Over the weekend, famed atheist Richard Dawkins had a novel suggestion for the future: eating human meat.
Dawkins was responding to a story in the Independent which described “clean meat,” or, in other words, meat grown in laboratories made from stem cells harvested from living cattle.
Josh Tetrick, CEO of clean meat manufacturer JUST, had told CNN that the first items could be available to consumers for human consumption “before the end of 2018.” He told The Guardian that the path to public acceptance of cultured meat is obstructed by “gnarly problems, communication issues, regulatory issues.”
The Independent reported, “But one recent study revealed one third of Americans would be willing to eat clean meat regularly or as a replacement for farmed meat. To reach that point, companies will have to bring down the cost of mass production.”
In 2014, the animal rights activists at PETA offered $1 million to the first scientist to produce and sell in vitro chicken meat.
But Dawkins envisions himself as more far-seeing than everyone else. Hence this tweet: