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MEAT, MYSELF AND I
Everyone is slamming my ‘human meat’ programme – but they’d think again if they knew why I did it, says Gregg Wallace
YOU may have seen the programme I presented on Channel 4 on Monday night called The British Miracle Meat.
If you did I imagine you may have been shocked and maybe even appalled.
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If you didn’t, then let me tell you about it.
It was a look at a new food production company called Good Harvest, an innovative operation which is pioneering “engineered human meat”.
Donors are paid by the company to have a small piece of their flesh removed from their body.
Good Harvest chief executive Tamara Ennett described the operation as “pain subjective”.
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The donor’s sample is genetically grown in a lab to create a much larger piece of protein made from human cells, which is then packaged and sold in supermarkets.
At Le Gavroche, his Michelin-starred restaurant in London’s Mayfair, my old mate Michel Roux Jr, cooked up three different succulent human tissue steaks for a blind taste test.
We had a lot of questions.
Would people from different parts of the country taste different?
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Would a beer-fed Geordie produce the same sort of meat as someone from down South?
But after eating one of the steaks, an impressed Michel declared: “That’s just the sort of meat that I would serve here.”
The most tender meat came from flesh taken from children, who Good Harvest kept in a special facility at their factory.
This allowed them to create a special premium product called Toddler Tartare.
With the cost-of-living crisis meaning food prices are constantly on the rise, doesn’t this new miracle meat offers shoppers good quality protein at a bargain price?
Now, having just read all this you might well be thinking: “Whoa, Gregg, have you gone off your rocker? Eat human meat? That’s horrible!”
Well, before you start firing off a letter of complaint to Channel 4, I’ll let you in on a little secret.
Nothing in the show was as it seemed. In fact, the whole thing was made up.
It was inspired by satirical essay A Modest Proposal, written by Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift in 1729.
Beer-fed Geordie
In it, Swift said the poor of Ireland should sell their children to the rich as food.
He was deliberately saying something extreme to highlight a real problem.
And like Swift’s essay, our programme was a wild satire — but it also provokes interesting thoughts about the future of food.
While it was a complete fantasy, we wanted to raise important questions about the nation’s relationship with food and what those struggling with the cost of living are being asked to do in order to stay afloat.
The programme makers consulted with experts to make sure what we were saying reflected what is actually happening and didn’t wander into the realms of science fiction.
Scientists in the US have already come up with the concept of a “grow your own” kit, where it would be possible to create a steak from cells scraped from the inside of your own cheek.
The creation of synthetic meats is an area of huge scientific research, with millions being invested in it.
More and more “fake meat” products are filling our supermarket shelves every day.
Advances such as this raise a load of fascinating moral questions.
Some might argue that if it didn’t exploit the poor, meat grown from human flesh could be the most ethical there is.
Synthetic meat
The individual has chosen to donate the meat, unlike animals who, let’s be honest, don’t have a lot of say in the matter, so it’s been produced without suffering or exploitation.
In that case would vegetarians be happy to eat it? No animals have died to produce it, so why not?
And returning to the cost-of-living issue, if synthetic meat is the cheapest available (even if it is grown from human flesh), would that trump any squeamishness you might have about how it has been made?
There are lots of things we can all do to reduce waste and make the money we do spend on food go further.
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We can stop eating snacks and processed foods, teach our children to cook at school, and plan our meals and supermarket trips every week.
And if we don’t start to tackle the cost of food and eat more healthily, then this programme — and the prospect of human meat on the menu — might not seem so far-fetched after all.
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