WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

I've heard theories that human meat is the best fit for humans to eat nutritionally, because it's exactly human.

author=SnowOwl
What the hell? If you could replicate any meat, why the hell would you even choose human meat. Just bring some chicken with you on the spaceship, jeez.

The counterquestion is, why wouldn't you? There's no particular reason why it would be inferior to other types of meat. There's a social stigma against it now, but I can definitely see that slowly disappearing over time once synethetic meat came into existance.

I guess the main difference would be having centuries worth of recipes to use for more traditional types of meat. We all know hundreds of really good ways to cook beef that have been perfected by chefs over time. I can't name a single decent human dish.

And I guess the same is true for, say, koala meat or tarantula meat or penguin meat or boa constrictor meat. Even with the right technology, it would take a very long time before people started making anything really worth eating out of that stuff. There'd be a solid hundred years where it was limited to avant-garde chefs serving food on reclaimed driftwood, based in their restarunt that's a giant inside-out carnival tent in San Francisco, where all the waiters have plastic surgery making them look like Charles Manson but their uniforms are Dragon Ball Z karate gis. "Look at my food, my whole venue, it is... ART!"

author=LockeZ

author=SnowOwl
What the hell? If you could replicate any meat, why the hell would you even choose human meat. Just bring some chicken with you on the spaceship, jeez.

The counterquestion is, why wouldn't you? There's no particular reason why it would be inferior to other types of meat. There's a social stigma against it now, but I can definitely see that slowly disappearing over time once synethetic meat came into existance.

I think this is the one time that logic doesn't apply. It's just kinda bleh, due to being raised to think so. It would have to be a life or death situation for me to eat human meat.

If you have something that can synthesize meat, then the natural extension of avant garde cuisine would be to create meat that exists outside of the standard human experience--meat that exists just to trigger specific taste buds in order to maximize the experience, meat that so far has only existed at the edges of our imagination.

So, fuck eating human meat, I want to eat an Oompa Loompa.

Real Meal Network.

Eating chicken meat doesn't have the same moral weight as eating human meat does though, because we're human and the implication of eating something from your own species affects us thinking beings. I don't know of that many people that could eat human flesh and not think at least a bit about what they're doing and how it is a little bit fucked up, unless you live in a cannibal community.

Which makes me wonder if a possibility of a synthetic human meat could erase that sort of effect on, you know, normal people.

author=FlyingJester
I've heard theories that human meat is the best fit for humans to eat nutritionally, because it's exactly human.

Actually, this is the reason certain Neanderthalithic (?) tribes died out - eating our own meat is bad for us. Very much so. Cannibalism leads to quite a few diseases so...

There exists a third reason (as well as many more that will not be addressed here) why cannibalism is bad for you, and it seems like karma. If you eat human brains, you may contract a disease that will return the favor: kuru will eat your brain. Worse yet, there is no cure.

Kuru may be untreatable, but it is also rare. So rare in fact, that it is limited geographically and temporally to the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, who experienced a sustained epidemic which peaked during the 1950s and slowly declined over the ensuing decades. At its peak, the disease was the most common cause of death of Fore women. The Fore tribe consumed their dead not in a malicious fashion, but as a funeral rite. After scientists identified the disease, cannibalism effectively ceased in the early 1960s – for kuru, the best treatment is prevention.

Prevention is essential because once you contract this particular Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE), not only is there is no cure, but it is unfailingly lethal. TSEs are typically defined by a traffic jam of bent-out-of-shape proteins, or prions, in your brain. Once in the brain, prions degrade neurological function and cause the symptoms of kuru: tremors, loss of balance, and headaches. The incubation period ranges between a few years and as long as 60 years, but once symptoms start in someone, they usually have only a few years left to live. The spongiform component of kuru is a visceral depiction of the physical effect the disease imprints on the brain: it leaves your gray matter as cratered as a sponge.
- Extract

That's just one source, but there are plenty others.

author=Liberty

author=FlyingJester
I've heard theories that human meat is the best fit for humans to eat nutritionally, because it's exactly human.

Actually, this is the reason certain Neanderthalithic (?) tribes died out - eating our own meat is bad for us. Very much so. Cannibalism leads to quite a few diseases so...

Oh I'm well aware, although something could be nutritionally well suited but also quite full of dangerous diseases. Of course, if we're talking about synthetic flesh, then it would probably be disease free (or very limited).

People eat pork brains, though.