Nature Futures 2 by Colin Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page B

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 it’s … well, it’s sort of like what our great-grand-parents ate, isn’t it? Kind of like … meat?
    Exactly the problem! It’s not tofurkey or FauxPorc, I can assure you. It’s red and bloody and it smells of iron and something else …
    I’m sorry, I think I’m 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 it’s the Dark Ages and he looks at me cool as a cucumber and asks me if he can use the stove. And that’s when most of the others walked in. I don’t know what was worse — 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 he’d been thinking about Eating With Integrity for years, how much sense it made, what with all the contaminants and the epidemics, you couldn’t be too careful, blah blah blah. How it was all well and good to grow your own foods and use sterile hydroponics but you couldn’t be too sure, and anyway, we evolved to eat meat, and the fact that there are 10 billion of us on Earth doesn’t 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 …
    Oh, my. No one spoke up?
    He’s the boss! No one dared. And I think they were all just stunned to see that this movement’s spreading into their own lives, into their own office. It’s 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, Geoff’s brother, for one, they excuse themselves. And that sets off our guest.
    It’s the safest meat there is, he says. People didn’t have to agree, but they shouldn’t feel free to be downright rude.
    Bit of a buzz-kill, eh?
    â€¦ So then people force themselves to sit down, and they’re tented up, and their containers unseal, but … God, I can still see it! No one eats a thing. We’re 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 (2003–2006)
    Â 
    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