Rick Monteverde wrote:
Well, let's start with KJ ("mad cow") and go on from there. There's
something wrong with eating your own stuff. There's genes in there. Code for
proteins that don't fold properly. Other stuff. Yuck. In fact eating pork
(chimpanzee, etc.) might have similar drawbacks due to the genetic
similarities.
DNA is destroyed by cooking. However, there are cautions about eating
meat from animals with cancer, so perhaps there is something to this.
If HIV transmitted to humans from eating primates, I suspect it came
during hunting or the preparation of the meat, rather than the
eating. Chickens infected with bird influenza are a threat to people
working with live birds and in food preparation, but once the meat is
cooked there is no danger of infection.
The other source of fear starts when the government takes over a large
component of the economy and your life, like oh, say healthcare for
instance. Maybe eventually the food supply too since your health depends on
what you eat, and the government is responsible for that, times become real
hard etc., so it follows logically.
U.S., European and the Japanese governments has been regulating food
preparation and ensuring purity in food and drugs for all of recorded
history. Laws from the 13th century to ensure pure bread and beer are
still on the books. European beer bottles advertise the fact. In the
U.S. colonial period and early 19th century, laws regulating food and
lodging were far more intrusive than they are now. Not only did they
specify the exact dollar amount any hotel could charge, they
regulated the menu as well.
People think that the government is more intrusive in modern times,
but in fact it is far less intrusive toward individuals, albeit more
toward corporations. In Colonial New England, the government took
children away from their parents when the parents did not teach them
to read by age 6, or did not bring them to church. In New England, in
the 1840s it was against the law for men to have beards, and a crowd
nearly beat to death a man and held him in jail for months for
defying that. In 1920 my grandmother was arrested for wearing a
bathing suit on the street on Long Island. The government interfered
in people's sex lives and the use of contraceptives into the 1960s.
We are now living in the golden age of self determination, free
market competition, and freedom from government interference.
- Jed
