Memories of the 28th Century

After writing my post regarding human spare parts I realized that there was a rather interesting extension to the idea; to wit, food production. Actually, I was going to write about the potential value of growing flesh from their own stems cells for cannibals and for vampires growing blood, but there aren’t all that many people who would be interested in such food, but specially gene tailored flesh from some animals could be grown that way, and it probably will be a delicacy in a few decades. We wouldn’t be producing steaks that way, but there must be special cuts of meat or seafood that are absurdly expensive but that would be cheaper or easier to get due to harvesting restrictions or whatever, if they could be grown in factories.

Culturing meat that way would allow meat production without the large areas for animals to forage or just wander about, and seafood wouldn’t need ponds; it would just need tanks with feed and disposal piping. In The Space Merchants by C. M. Kornbluth and Fred Pohl there was mention of a mass of cancerous chicken flesh that was constantly harvested for edible meat. This method would be similar, but the flesh would be normal, undiseased.

Other possibilities would be cannibalism and vampirism. After writing my post regarding human spare parts I realized that there was a rather bizarre alternative use for the system; cannibalism could become common. The late Jeffrey Dahmer wouldn’t have had to kill people to satisfy his appetite; he could have simply gotten a supply of food from his own stem cells. I don’t believe that cannibalism is common at this time, but it might become a common thing for some people. I’m not advocating cannibalism, but they say that you are what you eat, so it makes sense to eat what you are.

And then there would be the vampires. It would be a little more complicated than the culture with a blood-like fluid going through and feeding some muscle tissue, that you would need to use yourself for food, because blood is made from a number of components that are made in various part of the body. Both red blood cells and white blood cells are made the marrow of bones. Other components of blood are added by other parts of the body, but the cells and the plasma are the principal components, so vampires should be able to get by on them. It doesn’t take much imagination to dream up a vampire with a large growth vessel, a thing that would be like a huge Petri dish, and in this vessel there would be a mass of marrow cultured from the vampire’s own marrow. The marrow would be fed with a suitable mix of chemicals, and it would produce an assortment of blood cells. The cells would be drawn off and mixed with plasma, and the vampire would drink the resulting beverage when enough had accumulated. If vampires could make it in home based systems think of how much easier it would be in a medical facility with adequate equipment and personnel who know what they were doing, or maybe the vampires would become the experts.

I’m not advocating these uses for that technology, but I can imagine it happening. If you have read enough science fiction, then you have run across tank grown food being mentioned. I have a little more faith in the poor taste of humans, and I can imagine a dainty middle-aged looking woman, who will actually be about eight hundred years old, having a dinner for whatever purpose and featuring her own rump roast. She would make some semi-lewd comments about her body, etc. I’ll stop before this gets too outre.