Grrl Power #1447 – Meat?
Fogo de Chão is my go-to for fancy restaurants. Birthdays, wanting to suffer from a delicious meat coma, other reasons… I’m sure there are some. It’s not really a Valentines Day place. Because the meat comas aren’t conducive to post-V-Day activities. Sure, you can go to other “fancier” steak places and spend $60 on an 8-ounce steak, or you can do churrascaria and get all you can eat amazing steak. The math works for me. It used to be my favorite thing to get there was the house special, Picanha, which is the “prime part of the top sirloin,” and don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic piece of meat, but over time, I migrated to the bottom sirloin. It’s like… a looser… weave? I like it. Go eat some.
There’s something wrong with that couch if flopping on one side of it makes you pop up all the way around the L-bend. Maybe it’s a single-piece inflatable couch. Oh! Maybe it’s a water-couch.
You know, if you had a machine that could just make quantumly-perfect meat, like, say you Star Trek style transported a cow, and kept it in the pattern buffer… I mean, kept a copy in the pattern buffer, then every once in a while, you energize just the ribeye part… it’d be perfectly ethical meat, right? It’d be just tissue. But beyond that, if could just make meat, I guess you’d have a library of pattern buffer meats you could print – why couldn’t you make other food? I don’t mean like, celery, I mean, couldn’t you invent food? Like, categories of food. Not meat or cheese or vegetables. Like cheese combined with… celery. NO! BAD IDEA! That would be absolutely… like… string cheese. Huh.
I know, food is just proteins and starches and sugars and all that, but surely you could make some food that’s like part ham and part avocado. Oh, geeze, that would be an upsetting texture. No, not some combo of two other foods, like a totally new kind of food. It would probably be hard to do, since most stuff you’d come up with would be either nutritionally inert or poisonous.
(The Cuisine Forge 5000 didn’t create meat from a pattern buffer, it transported meat… from sources. At random… It just worked at such an extreme range (measured in thousands of light years) that no on realized it for several years.)
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Here’s a question: would vat-grown pork be considered kosher, since it didn’t come from an actual pig?
For my part, I’m thinking of both beef AND pork being cloned in a repeating pattern of muscle cells surrounded by fat in a hexagonal honeycomb. Massive amounts of high quality, low cost, ethically sourced bacon AND wagyu beef!
That is likely going to depend on the Rabbi or Imam you ask. Apparently, that’s a matter of significant debate in the community, the answer will likely be based on whether you are Kosher because of religious observance, health, or tradition.
If you’re kosher for religious reasons, and this is a form of worship, then even cloned or lab grown meats from unclean animals would be avoided. Not eating unclean animals and avoiding other unclean practices is a matter of worship, not a practical one. (Pigs aren’t the only unclean animal. They’re just the most commonly discussed ones.)
However, many people argue that these purity laws were actually an early primer on sanitation and cleanliness. These laws were passed down as a way to stay healthy in a world where basic sanitation was not assured, and meats like pork could not always be properly cooked. So since replicated matter has no connection to the original, unclean animals, there is no risk of contamination. Therefore there’s no health reason to avoid pork, shellfish, reptiles, and other unclean animals.
As to the traditionalists: tradition is not logical, nor does it need to be. People follow tradition because that’s what their parents did. So those people will have to chart their own course when it comes to replicated foods. Some people won’t even let their video game characters eat unclean foods. Others will say “if it didn’t come from an actual pig, who cares?”
The usual answer to *any* question on Jewish law is “it depends”. That said, it is forbidden from *appearing* to violate the laws. So imitation bacon bits (which are usually soy) may not come from a pig, they *look* like actual bacon, and so are problematic.
I can understand Max’s preference for sirloin. It’s one of the, and I put this in heavy quotes here, “cheap” cuts of steak. A place that can do one well is usually worthy of praise.
That said, I prefer KC Strip.
Full on vegetarian here, no fishy half measures. Sydney’s reaction in the last would be exactly mine in that situation.
Pescetarian here… when I started skipping on meat intake, my taste slowly changed. A year in and pork or cow didn’t taste like something I wanted to eat anymore if I could avoid it. The same goes to any meat-free substitutes: If it tastes like meat, I dislike it now. (Chicken is bearable, if barely.)
Not a problem for you? Just curious, especially because it became a problem for me. Unexpectedly, I thought it would take some effort to avoid meat.
Sydney wouldn’t be able to resist if he offered synthesized filet mignon with very a very high Scoville value. Of course, why stop there?
You know you are eating a lot when the waiters at Fogo de Chão starting pointing at you to the other waiters…not me but my then 17yr old son. He did not understand the green/red pattern for 40 minutes, he just said yes every time. He had lost ~20 lbs from too much exercise, not enough intake and was finally reverting to form
With regard to churrascaria, there’s a lovely little card game out by Cheapass Games. Welcome to Carnespadas, the Brazilian Steakhouse of the damned. There is no menu, but waiters come by with meat on swords and ask if you would like some more. And you always want more.
It’s a press your luck game, where you’re trying to avoid a meat you’ve already had, hopefully filling up your competition with low-scoring cards. Very fun, cute art (it’s one of their Zombie games)
Erm… Max’s elbow in that robe looks uncomfortably like……
….Max’s comfortable elbow.
(*I* don’ wanna do laps until the end of time!)