Hard to Swallow
Charles Strohmer
July 1, 2000
It is difficult perhaps impossible, to overstate the importance of food. Eating, after all, is a quintessentially human activity. Sure, all life forms, in one way or another, get nutrients and energy from outside themselves. But only people have transformed nutritive consumption into such a varied, elaborate, and ritualistic process. Feasts and fasts are central to most every religion and culture. And since having something to eat is a frontrunner for the most basic human requirement, we need not climb much higher on the hierarchy of needs to realize that what we eat is critically important. So when we talk about life-changing and life-shaping technological advances, food—the stuff that we ingest, and that becomes us—takes center stage in our hopes and fears. Case in point: at the end of the nineteenth century, the advent of refrigerated rail cars made large-scale processing, packing, and distribution of meat possible. Suddenly East Coast city-dwellers were able to dine on beef and pork that had been killed weeks earlier and thousands of miles away. It was an unsettling prospect for people who'd grown up eating meat that had been butchered recently and locally. It just seemed wrong. So people reacted, and a significant protest arose as concerned citizens demanded the right to know just what they were feeding their families. Eventually the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and variety offered by technology won out. Today, it's actually the idea of eating fresh-killed meat that sets many of our stomachs to churning. Today we are on the cusp of another revolution in food, as genetic technology promises to open up vast new opportunities and unknowns in the food industry. As with all potentially sweeping technologies, ...
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