© Red Ice Creations
to quote from the
classic 1973 science fiction film and Charlton Heston's memorable line. (1970s era spoiler alert!): In
Soylent Green, due to global collapse, a desperate and dying humanity is unknowingly being fed human remains as a food source. But due to biological and scientific advances we can apparently eat humans now, willingly, and with a side of mustard. Why wait for catastrophe?
Once more life imitates art, and a startup called
BiteLabs is looking for support to create meat products from celebrity body parts, aiming to take cells from willing celebs and using them to grow protein into test-tube meat.
LATimes.com spoke with a representative of the organization: "At the moment, our primary goal is to provoke discussion and debate around topics of bioethics and celebrity culture."
Provocative indeed, but not necessarily a new idea. In recent years the idea of food made out of evidently tasty humans has been put forward, only to repulse the public and get pulled from shelves.
Human breast milk ice cream had its moment in the sun,
Princess Diana's hair was involved in the production of occult jam, and two
Dutch TV presenters ate slices of each others' flesh for a television program.
Even '
human cheese' has been made with belly-button bacteria. Certainly an acquired taste.
Comment: Most western media outlets carrying these stories of the collapse of the healthcare system in Syria tend to blame the Assad government for deliberately targeting doctors and hospitals. Yet this report describes pre-war Syria as "a middle-income country, with child survival statistics to match". Are we to believe that Assad suddenly turned into a heartless dictator overnight, or is it more likely that the insane, Western-sponsored Islamic fundamentalists are to blame?