Meat in the 24th Century

nrobbiec

Something I was curious about, there are (I don't know why) always people in the Star Trek universe complaining about replicators and so for someone like Joseph Sisko who refuses to serve replicated food but serves meat, how does he get his stock.

Are farming, fishing and abattoirs still thriving industries?

bioixi

It may be cloned meat, or maybe some farms and fisheries still function, it may be meat from alien animals or meat imported from colony worlds or even from the klingon.

artan42

Farming I assume. With off-world colonies there's more room for farmland on Earth.​​

brian334

Unless Earth has restored the populations of alpha predators slaughtered by our ancestors, there will always be a need for the ability to limit herd sizes. Imagine, if you will, the result of allowing cows to wander the plains uncontrolled. They would overpopulate and eat the plains flat in a few short years. A healthy cow has a calf every year, so cattle populations double every two years or so. If you begin with one bull and one cow, that comes out to be 4 cows in two years, 8 cows in four, 16 in six years, 32 cows in eight years, 64 in ten, 128, 512, 1024, and 2048 by the end of their 20 year lifetime. Now recall that we are beginning with millions of cows...

In the absence of, or limitation of, alpha predators, herd animals do not thrive. Disease, starvation, destruction of habitat, and competition with other animals all take their toll. You might end up with lots of cows, but no bison or elk, for example. Man has placed himself in the role of alpha predator over pretty much the entire world, and with good reason. (Anyone note the rise in tiger attacks on humans? Fewer tigers, but more attacks. Habitat loss is a very real problem for humans who want to maintain wild predator populations.)

So I do not envision a time, ever, when humanity stops eating meat. You have to do something with the excess animal populations or they will 'self correct' in devastating ways. I can see available farmland being restored as 'natural' areas when humans shift from farm to factory production of food, but even these restored areas will have to be harvested from time to time.

*note: for those who may be curious, google Deer Overpopulation Problems in the US

markhawkman

Yeah, and this is why I am a member of "People Eating Tasty Animals". Population control is quite necessary.... and tasty.

lilchibiclari

People will still be raising livestock for gourmet cooking, or doing the occasional go-out-and-hunt-for-the-experience, but it will be because they want to, not because it's the only way to get the meat that they want to eat. I can see 80% of meat consumption being replaced by replicated/synthetic food, so there may be only about 1/4 as many cows being raised as we have today.

gulberat

I don't know...the extreme squeamishness and shock that Keiko reacted with, when Miles talked about how his family prepared and ate meat makes me think that on at least parts of 24th-century Earth, meat eating is viewed very badly.

This is obviously not true of all species, but it does make me think something happened with humanity's attitude towards meat eating.

brian334

That was a Hollywood nod to the Vegans who run California. Vegans may have good points about their diet, but no matter what, you still have to have a means of population control.

Ohh! New job in STO: Wildlife Neuterer. Your job is to go out into the woods and shoot every deer, rabbit, and pig you can find with a phaser set to stun, and then surgically render it sterile. (They tried Birth Control Pills, but the does kept leaving the little pink case in some buck's medicine cabinet.)

markhawkman

Meh, vegan diets are un-economical due to the cost. That might change in the future, but not for a while. I kinda wonder if the Keiko scene might have been more about the preparation and not the actual fact they ate meat. Lots of people who eat meat have never handled raw meat, and even more have never cut apart an animal to get meat.

gulberat

On population control, it would at least be nice to think that adoption and trap-neuter-release have sharply lowered the number of euthanized pets in the 24th century. Far too many cats and dogs die in shelters these days before they can find their forever home.

markhawkman

Actually, in some cases you're really better of shooting the excess cats and dogs. A lot of them are totally unsuitable as pets, and have ridiculous numbers of parasites. My family had an issue recently with a stray cat who decided she wanted to raise kittens under our porch.... I don't know how it is possible for a cat to survive with THAT many fleas.... ugh... it took a month to kill the fleas after the cat left. Oh and the cat left because our neighbor stole two of her kittens. those kitties got to go live on a farm, hopefully they will be friendlier than their mother. She's one of those cats who only interacts with people when she wants food and even then not much... and she rummages in garbage cans.

gulberat

Mark, trap-neuter-release is for the "unsuitables." Some TNR programs take the additional step (a very good one) of vaccinating the released animals in addition to spaying/neutering. That way if they can't be adopted, they can at least live out their natural lives without contributing further to pet overpopulation (and in countries with rabies, they can be vaccinated against rabies so as not to be a threat to humans in that way).

