to be fresh as can be. He harvests himself, he cooks himself, it has to be done within the hour.
You know, I just realized, in a way itâs ⦠well, itâs sort of like what our great-grand-parents ate, isnât it? Kind of like ⦠meat?
Exactly the problem! Itâs not tofurkey or FauxPorc, I can assure you. Itâs red and bloody and it smells of iron and something else â¦
Iâm sorry, I think Iâm going to be sick.
You asked me to tell you!
Oh, God. To think, in your own home!
Right, so there he is, and he forceps out this ⦠lump of flesh, this oozing ⦠thing like itâs the Dark Ages and he looks at me cool as a cucumber and asks me if he can use the stove. And thatâs when most of the others walked in. I donât know what was worse â the disgust as they looked at us, or the pity. So, of course, into this conversational vacuum leaps our newly converted Integretist. How he can talk! How heâd been thinking about Eating With Integrity for years, how much sense it made, what with all the contaminants and the epidemics, you couldnât be too careful, blah blah blah. How it was all well and good to grow your own foods and use sterile hydroponics but you couldnât be too sure, and anyway, we evolved to eat meat, and the fact that there are 10 billion of us on Earth doesnât change our basic anatomy, yak yak yak. Stem-cell technology is perfected now, and you can grow whatever you like, they have scaffolds for anything, muscle, liver, sweetbreads â¦
Oh, my. No one spoke up?
Heâs the boss! No one dared. And I think they were all just stunned to see that this movementâs spreading into their own lives, into their own office. Itâs not just for recovering plague victims and famine survivors any more.
You know, I saw something the other night about that. The Integretists are getting up to 20% in some cities. Once it costs nothing to clone yourself, a certain kind of person thinks, well, why not?
Meanwhile the stove is doing what it can, trying to cook this ⦠this lump . So it starts to ⦠smell, you know? And a couple of the more sensitive people, Geoffâs brother, for one, they excuse themselves. And that sets off our guest.
Itâs the safest meat there is, he says. People didnât have to agree, but they shouldnât feel free to be downright rude.
Bit of a buzz-kill, eh?
⦠So then people force themselves to sit down, and theyâre tented up, and their containers unseal, but ⦠God, I can still see it! No one eats a thing. Weâre all just too disgusted and perplexed, so the only sound at the table is my one happy guest, Eating With Integrity, happily chewing away on what he keeps insisting is the only 100% safe and healthy food left: his own flesh, cloned and grown in a vat next to his coffee machine. I can still see him there, having harvested himself and cooked himself, now eating himself; holding up his fork to our averted eyes, smiling and saying, now this, this is Eating With Integrity !
A science writer in New York, David Berreby writes the Mind Matters blog at bigthink.com/blogs/Mind-Matters and is the author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity . He is at work on a book about the future of autonomy.
Expectancy Theory
Ananyo Bhattacharya
I conceived then that, irrespective of the brutal history of our species and the multifarious dark, disturbing truths revealed to us in the natural sciences by studies of the human mind and instincts, the world was perfectible. Not through a long, desperate and tenacious struggle against our own fell natures but simply because a large enough number of well-intentioned folk wished it to be.
â Jacques Monad, Journals Vol. III (2003â2006)
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Expectancy theory, the scientific hypothesis that ended science and permanently changed the lives of every member of the human race, grew out of a single line of
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley