Today’s DayPage is a FreeForm monologue by Rex Latchford: You can left or right click on the link below, or use the player widget if your device supports it. See a partial transcript below.
http://daypage.net/ar/DayPage~2013-08-06~Chicken_Little_vs_Artificial_Beef.mp3
The following rush transcript may contain errors and/or omissions…August 6th: Chicken Little vs. Artificial Beef
Well, the [electric] cattle-prod [that producer Mincka uses to wake me up in the morning] seems to be working, and it’s time for another DayPage. Gus Mason is ripping it up in Studio 2A. He’s been DJ’ing all morning playing some great tunes for you [on Radio InfoWeb’s live stream]. And yes, it’s Tuesday, and time for my infinite battle with time where each day, I come into the studio and give you a slice of the day. Today I’ll be serving up a slice of some artificial things.
It’s like a disease that can’t be cured. The old stories crept back into the news today. Looking at the Washington Post, just purchased by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, we see familiar stories:
Al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri is said to have ordered a terrorist attack. Intercepted communications led to a travel alert, embassy closures; Americans told to leave Yemen. But as we mentioned yesterday, that could just be a way to excuse all the snooping by the NSA and say: “See? We really need to snoop all your phone calls and all your Internet activity.”
And, a Drone kills 4 alleged al-Qaeda members in Yemen. We sure know how to make friends, don’t we?
Also in the famous founder department, Scientists say cultured meat could help feed the planet and help solve environmental problems. A five-ounce burger patty — which cost more than $330,000 to produce and was paid for by Google co-founder Sergey Brin — arrived under a silver dome and was promptly put onto a pan to sizzle with a dab of butter and a splash of sunflower oil. The smells that drifted off toward the audience (a few invited journalists and scientists) were subtle but unmistakably meaty.
Next came the tasting. Besides Post, only two people were allowed to have a bite of the test-tube burger: Josh Schonwald, the American author of “The Taste of Tomorrow,” and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutritional scientist. Both said the burger tasted “almost” like a conventional one. No one spat the meat out; no one cringed.
Rützler gave the chef an appreciative nod. “It’s close to meat, but it’s not as juicy,” she said. “I was expecting the texture to be more soft. The surface was surprisingly crunchy.” She added: “I would have said if it was disgusting.” Schonwald said the product tasted like “an animal protein cake.”
Speaking of diseases, as we did at the start of this DayPage, I’m reminded of a science fiction story that involved “Chicken Little” — a large cancerous blob of chicken meat the size of a giant building. It fed the world. Which came first? Chicken little or the burger?