Food of the Gods
There have been a couple of posts about synthetically grown meats over the past week. The first one I noticed was in MetaFilter entitled A Step Closer to In Vitro Meat Production. I found this a curious bit of synchronicity as I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Wind From The Sun. In this collection of short stories, the first one is a short bit about tissue engineering for food use from 1961. "Food of the Gods" is the testimony of one corporate leader to a governmental body about the history of man's relationship with meat.
He has to define the term carnivore and explain that, as horrid as it sounds, at one point we actually killed living creatures for their meat instead of growing it. The problem is that there is a competitor who has stolen the market from everyone in the business with a new product, Ambrosia Plus. After a lot of work, his scientists have figured out what the source of Ambrosia Plus is, and he wants the government to shut down its production.
To explain why, he has to define another term for the legislators:
Cannibal.
Clarke's short stories are usually thought provoking, but they aren't as well crafted as Heinlein's or Asimov's. If you can find a copy of TWFTS, take a peak. Reading "A Meeting With Medusa" after having seen 2010 was an interesting experience.
