Kalefa Sanneh

Sometimes we need to develop new taboos or new rules, right?

You're living in a world where, like, sex leads to pregnancy, and then all these birth control technologies come in.

And then you've got to re-figure out your rules and your taboos around sex, which we're, you know, still in the process of doing.

Yeah.

In this case, would it be possible to still respect people's bodies and not eat people's bodies, even if we're eating lab-grown meat that sort of tastes...

the way someone's body would taste.

I suspect maybe this is a cop-out.

Can I give you a cop-out answer?

Yeah.

So one cop-out answer is maybe we didn't evolve to find the taste of humans that delicious and so that when we're comparing different kinds of lab meat, we're going to be drawn to things that are a little bit more like the kinds of things that humans have traditionally eaten.

I will tell you, unfortunately, so these people... Is this going to be a version of the New Yorker cartoon where the doctor says to the pig, it's your ribs, I'm afraid they're delicious?

What does that mean, the intended purpose of the practice?

But it's hard to separate tastiness from the stories we tell us, right?

Just like the label on a bottle of wine is going to affect the way it tastes to people.

If you have all this buildup and all this ritual and all this symbolic meaning, maybe the human body starts to taste delicious the same way a communion wafer might taste delicious to a believer.

I also think that there's reason to imagine that we might have evolved not to find humans tasty.

In general.

Right, right, right.

I like the idea that you'd respond to this kid with this question the way we often respond to kids, which is by telling them something that's sort of mainly true.

True but incomplete.