How Much Would You Pay To Eat Kendall Jenner?

Let me start by saying that the title of this article is not clickbait. While it is meant to titillate a bit, I do think that it is within the range of possibility that you will be able to taste a bit of the flesh of anyone you want in the near future. See, humans are predictable and once we CAN do something, we will do it.

If you start with the idea that lab grown meat is actually a thing that is already on the verge of coming to market (in a limited sense) and can definitely be done, then the possibilities pretty much reveal themselves with only a bit of imagination required.

For that matter, most of what I intend to talk about in this article can be done NOW so it is not like it is something to leave for future generations to consider. What we will or will not eat is only one facet of a complex future. I don’t even mean to imply that it is a conscious choice that we will be required to make because it isn’t. It is the reality of the near future that will be ushered in on marketing and pop culture fad-ism. We are just the generations that are fortunate enough to be alive to witness the birth of a really new world.

Ok, so we can produce meat in a factory and thereby end the suffering of millions of animals. That is great, not to mention that lab produced meat is cleaner and disease free too. Plus, we can produce a lot more food this way than we can by traditional methods.

There are really not many reasons not to go in the direction of factory produced meat. Outside of the slightly squeamish feeling of eating meat that is “grown” as meat and not carved off of a (formerly) living thing, there is no reason not to eat it.

PlantLab could grow fruit and vegetables for the entire world in a space smaller than Holland

In this article having to do with factory agriculture the claim is made that you could grow enough food to feed 9 billion people in an area the size of Holland. This is through utilizing space below the ground which requires less energy and other resources than growing above ground. While this is not about lab grown food in the same sense that we are proposing to produce meat it is still the other half of a balanced diet and so I thought it was worth including.

Ocean creatures too are in the process of being crafted into something that can be produced in a factory without ever having to reach the stage of rudimentary consciousness that fish and other sea life is thought to posses. I found a company called Finless Foods to illustrate the concept of lab grown seafood. While I do not think they are as far along in creating a viable product as the land based animal meat producers are I don’t image that what they are attempting is in any way impossible.

On the land animal side, the flagship company, backed by the likes of Bill Gates and by Tyson Foods, perhaps in a sign of where the meat industry is planning on going, is Memphis Meats, a Silicon Valley startup who has already produced meatballs, hamburgers and a fried chicken “breast” patty. To date the reviews from initial taste testers are good. Just think of the possibilities for good and “other” applications too.

1: Could we produce shark fins, rhino horn and ivory, etc. in the lab in unlimited quantities and thereby take all the value out of the things that poachers currently hunt animals to extinction for?

2: Could we grow animal parts and plants efficiently and renewably enough to feed our race as we reach out further into space with manned missions? If we can do it on the Earth then I do not see why we couldn’t do it in space or on Mars. Elon Musk, are you listening?

3: Could we grow new parts for people too?

Yes we can and it is being done successfully right now.

That last point really opens up a Pandora’s Box, doesn’t it? On the one hand we already have people producing new parts for human beings out of their own cells.

The body parts are made of a polymer material that includes a scaffolding mold and stem cell samples taken from patients’ fat. To get the desired spongy texture for the man’s artificial nose, the team added a mixture of salt and sugar to the mold. Seifalian holds a patent on the polymer used to make noses and hopes to extend it to include other organs. Currently, he and his team are working on building coronary arteries, although ears are admittedly the most challenging.

Knowing human beings as well as I do and having a somewhat dark sense of humor I immediately wonder what this technology could lead to. I mean, this is the age of celebrity and people are marketing every part of themselves they can. The Kardashian family is one who perhaps epitomizes success within the vocation of “celebrity for the sake of celebrity”. That was why I randomly picked Kendal Jenner to use as a theoretical example in this story.
Photo by Disney on Flicker https://www.flickr.com/photos/disneyabc/15677984059 License info on page: Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode

Kendall is already a model and singer as she tries to produce content and develop her personal brand in order to establish her position in the family hierarchy of celebrity. Will the new ease of creating meat products and body parts give celebrities new ways to capitalize on their fame? Don’t scoff at the power of that fame either. Recently Kendall’s tweet that she no longer opens the app Snapchat is estimated to have cost the fledgling IPO more than a billion dollars in stock losses overnight.

There are already a couple of parody websites that offer the cultured flesh of celebrities as food. This site seems to be perhaps at least a bit serious although another I found along the same lines is more plain on the fact that it is a parody site.

So human flesh is or is on the verge of becoming one more commodity in the marketplace. Eating a bit of a celebrity is only the beginning too. I mean how about other body parts that people might be interested in? I am sure that if you can grow organs like ears and noses in the lab on a “soft, spongy framework” then you could also create living sex toys or sex dolls that would really put the “real” in Real Dolls. That might make my title question about eating Kendall Jenner less of a bait and switch than it seemed at first.

Originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/@mikesjohnston/how-much-would-you-pay-to-eat-kendall-jenner-8f4e3b9648e3