What is the most exotic dish you've ever had in a fancy restaurant? Crickets? Eel? Maybe beef testicles?
In the future, restaurants using lab-grown meat technology are going to offer much crazier dishes: can you imagine yourself ordering a steak made out of mammoth meat? Moreover – how do you feel about the idea of eating your wife? Or even yourself?
If trying out new food is your thing, you’re going to love the crazy gourmet dishes of the future!
What is gourmet food?
The word gourmet comes from the French term for a wine broker. Gourmet is a cultural ideal associated with the culinary arts of fine food and drink. What defines gourmet food is its uniqueness – mainly its ingredients, which are usually rare and expensive.
Over the year, the gourmet food trends have changed constantly: from foie gras, caviar, and escargot, to sushi and fusion cuisine - people in the fine dining industry are always looking for the next rare thing.
While recently it might have seem like we’ve already seen everything and there is no more room for innovation, in reality we are on the verge of several interesting developments in the fine dining industry.
The rise of the clean meat
Lab grown meat (or “clean meat”) is expected to be the greatest food revolution of our time. This groundbreaking technology enables producing meat without the need for slaughtering any animals. It is done by taking animal cells, turning them into strips of muscles and then combining them to make a burger patty or even a whole steak.
While it will probably take several long years before lab grown meat becomes a common thing, there is already a big buzz around this idea and many entrepreneurs are starting to come up with some very interesting ideas that are based on it.
The most trivial and obvious concept is the vegan friendly steak house. For many vegans, the essence of their diet is simply to avoid harming animals. As the making of lab grown meat doesn’t involve any animal suffering (including the animal that provides the cells for the process) eating lab grown meat could become a legit vegan option. Sure, many vegans will be disgusted by the idea of eating meat, no matter how it was produced, but many other will be a great target audience for these futuristic restaurants.
But it’s not only about vegans. Take foie gras for example – it’s considered to be one of the most sadistic dishes in the world, as making it involves a cruel goose force-feeding process. With the new clean meat technology, we will be able to produce dishes like foie gras without any cruelty.
A real Paleolithic restaurant
In a world where we have the option to create a meat from tissue cells – why settle on existing animals? Several projects around the world are working nowadays on the resurrection of several prehistoric animals, including the woolly mammoth, little bush moa, the passenger pigeon, the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger – all of them have the potential to become the next the next big culinary thing.
Prehistoric theme restaurants could become a huge successes – especially when taking into account the growing popularity of the paleo diet, in which the main idea is to eat similarly to how prehistoric men ate.
A human steak
Several months ago, Professor Richard Dawkins, author of the book The Selfish Gene, tweeted a surprising question:
What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism? An interesting test case for consequentialist morality versus “yuck reaction” absolutism.
As weird as it may sound, the idea of eating human meat might become generally accepted. After all, there are no technical limitation for using the same lab-grown technology in order to create human meat.
While studies have shown that human meat is not very nutritious, there are probably many people that would like to break this big taboo and discover whether human meat actually tastes like chicken.
But it gets even weirder: the source of the human cells used in order to grow the meat could be anyone. So, for example you could find yourself one day in the future eating a burger that is made out of your own meat. Another wild example could be a romantic candle light dinner in which a couple eats each other. Who knows, maybe the biggest trend will be to eat meat made out of the cells of celebrities, like a Donald Trump burger or Beyoncé nuggets.
Extra-terrestrial food
The gourmet food of the future might even come from outer space. Europa is the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter. It has the smoothest surface of any known solid object in the Solar System, which led scientists to the hypothesis that a water ocean may exist beneath it.
As water are the fundamental basis for life, Europa is considered by many scientists to have the highest potential for extra-terrestrial life on our solar system. In 2022 a flyby mission called Europa Clipper is expected to be launched to explore Europa, and another lander mission is planned for several years after. The goal of these missions is mainly to find life - not necessarily intelligent or complex life forms, but more like simpler one.
If indeed one day we will find extra-terrestrial life on Europa, or anywhere else in the galaxy, there is a good chance that they will also reach our futuristic restaurant’s menu, as there are plenty of people that would love to try food from outer space, and all we will need are few cells of these lifeforms in order to generate similar meat.
The day chefs will play god
But even in the case that we will never find life outside of earth, there is still one more crazy option for the concept gourmet dishes of the future –inventing a new type of meat. With the use of genetic engineering technology, there is almost no limit for what we can create: from combining two different types of meat like veal and pork, to the creating of a brand new type of species just for culinary purposes.
Ever dreamed on eating a unicorn? How about dragon wings? In a world where a chef can create whatever kind of meat they want, we can't even imagine what will be the next big gastronomic thing.
In conclusion
The lab-grown meat technology is going to have huge impact on our eating habits, in a way that is hard to comprehend - especially when it comes to exclusive gourmet dishes. Some people will love it, and some will probably be disgusted by it but one thing is for sure: less animals will get hurt.