Next step: sustainable human steak?
They don’t mention the “sustainable” word, but you know they want to. Right from the start, they’re selling it to us:
Not to mention the spiritual questions and the mental health issues. Who knows? Relatives might feel a bit miffed if Aunty Betty was carved up for canapes and offered up to the crowd at the local alcoholic’s shelter.
Welcome to dystopia. We can devalue human lives, but think of the cows we’ll save!
And the Culture War continues
Tut. Tut. Tut. New Scientist gently chides us for being the sort of modern prejudiced people who think cannibalism is taboo. It’s just your colonial roots that do that to you, right?
If you don’t like cannibals, you are just a racist:
Our aversion has been explained in various ways. Perhaps it is down to the fact that, in Western religious traditions, bodies are seen as the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or maybe it is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation. These came to represent the “other” to Western societies – and revulsion towards cannibalism became a tenet of their moral conscience.
Once human bodies are reduced to being meat to feed the poor, euthanasia is almost a gift to the world, really. And science is just, well, one of many ideologies, not something special.
The New Scientist output is just another article chipping away at the pillars of Western Civilization. The fact they don’t even consider pollutants and diseases, nor the soul-sapping mental health issues, is just embarrassing for a supposedly “scientific” magazine.