on meat: chapter 3
A followup on previous discussion of artificially grown cow. And a followup where it turns out someone is working on it already.
The dissemination of that report has caused some discussion on the 'net. And for some reason there are people who find it creepy that cow tissue can be raised in a lab without any actual bovines being involved in any sort of direct manner.
As far as I'm concerned though, it is not creepy enough. The problem of producing acres of delicious steak without having to bother with butchering actual cows is now a solved problem, so we have to move on to future work.
The state of the art is not without unsolved problems: it's not clear how to exercise the muscle-tissue (henceforth "pre-steak") nor how to interject fat deposits. Both are essential to tasty deliciousness.
Well... I have a vision. And the vision is not only practical but also vegan friendly. As I understand it, the vegan objection is essentially that we shouldn't exploit animals because they'll feel it (let us postulate that the human word "feel" in any way extends to whatever it is that cows do). Clearly this is a nervous system problem. Moreover, it's a problem of having too much nervous system.
Well... it's elementary what we must do: if we can grow pre-steaks, we could also grow actual cows in vitro. The key is to intervene at the critical stage and make sure than the brain stem does not come about. This would of course leave us with a vegetable of a cow (call it Terri). Such a cow wouldn't be very good at walking itself (thus exercising the muscles) or eating (thus helping along delicious fatty tissue). But that's not a problem! There's a huge empty hole where its brain ought to be. And what with computers getting not only more powerful but also smaller, clearly we can introduce some sort of control unit that will take care of the more robotic aspects of cowhood: walkin' around, eatin' grass, shittin' manure, walking through the dissecting plant where it's dismantled into yummy, etc. We would of course not bother emulating any sort of feeling of the cow, since that doesn't contribute to tastiness in any quantifiable way.
So what do ya think? Should I start a project on sourceforge for CowbrainOS 1.0?