Two Things
Lab meat; on reading
No coffee this Friday, December 1, as regrettably I’ll be out of town. Our weekly convivium will resume Friday, December 8.
(1) Playing chicken with lab meat: The “Chicken Restaurant Index” is a metric I use to judge the moral health of a community. Roughly stated, the number of chicken restaurants in a given community is inversely proportional to its moral health or, alternatively stated, directly proportional to its moral decadence. But what if those chicken restaurants are serving lab-grown meat rather than a more-or-less natural, farm-raised product? At the New Atlantis, writer-farmer Garth Brown says it shouldn’t matter, that we’ve essentially been eating lab-grown meat for decades anyway:
More than any other animal, a meat chicken is a factory product. The hen you see pecking around your neighbor’s yard is still a chicken, living a chicken’s life much like chickens have ever since they stopped being wild junglefowl. The bird in the broiler house is something less. It might still have the capacity to scratch and peck, but it will never have the opportunity. It exists solely to convert feed to muscle, though to do so it requires annoyances like feathers, bones, a digestive tract, and a small but recalcitrant brain, from which no amount of breeding will remove certain distinctly chicken-ish desires. It is a unit optimized for the production of lean breast meat, but one that remains frustratingly bounded by its creaturehood.
Viewed this way, growing chicken cells in a bioreactor, producing what is called either “cultured” or “lab-grown meat,” just makes sense. Instead of optimizing for muscle growth in a chicken, with all the externalities that accompany raising livestock at scale, lab-grown meat takes the most economically valuable part of the bird and cultivates it in isolation. Rather than carefully selected lines of poultry, it utilizes carefully selected lines of cells. Rather than converting corn and soy to meat via an animal, a slurry of nutrients convert directly to muscle with no intermediary. Rather than traveling to a slaughterhouse, the output of a bioreactor can be shaped and packed at the point of production. In theory, a lab-grown meat factory should produce lean chicken more efficiently than a real chicken ever could.
Brown wonders if lab-grown meat could reshape not only our diets and consumption habits but also the practice of agriculture itself. When efficiency isn’t the dominant criterion, perhaps we can slow down and rediscover our nature as embodied beings dependent on the land: “In a world increasingly defined by isolation and the illusion of limitless, individualized possibilities, the slow process of setting out to grow food and then doing it is singularly salutary.”
(2) How reading shapes us: I enjoyed this Public Books essay by Elyse Graham, “Your Brain on Books,” a double-header book review. The opening paragraphs alone are intriguing:
The subtle Saint Anselm, a Benedictine monk, treated reading as a form of communion. In his time, the 11th century, readers often consumed books differently than they do today. A common form of monastic reading, for example, was lectio divina, which monks treated—as Christopher de Hamel says in The Manuscripts Club, a group biography of manuscript lovers—as “an act of devotion, like prayer.” The reader would open a religious text to a random page, then prayerfully study the passage to see what message God had chosen for him now.1
This form of reading, de Hamel says, is one reason why so many medieval manuscripts have richly decorated pages. The decorations “helped impress a page visually in the reader’s memory,” helping him to meditate later upon the revelatory passage. We can see from this example how an era’s methods of reading affect the look and feel of its books.
And later:
Reading occupies a strange position in today’s world, being at once physiologically unnecessary and culturally central. Language is natural—we produce language automatically, as children, and we know of no human societies that lacked language—but reading is artificial. It had (and has) to be invented, like the crank. Plenty of human societies have lacked reading. Despite its artificiality, we, referring to participants in the modern West, consider reading to be an essential skill and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make people read more and better.