NPR and the The New Yorker have recently covered the burgeoning field of synthetic meat – muscle cells grown in “test tubes” (I suspect that microbiologists object to such blunt descriptions of what is undoubtedly highly specialized nerd gear). Unfortunately, both articles focus on the potential volume of meat that synthetics could provide to the global population in only a pre-apocalyptic scenario. Putting aside how such lab-made cell cultures may taste – given that the flavors our pallets tend to enjoy are products of what the animal ate and how they moved – and putting aside that most of us should eat less meat than we currently do – for health and ethical reasons – such strangely marbled meats may, ultimately, only be helpful for the very, very few chumps who know how to make it.
When the lights go out, it will be really, really nice to be those three guys locked inside the super secret test facility with amazing security and several back-up generators that don’t threaten to fail until said scientists are at the peak of their interpersonal tension over who ate the last of the other rations, and, also, they are about to cure the zombie plague if only the power will last a little longer. For those of us clubbing stumblers to survive on the outside, their squabbles over whose job it is to cook the next batch of mealy myofibrils will seem petty to all of us and the gruff weapons expert of our group will wish out loud that some broke-ass post-doc student had gotten a grant to study machete-sharpening, instead of the government trapping three eggheads together inside of a doomsday building with the only steak around.
In addition to being a perishable, unsavory and power-dependent food source, synthetic meat certainly won’t help us maintain hearty, bio-diverse herds before the end of the world. More than just having meat from labs, and more than just having a few varieties of cattle mass-produced, we need a gazillion varieties of beef, pigs and fowl running around our hillsides, instead of becoming decrepit, weak versions of themselves indoors. Our stock will need to be exponentially more robust after the apocalypse and we should not narrow the playing field of genetic competitors that could survive alongside us long enough to end up on our plates.
If vegetarians don’t lead to the apocalypse by clamoring for guilt- and death-free food that turns on us, mutates and eats our brains, we will definitely need them on our survival teams, because we’re all going to have to do with fewer burgers and the vegans know all of the good root vegetable recipes.
