Hypothetical: Humans discover transdimensional portals and millions of possible, life-bearing worlds are open to us; any and every kind of animal or vegetable foodstuff you can possibly imagine, and many more you can’t imagine, are now readily available.
These foods may be subtly different from those we have on Earth Prime (e.g. peanuts that look and taste like peanuts, but have a different protein that doesn’t trigger peanut allergies).
Or they may be weirdly different from Earth Prime foods in any way you like - for example oranges that grow on a tree - definitely a plant in every sense, but when the fruits are opened, they contain pulled pork.
How do people with all kinds of dietary needs or restrictions react? (these dietary peculiarities may bereligious, allergenic, ethical, etc).
Some are a no-brainer, I think - for example, most lactose intolerant people are probably going to be OK with milk that comes from cows from Earth 1057 Delta, where lactose is absent from milk (naturally substituted by glucose or fructose or whatever); people with peanut allergies are probably going to be OK with none-allergenic peanuts.
But what about vegans/vegetarians vs meatberries?
What about Muslim or Jewish people vs [some animal that tastes exactly like bacon, but isn’t a pig]?
No need to frame the question so hypothetically. Genetically modified foods are real enough, as are lactose-free milk, in-vitro meat and vegetarian meat substitutes, etc.
I think it is pretty clear that if you find or engineer a variety of something (peanuts, strawberries, gluten) that you are not allergic to, you win, now you can eat some, assuming the years of it making you sick have not turned you off of it completely.
As for the religious questions, I am not qualified to answer them- for instance doesn’t halal/kosher meat need to be slaughtered? That would seem to rule out cultured meat, pig genes or no pig genes. Unless some sect rule that it isn’t really flesh?
ETA vaguely similar situation with vegetarians: now you don’t have an animal product, but it is still flesh, so they would not suddenly think it be healthy or love the taste, at best it might theoretically be cruelty-free and have a reduced environmental impact.
– I don’t actually know what the answers to that question would be. I am pretty sure of two things, however: !) there would be a lot of discussion 2) putting “answers” in the plural wouldn’t be a typo.
You may not consider the hypothetical necessary, but I do. It permits all sorts of scenarios such as:
[ul]
[li]Meat products that have no connection whatever to an animal origin - not even a biopsy taken from a domesticated cow or pig, for example - the meat just grew on a tree[/li][li]Animals whose flesh has the exact culinary properties of, say, pork, but do not have the morphological features that define them as pigs[/li][/ul]
Almost every possible carbon-based consumable likely has (or will have) a sect that bans it. And every religious restriction generates cheats and workarounds. People are like that. So yes, we’ll engineer non-allergenic and non-animal analogs to suit both physical and spiritual requirements.
Hey Xians, try this: Take an alleged physical relic of Jesus. Extract and cultivate His DNA; add to communion wafers and wine. Then you really WILL consume His flesh and blood! Hallelujah!
Alcohol is off-limits for Muslims, Mormons, and Teetotalers. But all sugars are chemically alcohols; believers ignore that. So let’s engineer a non-sugar, non-alcohol head-fucking beverage. Mescaline beer is tempting. If all intoxicating substances are off-limits, go with stroboscopes or direct neural stimulation. Wire me up.
Pig meat is off-limits to Jews, Muslims, and Vegans. Infect a target planet’s biosphere with porcine DNA that invades every living thing. The whole planet is then a no-go zone. But how to keep Scientologists away?