Cover of Soylent Green
I fear that this article will spoil the conclusion of Soylent Green for anyone who hasn’t seen the film, but the title is just too appropriate for this bit of news from The Telegraph:
Reports last week that researchers could be just six months away from producing the world’s first artificial meat, using thousands of stem cells bred in a laboratory, sent a wave of fascination around the world. Yet there is an even more ghoulish prospect ahead: the idea of eating artificial food made from humans.
This may sound like science fiction, yet a new technique for making gelatin from human DNA is attracting “increasing interest from research and industrial circles”, according to a new study by scientists from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology. The paper, published recently in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, revealed that successful experiments had been carried out in which human genes were inserted into a strain of yeast to “grow” large amounts of recombinant (genetically engineered) human gelatin.
Eating gelatin derived from human DNA, whether used in jelly babies or not, certainly makes me slightly queasy. But I suspect this development will be only the tip of a changing food iceberg. Food production is a key challenge facing the modern world. Climate change & population growth, together with socioeconomic demographic changes, are increasingly likely to cause a “food crunch” that may be even more paralysing to the global economy than the credit variety.
A typical Western diet is heavy in meat, processed foods and refined sugars. Production of all these foodstuffs is highly energy-inefficient and is resource-intensive to maintain. As a larger percentage of the world becomes wealthy, their diets will increasingly skew towards this paradigm. The cost of maintaining this diet will therefore continue to climb, requiring more technological intervention to sustain it. This is already happening in the form of new irrigation & hydroponic techniques and with genetically modified foods. In that context, growing human DNA derived gelatin in vats is an unsurprising development.
Where would you draw the line with what you’re prepared to eat, I wonder?
Doesn’t this sound a tad dangerous – law of unintended consequences and all that? Foreign proteins in GMOs are being blamed for some food allergies, which are on the rise anyway. New prions come to mind too – like mad cow and chronic wasting disease. Scary.
We could make a few simple and healthy lifestyle changes – eating more local fruits and veggies, raising smaller meat animals, have less sugar, and respect the land. Yet we’d rather clone animals, captive breed wild animals, desalinize the ocean and eat lab-grown meat. What does this say about us as humans?
Dangerous? Who knows… the proof will (quite literally, in this case!) be in the pudding. I suspect the modified gelatin is relatively low-risk, but obviously more testing needs to be done.
I’m no tree-hugging eco-activist but I agree entirely with trying to buy/eat locally when possible. For a start, things tend to taste better because they’re fresher (less time between source and my dinner table) and because (in the case of fruit & veg) it’s had more time to ripen naturally. It also ends up being cheaper too, on average, so it’s a case of win-win IMO. Occasionally, sure, I’ll buy something out of season that’s been flown or shipped in. But that’s more of an exception than a rule. I also try to avoid buying too many processed goods, for similar reasons: they don’t taste as good, so it’s a false economy.
The thing is, it takes a bit of time and effort to shop this way. You have to consciously make decisions as you go round the supermarket or wherever it is that you shop. Most people opt not to take time to do this, and that means they end up buying flown-in/expensive/processed foods almost by default.
Having said all that, it may be that in a future world, “manufactured” foods may be a low-cost alternative to natural foods in poorer countries, in emergencies. For instance, if there’s a famine somewhere, industrial-scale mass-produced human yeast-meat might save lives. The economy of scale of mass-production might also make natural foods a luxury food by comparison. Soylent Green, indeed…
Human pudding. Fabulous. Nestle will be all over that one.
“I’m no tree-hugging eco-activist”…Well, someNGOs think that there is no such thing as environmentalism. We all live on the same planet, after all and none of us are immune to relying on the Earth’s resources.
Sure, if someone beats a kitten, it’s not going to hurt me directly. I can just turn on my heel and walk away. But if it’s not your water that’s being contaminated, it’s someone else’s. We could say it’s a matter of social justice as well, but ultimately the same pollution could reach any one of us and it would very simply and directly affect our safety no matter who we are.
Being vegan can sometimes make things simpler: I don’t eat gelatin (nor any other animal product), so it shouldn’t be any harder for me to avoid synthesized versions of them.
But being vegan can sometimes make things less simple: When animal genes are added to yeast/bacteria/vegetables in order to express animal proteins, is the resulting substance an animal product or not? Is it vegan friendly or not?
For example, imagine if some vegetable was engineered with spider genes, that expresses a particular protein that makes the vegetable resistant to certain diseases. Even if those new spider proteins constitute only 1 millionth of the mass of the plant, by choosing to eat that vegetable, you’d be choosing to eat that spider protein too. It’s not 100% vegetable. A non-zero percentage of it is animal.
I think the ethical debate you face is very similar to the ethical debate that vegans can have about genetically modified crops.
My personal ethical perspective on food is that I won’t eat something that has a mind.
Adding an animal gene to a vegetable doesn’t give that vegetable a mind, so there is no harm being done in growing it for consumption.
You could perhaps look at human gelatin in the same way.
But that said, I’m not comfortable with genetic modification in any form. It’s near impossible to isolate a GM crop, and genes will spread as insects carry pollen between plantations. Some insects may become allergic to the new proteins, or affect them in some non-obvious way. A genetic change could have a cascading effect on ecological stability. It’s a low probability event, but potentially high impact if some essential pollinating insect becomes an endangered species as a result of our meddling.