The Future of Meat
In an act of apparent cleverness, PETA offers a $1 million prize to the first research team to come up with a competitively priced fake meat by 2012. Which is nice that they’re offering money as a reward and all, but considering that over $5 million has already been put into this research and it’s going to cost millions before it yields marketable results, isn’t offering only $1 million the equivalent to giving someone $50 bucks for buying a new house?
I can’t say it isn’t a nice thought, though — the “don’t kill animals, just grow them to be eaten” part, not the reward. I will say that PETA has their heart is in the right place, even if that heart is full of bitter black hatred for their own species and doesn’t always seem on the up-and-up for the animals they profess to love, either.
Producing in vitro meat that has no feelings, no brains, and no way of suffering would be a great moral balm for anyone wanting to eat their steak and potatoes without guilt. It would also mean less environmental damage than the huge factory farms that are destroying tracts of land and creating literal ponds of shit (especially in the case of pig farming) and less risk of disease or use of growth hormones on the meat itself. Not to mention, that’ll help clean up our methane problem.
It sounds too good to be true and probably is. I could go on a rant about how governments could allow this new technology to create sub-par, genetically corrupted meat that results in horrific cancers or strange mutations or amazing superpowers. (Maybe not the last one.) But I don’t honestly believe that. Not because of any faith in the government, mind you.
You know vitamin pills? Supplements are awesome when you don’t have the time or resources to eat right, or have certain vitamin deficiencies. This doesn’t change the fact that the human body doesn’t process supplements as well as it processes whole, natural foods. Most of the vitamins in those pills just pass through our systems and aren’t absorbed at all. Real food, cultivated properly, is just healthier for everyone involved.
And thus we circle back around to the issue of massive, animal abusing, environment destroying factory farms, that are producing meat in unnatural and unhealthy situations. They shouldn’t and can’t continue as they are. PETA and other animal rights groups would just like to see them disbanded entirely. I can’t agree with that either, because some people, as well as certain pets that people keep, need to eat meat. Humans are omnivores. Get over it.
So what to do?
Eat less meat, for one. The amount of animal protein consumed in the United States alone is staggering. Even with the growing vegetarian community, there are still restaurants who’s menus are 90% meat dishes. Many of said dishes are composed primarily of a Meat, and then some random vegetable that isn’t even identified in the list of ingredients beyond “served with roasted vegetables”. Salads aren’t considered a ‘real meal’ until some strips of grilled chicken or bacon have been tossed on top and vegetable soups get a base of chicken or beef broth because, apparently, they aren’t flavorful enough on their own. And the average household feeds itself following the same thought process. I know mine did growing up.
Maybe instead of replacing meat with a laboratory produced equivalent — or attacking people with horrible images of slaughterhouses to make them feel bad about themselves for liking a nice rare steak on occasion — we could try changing the direction of our diets?
Gender Switch Catch 22
My roommate, who shares the same interests in discussions of gender and sexism as I do, passed on to me article about parents that are trying to raise their children in “gender neutral” environments, but said children often conform to traditional gender norms despite these efforts.
One point of the article that particularly caught our attention was this: “One militantly gender-neutral friend who had withheld dolls from her daughter says she once walked in on her daughter cooing to a toy truck she’d swaddled in a pink blankie.”
All arguments aside about whether or not this proves that women are naturally maternal/caretakers no matter how many footballs you shove at them, what struck me is why would anyone consider denying a child a toy because of it’s implied gender role to be “gender neutral”. What, trucks — a classic boy toy — are gender neutral, but dolls aren’t (unless, possibly, they’re being played with by boys)? It’s okay for a girl to fit into traditionally boy gender typing, so long as she isn’t conforming to anything traditionally girly? Surely I’m not the only one seeing the fault in this thought process.
My own toy collection growing up was fairly diversified. My Little Pony shared the same toy drawer as my model T-Rex and Brontosaurs. I used to give Barbie dolls rides in my beloved Tonka Truck, until I buried them all in the front yard.
This is what I always thought gender neutrality was; allowing someone — a child, or an adult — access to something they enjoyed regardless of the societal gender roles enforced upon it. Girls playing with model trains and makeup; boys playing house and football. It doesn’t matter the gender of the kid playing with the toy, as long as whatever they are doing makes them happy.
At what point did the effort to ease the strictures of gender roles turn into pushing them on the opposite gender instead?
