Scientists are growing meat in labs.  They are taking stem cells from a cow and then growing the muscle cells.  It’s still in very early stages.  But it seems like a likely solution for some of our basic problems of providing food for our future without killing our planet and ourselves.

It also seems vaguely horrific so far.  Certainly if you watch this brief video it doesn’t seem appetizing.  But that is to be expected.  It’s early in the development, the only thing they have is tiny strings of white “meat”.  It’s white because there is no blood feeding it.  It probably tasteless because there is no fat cell accompanying it.  It’s early.  But it is a demonstration of possibility.

The implications of this are far reaching.  Literally.  Imagine taking such a kit to Mars to feed the inhabitants there.  The fact is that if you can clone meat, you can also clone the wheat and vegetables. And voila – we have solved food in outer space.

Cloning meat will eliminate a huge amount of greenhouse gases produced by raising animals for food.  This is good. It will eliminate the horrific way we treat animals in giant factory farms and slaughter houses.  Fewer and fewer family farms exist anymore and with their loss came the terrible cruel treatment of animals in the name of efficiency.

But Lab Meat is also very sad to me.  The food we eat is more than the cell.  It’s the particular combination of cells that make it taste good.  A strawberry grown in hydroponics tastes different than a strawberry grown in the ground in your garden.  It’s because the plant, and therefore the fruit, is absorbing a different set of nutrients.  There is also a different set of stresses on the plant, which I would guess would make the plant change slightly.  Even after they perfect their meat cells and combine it with the appropriate other cells of fat and blood, the lab grown food will almost certainly lack that earthy good flavor of food grown normally.  We will be missing something important to the enjoyment of our lives.

Also, because humans are humans, people with money will be able to buy “real” food and people without enough money will be stuck with Lab Meat.  It is always the the way.

I don’t suppose that is anywhere near the immediate future though.  I expect to be dead before Lab Meat is perfected and so broadly available.  And for once I’m grateful that I won’t be around to see the future.

 

 

But it’s worrying.

What if future me is someone present me wouldn’t like? What if I stop caring about what other people need or think and just care about me?

How do I stop that from happening?  Should I write down what I am, what I believe right now and make sure I adhere to it like a religious fundamentalist adheres to their holy book?

Should I really stop change and thought from happening?   Because it isn’t like present me is the President of All of the Mes who will ever be.  I don’t know anything about future me, but maybe there are things I don’t know that make future me the right me.  Although I cannot imagine a future where not caring about other humans is ever a good plan…

Any strict adherence to one ideal stops me from thinking, doesn’t it?  I don’t have to think through an issue because I have it referenced in black and white.  There’s the answer of how I think.

Ultimately, I think I will risk my possible evolution away from things that are important to current me in order to maintain my ability to think through and consider myself in relation to the world at ever stage of my life.

 

I’ve been struggling this weekend with my depression, all the while contemplating hopefully a possible path to having ECT to treat it.

Depression doesn’t usually conjure images of hope but somewhere in the mire of stillness is this small ray of hope.

See, that’s the thing about depression and life in general.  Nothing is ever entirely one thing.  We are never really living in extreme in our head, but we feel compelled to describe our thoughts and feelings and opinions that way.

We see any sort of contradiction in thought or emotion as being hypocrisy or making a statement false.  We have fallen into this binary world where everything must one thing or another, when in fact, very little is actually just one way.

Life is not clean.  Its not divided simply into halves for us to choose.  Its a big field of possibilities and many of them can co-exist inside our heads, inside the world.

In morality, most of us would condemn murder.  But we have all recognized at least once some situation where a murder seemed justified.  The father who beat his child’s sexual molester to death, the idea of sending a time traveling assassin to kill Hitler…. Somewhere, at sometime you have considered a murder as not contemptible.

In politics, most have some kind of bias as liberal or conservative, but when you talk to individuals, they will often identify in some fashion with platform position of the other guy.  Many liberals feel the government should be more monetarily conservative.  Many conservatives have positive feelings about gay marriage.

Take something that is objective.  The colors black and white.  Except.  No.  The human brain decides a color based on context.  So that colors stop being exactly one color.  They change based on context.  Remember the dress?

There is no right or wrong.   There is no liberal or conservative.  There is not even black and white.

We need to stop pretending that life is a T/F test.  It’s not.  Extremism is fueled by this thought that every question has a clean simple answer.

As humans, we would be far better off if we recognized that life isn’t clean.  Its a big muddy mess.  And inside your head are lots of ideas that don’t necessarily seem to belong together – but they exist there anyway.  And that is OK.  Because that is the way life is.  Complicated.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. ~Walt Whitman