Stand by, this is probably going to be long.
Just like you, I sometimes struggle with the choices I make. For the moment, I’ll leave religion out of the discussion. Heck, I’ll even try to leave out sex and politics. Now, on to my beef (as it were):

At least in Southern California, just about everyone either needs a car or needs to know someone with a car. You might want a Suzuka Gray Metallic Audi T-Type RS Coupe with a Black/Alcantara interior, but would you drive a Toyota Camry instead? How about a 1990s-era Honda Civic? If you have a desk job at an investment firm and you don’t shuttle clients around or meet at their offices, do you need the Audi? Wouldn’t the “beater” do just as well?

What about clothes? Do you really need brand new designer label clothes if you’re on a budget? Clean, used, pre-owned, whatever you want to call them, clothes work just as well, don’t they?

But there are times when what’s good enough for someone else isn’t good enough for you for whatever reason. *You* wouldn’t drive a beater. *You* wouldn’t drink off-brand coffee. *You* wouldn’t eat anything less than high-quality, free-range, non-steroid beef. Or would you?

I just read an article from The Telegraph(^1) which discussed the evolution of test-tube beef. After I got over the initial throat-tightening revulsion to the concept of using stem cells to grow my dinner, my next thought was that it would be perfect to help solve the world’s hunger issues.

One claim is that a single “stock” animal, “would be able to produce about a million times more meat through the lab-based technique than through the traditional method of butchery…” What could be better? Well, truth be told, what could be better for someone else? I still like to know that my table meat and I at least shared breathing in common. Even fish breathe. And this, my friends, becomes my dilemma. It’s the “do as I say, not as I do” problem.

Would you eat it? If it’s good enough to feed a nation of starving people, would you eat it? If not, why? Prejudice? Are you of the “my meat needs to bleed” ilk or would you suddenly declare yourself a vegetarian to avoid the thought?

I love Andrew Zimmern’s discussion of food and how one culture perceives something as a delicacy and another as garbage. Some people will say “meat is murder” and shout out the evils of global warming caused by McDonald’s policy of slash-and-burning Amazonian rain forests to increase the cattle herds that then generate billions of tons of methane which destroy the environment(^2). Someone else might say it’s unnatural for us not to eat an omnivore diet since that’s what we are. Regardless, if we have the technology to bring the end of world hunger one step closer to extinction, shouldn’t we use it? I can’t really answer the question.

I know how my meat is made, even the notorious “pink goo” processing. I don’t care. You can show me videos of animals being slaughtered and processed for food. It is what it is. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it. But I will honestly say that the process they described in making the test-tube beef kind of turned my stomach a little.

I’ve seen death before. I’ve seen kids where half of them are on one side of a path and the other half, the “goo” half, has pooled somewhere else. Shocking, yes, but mentally it’s okay. Blood is red. Dried blood is black. Cut meat (excluding seafood) will range from pink to black whether it’s a kid who picked up a “dud” mortar round, road kill or tomorrow afternoon’s gourmet steak dinner. But as described in the article, the whole test-tube process seems unnatural and bizarre.

Would I eat it? Probably not intentionally the first time. But if it fed millions of people somewhere else, am I too “good” for it? No, but the crowd scenes in Soylent Green keep playing in my head. If I had to eat it, I would. But let’s be clear: It wouldn’t be to save the planet or save an animal’s life. If I ate it, it would be because that might be the only thing available or affordable on my budget. I’m not going to go Vegan just because my burger’s yellow. I’ll just need to forget how they made it.

^1. Link: (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9091628/Test-tube-hamburgers-to-be-served-this-year.html)
^2. I’m shooting from the hip. Don’t quote me on this as I’m not presenting them as facts. I have to put this in because although no one reads or follows this blog currently, chances are some Vegan bastidge somewhere will Google-search it and sue me because my stats are wrong. Who freaking cares. I’m using this as an example. Get over it.