No compilation of urban legends would be complete without mentioning cafeteria-style mystery meat. It is shaped like meat, colored (and cooked) like meat, but would it stand up to even casual scrutiny? Stories about schools saving money by cheating out on food were spurious at best. Schools don’t try to save money.
But if they did, would that be the place?
My memory of school lunch is not unpleasant. The food was food, and I ate burgers and fries almost every day in High School, and I looked forward to it. That was before the advent of fake meat, vegan meat, and the latest carbon and chemically intensive insult to nature, lab-grown meat, or cloned meat (as I like to call it)—something you’d expect in some deep-space dystopian post-apocalyptic tale. No cows in space, but you still need those nutrients. In the Matrix, they ate “a single-celled protein, vitamin, mineral, and amino acid colloid.”
Yum!
Meanwhile, in what passes for our real world, laboratory-generated meat facsimiles are a thing. The folks claiming it will emit less CO2, thus saving the planet (for people pining for real meat), can’t seem to agree on how much CO2 a lab full of people and equipment making meat might generate. I think it would be more. But someone is pretending this is the wave of the future (a real cash cow), so it’s a thing. Normalizing it is also a thing, but plant-based “meat” isn’t the thing they thought, so chemically grown meat has an uphill climb, especially in Florida, where they’ve banned it.
The first bill banning lab-grown meat was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on May 1. According to SB 1084, the bill prohibits the manufacture for sale, sale, holding or offering for sale, or distribution of cultivated meat in the state.
Florida isn’t known for Cattle ranching, but then, I guess it is.
“We’re fighting back against an ideology that ultimately wants to eliminate meat production in the U.S. and around the globe,” DeSantis said. “In the state of Florida we’ve put down the marker very clearly; we stand with agriculture. We stand with the cattle ranchers. We stand with our farmers because we understand it’s important for the backbone of the state. It’s important for our culture. It’s important for our heritage so the bill that I’m going to sign today is going to say basically take your fake, lab-grown meat elsewhere. We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
If they can ‘steer’ the mRNA away from the cows, Florida cowboys might be the heroes in all the new-age Westerns, only you can’t call them that. “Southerns,” sounds dumb. Someone will work that out, I’m sure – no lab needed.
So, how do people feel about meat from lab-generated cows? Greens would likely object to it the way they do GMOs (can we call them lab-grown vegetables?), but they all lined up for the mRNA thing, which makes them a GMO, IMO.
If we can convince them to spend all their time boycotting themselves, they won’t have any time left to push the lab meat (global warming, grooming, alien invasion, domestic spying, forever wars …).
We could only hope.