Between Paper Pages and Digital Screens
If you use Amazon.com at all — or the internet, for that matter — it’s a fair bet that you’ve at least seen the Kindle. And if you read blogs and review sites, it’s also a fair bet that you’ve come across the furiously negative reaction to it among many technology-minded book readers.
The Kindle is a representation of the human need to make things more complicated in order to make them simpler. The paperback book is probably one of the most easy-to-use and practical of human inventions — turn a page, get more content. It’s portable, looks nice on display, can be lent out to friends, and just plain feels good in your hand. You can collect hundreds, provided you’ve got the money and the wall-space. Why on earth does the human race feel the need to improve upon this?
Those against the Kindle and other e-book readers will often laud the inherent perfection of books. If nothing else, they remain a source of textual entertainment that isn’t chained to the nearest electrical outlet or wireless internet hub. Well, as long as you plan to read only during the day or invest in candles.
Paperback and hardcover books as they are currently, however, are not the bastions of usability that hard-core devotees will make them out to be. If they were, I would have reached for my dictionary to make sure I was using the word “laud” right — instead, I used dictionary.com.
That’s where the advantage of e-book readers over paperbacks comes into play; not in the readability, but in the accessibility. Being able to search two hundred books with a few keywords is a massive improvement over going through them by hand to find the information you want. It also helps on organization; when the size of your book collection starts reaching into the hundreds, it’s easy to lose or misplace individual books or buy multiple copies of the same book. Digital books provide instant organization and access to your book collection, with just the click of a button.
The other advantage of the Kindle and similar e-book readers, and probably their biggest attraction, is storage. Everyone who regularly reads and collects books suffers from never having enough book shelves. Everyone. The difference in storage space between what’s needed to keep several hundred paperbacks and what’s needed to keep a few scan-disk memory cards is massive. The book collection that currently takes up your living room wall could now fit easily into your purse. If you, too, got teary eyed over the several dozen books you had to get rid of during the last move or are constantly moving book piles around your apartment to accommodate your living space, this is a very appealing concept.
Now on portability. One of the articles I read sneered at the idea of carrying around that many books in your back pocket. No normal person finishes off or looses interest in a book during a daily train ride and simply must have a selection of 199 others to pick from right that second. And yes, when looked at that way, it can seem a little excessive. But let’s not talk about daily bus or train rides — let’s talk about hours long plane flights and week(+) long vacations. I have, on more than one occasion, completely finished off the two novels I brought with me for a weekend trip and had nothing to read on the nine hour plane flight home. Back when I used to travel around with my grandparents in their RV, I could never pack enough reading material to satisfy my appetite. I’m the person who requires a extra piece of luggage to carry all their books when they go on vacation. So, having a selection of two hundred novels whenever I go without taking up more space than a single book? A dream come true.
E-book readers are not without their advantages or future potential. But much the same way PDAs were once vastly over-priced for what they offered in comparison to conventional binder-style organizers, the Kindle asks a lot for giving relatively little back. Above, I list all the reasons why I want one — my reasons for not getting one could be summed up in a $400 price tag.
If e-Books were cheaper or there was a cheap (meaning free) way of getting digital copies of the novels I own currently, that might off-set the cost of the device. Unfortunately, many e-Books cost as much as paperbacks, or even more than it would be to get the same books used. The shelves I buy at Target may not be able to go on the train with me, but they cost a third as much and that’s money I can spend on more books. Or, you know, rent.
There also still remains the fact that while e-Readers offer the advantage of accessibility and portability when it comes to vast numbers of novels, nothing beats a single paperback book when it comes to easy and enjoyable readability.
I think I’ll wait for Version 2.
Creating a Gallery with WordPress
When I first started re-designing my webpage and building it completely on Wordpress, I used the WPG2 - WordPress Gallery 2 plugin to create and manage my image gallery. This served me fine at first, but after a while it became obvious that it had too many extra features that I didn’t use, trying to attractively integrate my G2 into my Wordpress theme was a pain, and it didn’t give me the easy control over my content that I desired.
So I removed it entirely and took a more serious look at my WP installation itself. After doing some more research in the Codex and browsing the forums, I found it was more than possible to build a gallery just using the tools Wordpress comes with.
Note: This does require some work to set up and continues to require some work with every post. But once you get the hang of it, it’s quick and easy to get exactly the look you want, and unlike a plug-in, it won’t run the risk of breaking your blog when you upgrade.
Go on to page 2 to see how I did it.
Recent Comments