This article was taken from the August issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about cannibalism. Not on a personal basis, you understand -- I live in a coastal town and I’m not completely convinced most of the people here are human in the first place. No, I’m thinking in more global terms. Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom.
In medieval times, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically -- which is just as well, otherwise Stephen Hawking would have to get his wheelchair equipped with Ben-Hur-style spikes and a turbo option.
The Sacrament of one of our more popular cults is based upon the concept of transubstantiation: that the piece of bread that the priest pops in your mouth (and if you’re lucky that’s all he’ll pop in your mouth) transforms, within your gut, into the flesh of the son of God. This is magic cannibalism, as it is understood that the son of God manifests on Earth in human form. (I can’t deny that I’d be more interested if it turned into God meat. Religion has always disappointed me.) Over the centuries, these ideas have naturally mutated through the “Chinese whispers” effect. There was a period, for instance, where communities in northern Italy decided that, if the Church essentially ate Jesus meat, then human meat must be fair game. This led to a Papal edict banning cannibalism, due to the good Catholics in that region getting fat and sassy on a diet of anything in shoes. Said edict was, in fact, only modified recently, following a planeload of Catholics getting stranded somewhere foul and reduced to eating their dead to survive -- and then realising that gnawing on corpses would get them excommunicated. The redrafted law now states that nibbling on humans is acceptable when the only other option is death, because eschewing the chewing would be tantamount to suicide, and that’s a cardinal sin. This obviously applies only to exceptional circumstances: eating your dad because Marks & Spencer was closed is still a no-no.
In the Polynesian islands, human meat has always been known as “long pig”, because people taste like pork. The incredibly efficient air filters in hospitals’ burn-wards are there to remove the overpowering smell of barbecued pork. I like to think that hospitals are so assiduous about it because human meat smells so good, and that without the filters the staff and visitors would go mad with food-lust and start devouring the burned patients. What if people are the tastiest meat of all?
Now, many people are working towards the goal of what is variously called “cultured meat”, “in vitro meat” and “artificial meat”. Meat that has never been part of an animal (see wired 08.09). A collagen matrix is impregnated with cultured muscle cells, thousands of them, all derived from a single muscle cell extracted from an animal. The meat then grows over the matrix, in sheets or in blobs. There will be scenarios where the meat is “exercised” to gain the correct texture, either mechanically or through electronic stimulus. When all’s done, you have meat that’s never been cut off a living thing and has no pain or death in its production footprint. It works with fish, too -- artificial fillets have been grown from gold fish cells. Apparently it’s hideous wet muck that tastes like the first time you ate mushy peas out of a dead tramp’s arse. But still, it’s early days.
So, the technology is there to start generating human meat without the dubious ethical intervention of human slaughter. Which is harder than you’d think, and the artificial meat version wouldn’t have any Rohypnol precipitate in its cell structure. If there’s no human shoe-beasts involved in the butchery, where’s the problem? Show me the ethical hurdles to ordering a cultured manburger.
I demand that science do its job and allow us all to indulge in a consumer experiment: are humans the most delicious meat of all? Furthermore, I think there’s an easy way to access more funding for this goal: celebrity cell donation. Memory RNA may have been a fallacy, but I think a lot of people will tell you that Nigella Lawson looks fantastically chewy and probably tastes very good.
Previous columns from Warren Ellis:‘It’s time to make the new century weirder and more wonderful’The BBC, and unfair competition in 2010 'The pops and crackles of vinyl poltergeists' 'Look out for Hollywood spelunking things into the Moon' 'How an old guy saved online music journalism' 'I want to vapourise you with a death ray from space' 'Thunderbirds will grow a generation of mad engineers' 'The future isn't big any more. The future is small' 'We could all have swine flu by the time you read this' 'The Kindle is a mewling, crippled, pining thing...' 'I plan to invest in anti-carnivorous robot security'
MicrobiographyWarren Ellis is a prolific comic-book writer for Marvel and DC, as well as a novelist and socio-cultural commentator, based in Southend-on-Sea. You can read his blog at warrenellis.com and follow him at Twitter.com/warrenellis
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
