Someone Save My Chicken Tikka

Those overzealous vegetarians in the West are now growing meat in petri-dishes. And trying to sell it as green and guilt-free.

Raju Terrace Garden restaurant in Pushkar makes a Shepherd’s pie that will cause mass suicides if sent to the country of its origin. It’s a rather strange Indian pilgrimage town pie with all the good stuff (the minced meat) replaced with cabbage. Though largely due to the local municipality’s rules rather than any desire to convert meat-eaters, the Pushkar pie is still an indication of the absurd lengths to which vegetarianism can go.

If Indians are veggie crazy, then the West is beating us to it now. Scientists there, armed with research that livestock reared for meat is responsible for one-fifth of global greenhouse emissions, are strongly suggesting turning vegan. They are now growing pork soggy cells in petri-dishes and threatening to start commercial production in five years. These scientists are, of course, working in conjunction with their other friends who had successfully managed to engineer artificial fish fillets from goldfish muscle cells.

Plus, of course, it would turn butchers jobless since you’d just be growing yourself a tenderloin or a fish fillet—why bother with the rest of the animal?

The argument is that livestock emit methane, when it belches or farts, and this fart is 23 times stronger as a climate-changing agent than carbon dioxide. The fact that the livestock will keep belching or farting irrespective of whether it actually ends up hitting the plate or not is, of course, another matter.  Also, if we stop eating the animals which are being reared for meat, would goats (cows are virginal creatures in India) stop doing the horizontal happy-happy and stop reproducing?

What’s even stranger is that some equally gainfully employed people at animal rights organisations that spend billions getting celebrities in their birthday suits to pose for their ad campaigns have suddenly warmed to the idea of artificial meat. Their logic is since no animals died in making them, how can it be non-vegetarian? The fact that the steak is still made of animal cells just doesn’t matter. This is the same logic that tries to sell the world vegetarian eggs; that it’s okay to eat eggs fed a purely vegetarian diet or unfertilised.

It’s a ridiculous concept. Forget what the bird was fed, you’re eating what could be the potential offspring of the bird and you think you’d get off on a technicality? Try telling that to the hen.

And don’t even get us started on the pure and abject hypocrisy of it all—just because a piece of meat came from a petri-dish makes it okay to eat is absurd. It’s just two steps short of arguing that killing a test tube baby is legal, hell even ethical, just because it didn’t physically take two humans to make it.

About The Author

Kabeer Sharma