Pine Nuts with McAvoy Layne: We are what we eat
Submitted by Jeff Munson on Tue, 04/18/2023 - 9:02am
If we are what we eat, well, today we can become a previously extinct prehistoric animal that nobody has seen for thousands of years. Yes the Aussies have created a humongous meatball made entirely of wooly mammoth meat grown in a laboratory.
No one has yet dared to try a forkful of this delicacy, for fear he might start growing toenails a foot and a half long, then start scratching an itchy ear with that foot. Imagine having an itchy ear, and accidentally removing that ear with a 5,000-year-old foot.
Or maybe growing a three-foot tail to get caught in the car door.
Without any takers, and not ready yet to replace the hotdog in Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4th, Australia’s mammoth meatball remains on display at a science museum.
When I was a kid, we would sometimes call a windy politician a, “meatball.” I don’t hear that epithet anymore, I suppose it’s too mild, but it might be coming back into vogue with the arrival of the Wooly Mammoth Meatball. I would not like to be called a Wooly Mammoth Meatball, but it could happen.
The ungetaroundable fact is, we are going to have to start engineering our food in a lab or starve. Cultured meat will not require land or water, and, will be resistant to pollution.
I confess to having always wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records, and I thought once I might make it, after I became the first clown diver in the world to miss the pool and land on his feet, but they didn’t believe me at Guinness, and I didn’t have the video. However, that door was opened again by the possibility of my becoming the first person in the world willing to subsist entirely on Wooly Mammoth Meatballs. Then that door was closed by a friend who reminded me that the Wooly Mammoths died from climate change.
But were I a chicken, and could write in chicken-scratch, (some say I do) I would be holding up a chicken-scratch sign today that would read, “Eat Engineered Chicken! Maybe McDonalds is already doing that and not telling us.
There is some good news that comes with the arrival of an engineered chicken. Now when we are asked, “Which came first the chicken or the engineered egg?” Well, we should know the answer. And it now occurs to me to ask AI’s Bard, “Which came first the chicken or the egg?” but I digress.
Why not treat plastic with a protein so it will taste good, then treat that plastic with pepsin and other powerful enzymes to make it digestible. That way, we could come home from the grocery store, unload the groceries, then sit down and eat the plastic bags. Well, I might make it into the Guinness Book of World Records yet if I can just pull that one off. Onward and upward!
Hope to see you at MarkTwainDays.com.
— For more than 30 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American."
Go here for the spoken word version of this and other columns and here for McAvoy's new book, "Living Twice: How Chautauqua Can Give You Another Life." In the book, McAvoy explains how Chautauqua is returning as a force in education and entertainment.
