posted
Some disease, like Mad Cow, could also hasten the development and acceptance of vat-grown meat/ Returning to feedlots, not to mention grass-fed livestock, would become financially prohibitive.
Disease could play a part in the absence of pets as well. We don't see pets in the Legion stories, apart from the Super-pets, and I've often wondered why there isn't a clubhouse cat or a dog on the streets of Metropolis.
Apart from extinction and social mores, could animals become objects of hatred and fear at some point in the future? Cats were feared in the Middle Ages as companions of witches and carriers of disease. There was (or will be) some big disaster before the Legion's time, which varies according to different versions of the Legion - great wars, robot rebellions, technology crash. Given some of the anti-bird hysteria we've seen with the bird flu in our own time, animals, including household pets, could become scapegoats for some plague and fall out of favour, even after the disaster is over.
quote:Originally posted by Set: . . . (And there's no recourse to complain to if the guy who you paid a ridiculous sum for 'real' venison went to the super-market and bought some cultured meat and packaged it to look like 'real' meat... It's not like you can take him to the cops for cheating you out of the illegal stuff you wanted!)
To do that effectively, bone would have to be included sometimes, right? Can bone be vated? Marrow is big right now and meat is said to taste better if it's cooked with the bones. Also, most stock uses bones for the richness and flavor.
The idea is kind of repulsive, but not as bad as the current systems.
Will wild meats be vated, too? You mentioned venison, but there is a distinctive flavor to many of the wild meats.
I'd rather we all went to veggies than growing vats of meat, I think.
Earth is supposed to have healthy eco-systems in the 31st century, at least, historically, that's what we've seen. In the Legion Companion books, especially.
That includes health animal populations and oceans of plankton. Animals won't become vegetarians if they weren't born that way, so there won't be a world of complete controled substances.
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
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From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Candlelight: To do that effectively, bone would have to be included sometimes, right?
I've read that coral makes really good scaffolding, in place of bone. Growing bone is possible, but overly complicates the procedure, as I understand it.
quote: I'd rather we all went to veggies than growing vats of meat, I think.
I've slaughtered animals on a farm, and been a vegetarian, at different points of my life, so I can see both sides of the issue.
Ultimately, I'm not ethically against eating meat, since it's the only thing the human body is designed to eat (requiring extensive colonies of micro-organisms in our guts to digest vegetable matter, since we can't do that ourselves). I'd just like it better if animals didn't have to be raised and killed for the purpose.
Today it's the only economically viable way to produce meat, but that's not gonna be the case 100 years from now, let alone 1000 years from now, and I suspect that as time goes on, and the population increases, and it's no longer economically or agriculturally *possible* to raise enough meat 'the old fashioned way' to feed Earth's ten billion plus souls, that the only people who insist on eating meat from animals that have been hunted down and killed are going to seem as crazyflakes to the people of the future as the people talking up how segregation and slavery 'weren't that bad' today or people who evoke the ancient Greek concept of eromenos or horribly misinterpret the writings about Mohammed and Aisha in the Haditha to rationalize NAMBLA-esque views of when it's appropriate for an adult and a child to enter a sexual relationship.
[Wow, that was a ridiculously long run-on sentence...]
There will always be a minority to support any fringe position, and the rest of the world will continue to move beyond them, until they are as cut apart from modern society as the Amish.
.
Cramer's probably got the right idea, that society is more likely to move away from herds of food animals because of stuff like avian flu, swine flu and mad cow than any massive surge in people caring about animal welfare. I think a combination of 'safer' and 'cheaper' will eventually win out over people who knee-jerk resist doing what's good for both them and the rest of humanity and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
Being that I'm still a carnivore, despite having been much healthier when I was a vegetarian (and lost 70 lbs in six months, and stopped being diabletic!), I'm one of those people who will probably have to have my bacon pried out of my pudgy dead fingers...
[ April 18, 2011, 12:25 PM: Message edited by: Set ]
Registered: Aug 2006
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I saw a 'Monster Quest' this week. He was hunting/fishing for a fish/species in New Guinea who was attacking naked fishermen.
The suspect fishes weren't hitting his regular bate so he switched to meat, pork, to be exact. The natives, who used to be cannibles, said that human flesh tastes like pork. He had one of the bad fish on his line practically before he cast out!
I'm thinking I'm not going to be able to eat pork again.
I can see fish herding in the future with natural and man made bays netted off and the best fish for eating kept in schools there and carefully husbanded. They do that on a small scale in a number of countries now, where general fishing of the populations of certain endangered fish is forbidden.
I wonder where the twin fish cadets come from that Lightle created? Would they be considered pets by some? Are they a duo mind, which makes them sentient but, if they're separated far enough do they become beta or gold fish like?
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
Come, join me!
From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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