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Another Immodest Proposals salon last night. The topic was "The Kosher Pig, and other Bioengineered Foods". This is a topic name I came up with while drunk at the last topic brainstorming night, and I've spent some time since then trying to convince freeradical42 that it was a mistake. The kosher pig itself is not an interesting topic, because there's very little to say about it if you are a Jew, and even less to say if you're not a Jew. freeradical42 thought it was an eyegrabbing title that could segue into a more general discussion of the future of GMO and other bioengineered food in terms of ethics, economic and environmental impact, and food culture.

The night proved us both right. We did get at least one Jewish first time participant who expected the conversation to revolve more around the kosher pig, and there were moments in the conversation where it felt to a degree like participants were a bit hamstrung by the topic. There were other food ethics-related things people wanted to talk about, but if they spent too much time on it they felt self-conscious about topic drift. The conversation was a little choppy, a little uneven. The roadmap felt off.

That didn't stop the discussion from being fascinating, though.

We began by playing around with ethical rules for food consumption. How do we weigh the importance of food being cheaply available to those in need against the importance of not doing harm to the environment, against concern for the welfare of food animals? We discussed different rubrics different kinds of vegetarians adopt for determining whether the pain of animals is a problem for them, from Peter Singer's "anything that experiences pain as much or more than a fish" to freeradical42's "anything that possesses the neuronal correlates of empirically observed empathy/theory of mind", neither of which I found entirely convincing. The former is completely arbitrary. The latter gets me because I'm not sure I understand what 'empathy' is and why we should prioritize it.

Nonetheless, these attempts at definition were important as we moved into later parts of the discussion. As we looked at present food technology and possible future food technology, it was useful though not conclusive to ask whether these technologies would meet the standards we had proposed earlier in the evening. So that when I drunkenly mooted the idea of the 'planimal', part part and part animal, to try to pin down where vegetarianism might draw the line between them, someone offered up the reduction "a plant that can demonstrate empathy".

The planimal sort of became a recurring conversational point for me, though I'm not entirely sure where I was heading with it. In the light of morning I offer these synopses with some structure, but the truth is these conversations are always messier than they appear in them. People are figuring out what they think as they talk, through back and forth, through socratic investigation, through thought experiments and argument. I think there's something interesting in this plant/animal line because there was considerable consensus that the ethical rules for the treatment of plants is very different from the ethical rules for the treatment of animals, notwithstanding a few jokes about triffids and "Carrot Juice is Murder".

For example, despite the fact that plants move away from negative stimuli, nobody considered this to be a pain impulse worth being considerate of. Our conversation on the ethics of eating and engineering plants talked about environmental impact, caloric and economic costs, taste, but when someone suggested that the Monsanto 'terminator gene' deprived plants of their biological imperative to procreate, this theory was dismissed very, very quickly. So where is the line, what amount of consciousness of sapience or sentience do we require to start thinking about a foodstuff in terms of their needs instead of merely on their impact?

My point with this, I believe now, is that whatever line we may have drawn in the past is going to need to be redrawn in light of bioengineering potentialities. We spent a lot of time talking about engineering lab-grown meat that wouldn't feel pain, but it seems possible to me that one might want to reengineer lifeforms that don't feel pain so that they now do: Pain serves as an important alarm system for higher lifeforms. It might be useful to create plants that sound such an alarm when they are attacked by bugs, or when they are low on nutrients. But I didn't quite reach this thesis last night.

We spent more time on the engineering tradeoffs involved in creating meat, and food generally, in industrial farming. Do you breed for richness of taste, or do you breed for mass production? Does grass-fed beef taste better, or is that a psychologically implanted illusion? How much animal suffering are we willing to tolerate if it means the hungry of humanity will eat well? How much tinkering with the genome will we tolerate if it means nutrient-rich rice to feed the starving?

I led us down a sidetrack once again as people started to explore the relationship of vegetarianism to 'progress' and a progress narrative. There were some appeals to ideas of primitivism ("Back in the day, people lived in tribes where eating or not eating that cow was the difference between living or dying.") that I wanted us to steer away from as much as possible, so I questioned the relevance of a progress narrative. I'm not sure I see how vegetarianism is more evolved, a representation in any way of a more perfected human ethics, and I wanted to see how people approached the idea. There were some interesting points made, about how reduction in scarcity has given people, particularly in the more affluent parts of society, freedom to make choices based on principles other than survival.

Um... we also talked about many other things. I probably ought to take notes if I want to accurately report what happened.