a few proteins around it and packaged it in
wax paper, comfortingly annonymous and 'safe' (emotionally neutral) as a
piece of fruit?
:Engineering ugliness into
:any improved meat producing organism will reduce the amount of public
aversion to it
:being slaughtered for McNuggets. Though there may also be a bit of an uck
factor, as in
:"EEEEWWWW! You're gonna eat THAT???!!
This wouldn't happen if the public had regular exposure to the source of
their food... ask someone who grew up on a REAL farm and slaughtered the
same animals they raised how squeamish they are. In that situation, the
meat consumer is involved not only in the grub but in supporting the
animal, getting to know it. By the same token, a hunter taking meat from
other free beasts has a respect for the animal, a special relationship
unknown to the masses huddled up to the teat of factory farms.
Some vegetarians and certainly many run-of-the-mill McDeath-scarfers both
say, "Oh, yuck, how gross," flinching with discomfort, because they have no
connection to the living animal or to the act of butchery; it's foreign,
alien, and they wouldn't want to face their dependence on something
repulsive. The spawn of our suburbs have no respect for meat animals
because they've never raised them, never hunted them, never killed by
themselves and learned from the experience; we relate to plastic-wrapped
beef in the supermarket on the same thoughtless level as we think about
fruit, in so far as we think about it at all. Just pluck the morsel from
the branch; no thought before or emotions after, never mind how it got
there.
At any rate, deliberately to create walking McNuggets would play right into
apathy and the irrational selfishness of the American suburban belly. How
on earth does it increase extropy --particularly the aspects we admire of
knowledge, vitality and beauty-- to breed something for its ugliness so as
to manipulate fear?
Has anyone speculated, in SF stories or elsewhere, about the effects of
nanotech on cuisine? Other than mass-produced rice for Chinese peasants, I
can't remember any.
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