Photo courtesy Rainer Zenz, Wikimedia commons
I suppose it’s a sign of some kind of progress that people are thinking about ways to produce meat without the guilt. But these ideas give me the creeps.
As New Scientist points out, we eat 300 million tons of meat a year—50 percent more than in the 1960s. Much of it comes from inhumane factory farms.
Enter Adam Shriver’s controversial paper in Neuroethics arguing that we are close to, if not already at, the point of genetically engineering factory-farmed livestock who cannot suffer.
Wow. Pain-free cows. You know, that doesn’t work for me. It’s right up there with the Cheney method of torture. I mean, what does hurting an animal who can’t (or can) feel pain do to the miserable souls stuck with (or desiring) those jobs? Post-traumatic meat disorder.
Why not genetically engineer people to abhor meat?
Meat is more bad than good for us, bad for livestock, and bad for the planet. Eating a quality vegetarian diet would benefit every single living person. Here’s why and why and why and why and why and why.
Plus, eating meat is bad for cows and sheep and goats and chickens and fish and every other wiggling thing we insist on putting into our mouths. Whether they feel pain or not.
MoJo has covered more than once some of the compelling and ever accumulating reasons that eating meat is bad for the planet.
Now some thinkers are suggesting producing in-vitro meat bioengineered in Petri dishes. Jennifer Jacquet blogging at Seed calls it Frankenmeat.
I’m feeling the need to fight back against the strange bacon fetish sweeping the sweepable world.
Tofu never suffers.