Come to think of it, 24th century sensors and transporter technology could really boost the effectiveness of a combined adoption/TNR approach as you're more assured of being able to actually get all of the ferals in an area and track any new arrivals. (That and that level of sensor tech plus microchipping would also greatly increase the number of lost pets returned to their owners. )

markhawkman

Yes, I know what TNR is. But also there is the fact that some animals are simply a nuisance, and neutering/vaccinating them won't fix that.... also there is no vaccine against fleas.

artan42

markhawkman wrote: »

also there is no vaccine against fleas.

You can beam them off the cat.​​

markhawkman

yeah, but their favorite spots to sleep usually have fleas too.

It's not that I generally dislike cats, but... I sometimes wonder why none of the people who write scripts for vampire or zombie movies have ever written a plot where fleas spread the curse of the undead.

legendarylycan

markhawkman wrote: »

yeah, but their favorite spots to sleep usually have fleas too.

It's not that I generally dislike cats, but... I sometimes wonder why none of the people who write scripts for vampire or zombie movies have ever written a plot where fleas spread the curse of the undead.

because vampires don't have fleas; that would be a werewolf thing

which actually raises an interesting question of whether or not fleas could contract and transmit lycanthropy​​

markhawkman

The idea I had was that the fleas don't necessarily turn, but they relocate infected blood.

legendarylycan

fleas can do the same with lycanthropy-tainted blood, especially if it's a strain that can be absorbed into the bloodstream through the skin

now there's an idea for a werewolf movie that's never been done before - a lycanthropic plague; instead of overgrown mosquitoes or brain-eaters, you get hordes of excessively hairy wolfmen​​

jorantomalak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmcEU5WwdcA

theraven2378

the human body has evolved to be omnivorous, there is no changing that

gulberat

theraven2378 wrote: »

the human body has evolved to be omnivorous, there is no changing that

I'm not disagreeing with that. Rather, though, I think there is a chance that 24th century humans have taken an ideology that disagrees with that fact. It doesn't represent my own opinion on what I think we should do. My concern goes no further than avoiding waste of meat, and keeping and slaughtering animals in humane conditions.

artan42

For the same reason we look for free range eggs rather than battery eggs now, I can see the future utilising replicated eggs instead, it's just more ethical.

Meat is trickier but if the population of cows is only small I can still see small local farms rather than large industrialised production.​​

nrobbiec

It does raise sociological questions I mean going off of direct quotes none of the elements of these foods would be replicated so theoretically humanity has evolved the most humane livestock practices possible - the idea of cloned animals is interesting - would this eliminate moral objections to eating meat? Evolved sensibility would presumably lead to their being no suffering of the animals.

I mean yeah, there's still the avenue for squeamishness in terms of handling and processing.

markhawkman

nrobbiec wrote: »

It does raise sociological questions I mean going off of direct quotes none of the elements of these foods would be replicated so theoretically humanity has evolved the most humane livestock practices possible - the idea of cloned animals is interesting - would this eliminate moral objections to eating meat? Evolved sensibility would presumably lead to their being no suffering of the animals.

I mean yeah, there's still the avenue for squeamishness in terms of handling and processing.

I don't have moral objections.... cows aren't people.

Sure, it's a good idea to kill things quickly and efficiently.... it makes the meat taste better. Seriously, that's part of why deer meat has a "gamey" taste. Granted it tastes kinda like that anyways, but it's worse if you had to run the deer down due to not making a clean kill.

mustrumridcully0

nrobbiec wrote: »

It does raise sociological questions I mean going off of direct quotes none of the elements of these foods would be replicated so theoretically humanity has evolved the most humane livestock practices possible - the idea of cloned animals is interesting - would this eliminate moral objections to eating meat? Evolved sensibility would presumably lead to their being no suffering of the animals.

