Greetings from my Ann Arbor basement lair, dear VIP readers. Kevin and Sarah are graciously handling the Morning Briefing duties for me this week while I spend time with the family, but I will still be providing some content. Hard-hitting content, like expressing a decided preference for eating either bugs or lab-grown meat.
Spoiler: I will not be doing any research tastings for this column.
My colleagues Catherine and Jamie have each mentioned the bug stuff recently, which got me thinking about a future where the Democrats have killed all of the burger places because they hate good things and fun.
As a voracious consumer of science fiction books, movies, and television series, I see lab-grown meat come up a lot these days. Just the phrase "lab-grown meat" is enough to put me off of it. For some reason, I feel that seeing how the sausage is made in a laboratory would be worse than seeing how actual sausage is made. I have a lot more faith in the random Kielbasa King than Doctor von Wurstencreepin, who spends half his day giving cancer to rats.
Here's the thing about the bugs: Way back in the 20th century, when almost everything I watched on television was still in black and white, I was a little boy. That was also before the invention of the helicopter parent. We were raised by parents who deliberately worked on minimizing our free-time exposure to them. We were young, practically feral, and outside a lot.
Bugs were always on the menu in the world of young American boys. And none of us had cricket sensitivities or anything like that.
Now, I want to be clear that I don't want to be forced into eating government-mandated dung beetle stew by the hippie climate-alarm terrorists. The Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu rules were perfect examples of how I react when the government insists upon a lifestyle change. I work from home and rarely interact with the public; my life is lockdown. But once all levels of government were telling me that I had to stay home, I couldn't wait to get outside, and I headed for the door.
Did ever get COVID? No, I did not. It was probably all of those bugs I ate as a kid that helped build my immune system.
On Monday's episode of Five O'Clock Somewhere, my co-host and fellow Sci-Fi enthusiast, Stephen Green, expressed his aversion to the idea of lab-grown meat, especially after once hearing that "sheets of meat" could be produced in a lab. Seriously, the fake meat people don't do themselves any favors with their descriptions.
Even though I've been spoiled by living in the Grocery Store Age, I still have the primal instinct to hunt or forage for food. I spent my formative years in a small mountain town in Arizona, and killing one's dinner was not unheard of. We moved there when I was only 11, so I'm sure that some insects must have coursed through my digestive tract during all the time we spent in the woods during the summer.
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For the moment, I think that the best plan is to eat as many steaks and burgers as I can. In fact, when this latest Michigan trip began last week, I kicked it off with a two-day burger spree at some great local places. FIGHT THE POWER.
If I should end up living on a space station where hunting and foraging can't happen, I'll pass on the sheets of meat, thank you. Give me a protein shake for sustenance and get to work on synthesizing a variety of hoppy beers, lab geeks.
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