Food restrictions

[ewx]

[Poll #1241007]

(I'm asking about the nature of the substance, not the process that led to it: I'm not asking whether you'll eat battery chickens or baby-killing coffee.)

Comments

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of an article I read recently debating the idea of meat made from tissue culture in big vats. Which seems to gross most people (including carnivores) out, despite the fact that it involves basically no animals having to die. The article went on to raise the possibility of it therefore opening up a market for meats that would be ethically not-suitable-for-eating at present, such as panda, and then threw in the idea of human meat somewhat flippantly just as a topic for consideration.

Would I eat tissue-cultured human meat? Probably not, for reasons of eating one's own species being a good way to get interesting diseases. But I'd be kind of curious to find out what it tastes like.

I'm fairly sure I've ingested minute traces of arsenic at one point or another...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Presumably deliberately cultured human tissue would be carefully kept free of nasties...

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they'd do their best, but considering the safety precautions we have to observe when dealing with HeLa cells (a human cell line used in labs), I'd still worry. If a retrovirus or something got into one batch, and a cell in that batch also happened to develop cancer-like properties, contact with even a few cells could, theoretically, give people cancer by spreading the dodgy cancer-causing DNA into the unwitting manburger consumer via their mouth lining or something. :(

And stuff like CJD caused by wrongly-folded proteins would be really hard to prevent, I suspect.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I'd eat vat grown protein. Actually, I already do - quorn for instance.