I mean yeah, there's still the avenue for squeamishness in terms of handling and processing.

Cloned animals don't help at all, I think. The existing animals we use to eat now would not even exist if we didn't want to eat them. Heck, some livestock we have is so optimized for its tasks that they couldn't live without our assistance. Milk cows produce so much milk that without us milking them, they'd die. And many animals we slaughter for food would probably not survive in the wild for long (and certainly not in the numbers we create them).
(There is actually entire species of animals that are threatend by extinction nowadays because we breed them for a task but have since bred more efficient animal for that task. )

You need a source of meat that has no faculties for conciousness, pain or suffering. Basically artificially grown meat that grows more like a plant. (Except amybe not even a plant - plants can have awareness of their surrounding and experience their own forms of stress.)
Ideally this artificial meat would also be a lot less resource-intensive to grow and feed than real animals. Because we spend a lot of farmland to feed not ourselves directly, but the animals we want to eat later. This has also a high environmental impact, which isn't just problematic for some abstract concept of "nature", but because it's the environment we want to live in.

gulberat

One speculation I've engaged in in a story is the use of stem cells to grow only muscle tissue (i.e. meat) without the rest of the organism. IRL we are a very long way away from being able to do that so well that it would be an appealing food product, but who knows?

artan42

gulberat wrote: »

One speculation I've engaged in in a story is the use of stem cells to grow only muscle tissue (i.e. meat) without the rest of the organism. IRL we are a very long way away from being able to do that so well that it would be an appealing food product, but who knows?

It wasn't so bad apparently.​​

gulberat

Yeah, I'd heard we were in the baby stages of that technique, but getting to something that would earn kudos from skilled chefs will probably take a while. Not to mention the current problems with mass production. The latter will probably be overcome before the former, IMO.

They'll probably have to make sure they're including a bit of fat with the muscle tissue, among other things. (No, I'm not being sarcastic...that does contribute to flavor and texture.)

markhawkman

The real question is a matter of cost. Can they make it cheap enough for it to be commercially viable?

wombat140

theraven2378 wrote: »

the human body has evolved to be omnivorous, there is no changing that

Doesn't really make any difference whether it has or not; humans definitely can live healthily without meat (witness: large chunks of the population of India, for religious reasons), so the question is just whether they decide to or not. Anyway this thread is about characters who do eat meat and where they get it from.

Wild deer and so on already are culled and we aren't currently getting a major part of the world's meat supply from that. That doesn't mean they mightn't manage it better in the future though. (And export the culled wolves, rats and other "not proper meat" to the Klingons, who seem to have different ideas about what is and isn't "proper meat".)

Yes, cloning an entire animal would get you nowhere (except possibly being tidier, if you're talking about sci-fi style cloning i.e. growing the animal to adulthood in a tank), since you'd still have a living animal, complete with brain and central nervous system, killed at the end of the process. But cloning part of an animal would - no brain involved, hence no suffering because there'd be no-one to suffer. I could have sworn that growing isolated human organs for transplants was a thing in Star Trek, but I can't find any reference to it in the Memory Alpha wiki. If it was, then as Gulberat says, it would presumably be no problem extending that to animal organs or tissue - not just pure muscle cells, but a complete leg or kidney or whatever grown in isolation, complete with blood, fat and all the other things you'd find in a "real" one. For that matter there'd be no reason why you couldn't grow human tissue. Would anyone? I can see fried-cultured-human-kidneys-on-toast becoming a rite of passage among 25th-century medical students, anyway

The cost would depend on how efficient you could get the process - I suppose whatever nutrient solution or what-have-you you "feed" the growing organ on might be the main cost. (In the Trek universe you could probably replicate that at least, without spoiling the effect.) But you wouldn't have the substantial cost of feeding and housing an animal for months, so that would be offset against it. I love these discussions!

markhawkman wrote: »

I don't have moral objections.... cows aren't people.

If you're talking about in terms of being conscious/capable of thinking/suffering, then I'm afraid you're behind the current science. How many people here knew that the most complex bird language identified so far is actually domestic chickens'? I didn't until recently!

azniadeet

When any animal can pass a mary sue test, we can talk about giving that animal protected status.

Until then, they are things.