One Man's Poison Is Another Man's Meat
This piece is scheduled to run in the Capital Press in Summer 2006.Every once in a while I find myself engaged in conversations with strangers where the talk is unsettling and the stranger is… well, strange. Such was the case the other day when I was discussing the state of our food systems with a biotechnological entrepreneur in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
I was in search of the best hamburger in San Francisco and my quest had led me to the De Young Museum, in Golden Gate Park. One of my clients, Bon Appétit Management Company, runs the café at the museum, which buys all its beef from a small grass-fed producer from Point Reyes, California called Marin Sun Farms.
“Daniel Long, the chef at the café, buys as much of his food as possible from within one hundred miles of the museum,” I enthusiastically explained to the stranger. “Bon Appétit is a forward thinking company, and this Marin Sun Farm burger is reputed to be one of the best around.” The stranger looked at me in stunned silence, with an attitude that betrayed his impression of me; another ignorant lemming, a member of the uninitiated mob.
“Well,” he cleared his throat, cocking his head slightly to the side, “if they were really forward-thinking, they would adopt a more humane way of procuring their protein. Raising animals for their flesh is unnecessary and barbaric. With all of the advances in stem-cell technology, there is no reason why they couldn’t create or replicate different cuts of meat or different parts of animals instead of having to kill that animal to get them.”
My slack-jawed look of disbelief betrayed my need for further explanation. “Look,” he continued, “elephant trunk is a delicacy in certain cultures. You could take one elephant trunk and replicate it with stem cells, then you could use more stem cells to propagate it. This method would allow you to create your protein without all of the ethical dilemmas associated with slaughtering animals. Monsanto is doing something similar with their Round-Up ready seeds. We are at a point now where we don’t need to raise our protein in the fields any more; we can grow it in labs.”
As I stood listening to the stranger’s monologue, the old cliché rang true; one man’s poison is another man’s meat. While the stranger held out stem-cell derived elephant trunk as a model of perfect protein, I struggled to imagine a circumstance under which I would ever consume it.
The beauty of engaging in deep, philosophical discourse with random strangers is that you never know what you might hear. Sometimes, you are privy to the private, anonymous musings of great minds while, other times, you are blown away by lunatic science-fiction fantasia. Whatever the case, the view into the reality of a stranger is always edifying; just don’t worry about crackpot theories until you hear them for the tenth time.
The Marin Sun Farms hamburger at the De Young Museum, by the way, was indeed the best that I have ever had.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 1:56 PM
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