As you might have heard, Singapore has become the first place on earth to approve the sale and consumption of lab-grown meat.

Before I move on, It's a good idea to clarify a few things:

Lab-grown meat is not playing with God. Yes, the idea is new (well, not that new; Winston Churchill predicted it in the 1930s), but that doesn't mean God-like. The Fax Machine was new once. The principle is fairly simple. Take, say, a cheek swab of saliva and grow it in a nutrient-rich, burger-shaped petri dish, throw on some herbs, job done. there's plenty of in-depth science and explanations online if you want to delve more into it.

Obviously, there will be some hurdles to overcome but this has been in the making for many years now with me as a frequent observer of progress, and most hurdles are already done with.

The main issue is price, which has been driven down drastically already from tens of thousands of dollars, to $50 per chicken nugget, to 'the same as a fairly nice restaurant'. Once mass production really gets going, you can expect the price to be driven below your standard meat products.

The next thing I want to address is this: Singapore is not China.

Singapore is one of the wealthiest, most developed, least corrupt, cleanest, and culturally diverse places on the planet. It has an emphatic reputation for taking care of its ecology and wildlife and has a range of religions and beliefs working under the same roof.

I repeat. SIngapore is NOT China. I have seen many comments on news articles saying things like 'I ain't eating anything from that part of the world', or 'I ain't getting another virus from dog meat farms' and so forth.

Ok now I got those out the way. Onto the main question:

Would you eat human meat?

Would you eat yourself?

Think about it. Conceptually, we're simply taking cells and growing them into a burger. This removes all our ethical woes about slaughtering living creatures for our luxury. It removes almost all health & safety issues regarding cramped battery farm environments, overuse and inevitable immunity to antibiotics, the destruction of millions of square miles of forests and biodiversity.

It removes the crime of murder altogether in any sense of the word (unless you're particularly sensitive to the death of individual cells, wiped out in the billions every second before they're even aware of what's going on, moments before they were about to split off into a beloved twin sister).

So, if we remove the ethical problems with cannibalism, why not eat someone?

Why not culture your own cells in a petri dish, and have yourself with fries a few weeks later?

Granted, I wasn't the first to ponder this - credit goes to Richard Dawkins on Twitter several years ago. But the posited question is extremely interesting to me.

What about your pet dog or cat?

I can pretty much guarantee 80% or so people would refuse. But since the reason is no longer ethical, it can only be our disgust reflex making us gag at the very idea.

But that is one of the biggest problems.

One of the greater solutions to our food woes is insect farming. Insects are substantially more beneficial in many many ways compared to traditional meat by having more protein per square... inch?, taking up far less space, less capacity (if any) to feel pain and suffering, less water required, and so forth.

Grind them into a powder and squeeze them into a snack bar and you have yourself a substantially improved ethical meal. But insects? Gross (Let's ignore that the cows you eat literally live in their own shit, fed on basically the same shit until their throats are slit with a rusty knife)

This, by the way, already exists:

But there is an extremely long journey for these entrepreneurs to become mass-marketed to any degree of notoriety, because of our cultural disgust reflex, which has been selectively manipulated to feel completely numb and dehumanized to the torturous lives billions of cows, sheep, and chickens live every day - as long as it doesn't look like an animal when it's on your plate!

If we could learn to overcome this really rather a daft concept, the demand for these things would explode because let's face it, it. just. makes. sense.

Now, Americans have the biggest leap to make here. Their lives are so unbelievably wasteful and selfish, that it's going to take a ridiculous leap to get from that comfort zone to anything even slightly varied to what they're used to.

It would therefore be an even larger leap to get Americans eating themselves. Especially given how religious they are. I'm sure there's something in the bible along the lines of 'thou shalt not grow one's own cells (whatever they are) in a laboratory into a nugget of meat to be eaten by oneself'

But it should be done. Imagine living in an impoverished society. You're disabled, your state has become a prison state and you fear leaving your own property.

Thankfully, you have a mini-lab set up, rainwater, and your own spit. You can survive the 4th Reich in your bunker indefinitely by simply eating yourself. You can even shape it into a mold of your own arm to really get into the spirit.

You could even put chunks of human steak on your little firing range for target practice to get the real meaty experience, never needing to see another Commie Nazi until they're wiped out by the British Forces.

I don't know where I'm going with this post.

Just answer the question.