Life imitates sports talk radio

It was LA, there were clones, and a Jungle looming in the background, but Jim Rome was nowhere to be seen. Instead:

The cloned steak was served medium rare.

Inside the unusually hushed atrium of Campanile, the guests lifted slices of beef onto their plates. Executive chef Mark Peel had prepared the porterhouse with fleur de sel and cracked black pepper before pan-searing it with a little canola oil — a simple preparation to highlight the meat's natural flavor.

It was the centerpiece of a dinner party convened to taste the future of food.

Fear and food are old friends. Cloned meat, for good reasons or bad, generates a public response not unlike what happens if you put carpaccio of monkey with five asses on the chalkboard as an appetizer special. So, in an effort to combat this reluctance, some folks in LA decided to put together a dinner party featuring a double-blind taste test of cloned and uncloned beef. As the article explains:

The cloned meat, provided by the Collins Cattle ranch in Frederick, Okla., was accompanied by corresponding cuts of conventional beef. All were prepared in identical fashion. Peel's idea was to conduct a double-blind taste test — a 21st century version of the Pepsi Challenge.

This is, as my father was fond of saying, a snare and a delusion, and the Pepsi Challenge analogy clarifies just why. People do not object to cloned food on gustatory grounds, but because the prospect, right or wrong, sketches them the hell out. To suggest that a taste test would allay these fears is a piece of moral sortilege worthy of an experienced three card monte dealer. By way of analogizing the analogy: if you turned a room full of fourth graders on a banana split made with BGH-treated milk, and a Vermonster made with BGH-free milk, you would learn absolutely nothing about the relative safety of BGH milk for children, unless the kids who ate the Sealtest all came in with Elviraesque* racks the next day. This, however, is not a guarantee that BGH is safe.

This  phenomenon of shunting moral questions of production into aesthetic questions of consumption is has been with us for at least a century. Notably, Upton Sinclair wrote a book about how large scale capitalism chews up families and spits them out. America read, then asked for and got rules designed to guarantee less icky sausage. This LAT experiment suggests that our moral horizons remain just about coterminous with the roofs of our  mouths.

On a brighter note, do you know what happens if you try to get Prince Paul, Wise, DBC, Daddy-O, Delite, Bobby Simmons and Frukwan to take the Pepsi Challenge? Listen and find out:

Stetsasonic, "Stet Troop 88" <i>In Full Gear</i> Tommy Boy, 1988

*Elvira + PETA? Who knew?