Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Interesting question...when animals are so valuable that owning one is such a necessity that people buy fakes if needed, I'd say that people would be vegetarian of necessity.

I'm pretty sure Mercerism means that eating meat would be seen as un-empathetic. Which I find interesting. In my own life, I have chosen to live a lifestyle in which animals must be killed so I can eat. I try to pay attention to whether animals killed for my food suffer first, but I don't always follow through on that. I definitely try to avoid food which had to suffer so that it can be more tasty, so, basically, veal. I don't really consider myself un-empathetic.

DADOES has this weird covetous fetishism almost for live animals. They're valuable because they're endangered, because they're rare, and because you can use them to prove what a good person you are, and how well you're doing financially. It's all packed in to it.

I assume that there would be some kind of synthetic meat, because killing animals seems to be highly taboo or illegal.

I like the empathy theory but I have to admit, I just assumed that there was synthetic meat in this version of the future. Plus, with the dust, you wouldn't want to eat anything that may have been exposed to the dust or had been eating the dust...

Even if people are vegetarians, other animals aren't. You can keep a dog on a well balanced vegetarian diet, but if you do it to a cat, it'll become malnourished. However, given how expensive animals are, a can of Fancy Feast would have to cost its weight in gold, which is impossible since cats are mentioned as an economical choice for pets. The only possible explanations are, (A) Dick didn't put enough thought into the setting, or (B) they have a way of making synthetic meat.

Aren't the android bodies so close to human flesh as to be nearly indistinguishable from human bodies? If so, then by definition, android technology demonstrates that they can manufacture meat.

But that really bothered me; if they could make androids so close to humans so that they only really lacked empathy and some other signifier only found in bone marrow, then couldn't they at least manufacture animals which don't normally exhibit empathy themselves? Why jump straight to artificial human replicants when you could profit mightily by growing animals that could fool just about anyone, unlike the mechanical pseudo-animals? There are plenty of real organisms that don't live more than a handful of years, including large dog breeds, so the short lifespans of android animals wouldn't give them away.

I think most of what bothers me about the story comes down to my modern expectations of internally consistent world building, which seemed to be entirely optional for a rather longish period of sci-fi history.

I wouldn't eat electric meat if they made the entire creature, because so much of the same reasoning would apply. The environmental impact argument would be erased, though, I suppose (I don't remember any details on the manufacturing process). I do have to say, though, that people would be the last thing a ruined planet would want more of.

Plus, I don't think I would like it. Beef smells kinda nasty to me. But I really miss prosciutto.

In a world where animals are so rare, wouldn't eating meat become the ultimate extravagance, something the super-rich would do because they can? Like massive ostentatious weddings that get reported in Hello.

I agree with Andrew, eating real meat would be the sort of thing the 0.01 percent might do for display purposes. I've heard, for example, that in the day of drugs like Viagra, many folks in places like Vietnam will drink powdered rhino horn in their wine not because of its reputation as an organic ED drug, but to show off their wealth because rhino horn so expensive.

Maybe all the rich people who can afford meat are on Mars.

Caitlin wrote: "Maybe all the rich people who can afford meat are on Mars."

Good point. Because Mars was just off in the background, and we never saw life there directly, I kept forgetting that the people living on Earth were in many ways an underclass, those left behind when the wealthy, replicant-owning people and those serving them fled. All this jostling for status via animals is a jostling between those who are already near the bottom of the social hierarchy, and how they treat animals probably reflects that.

In the middle ages eating peacock was a status symbol.
It fell out of fashion. Just because you can eat it does’t meant that you will. As far a conspicous displays of wealth- Fresh fruit would be more valuable (both on and off planet). Try buying a banana on Mars.

“Tell em� I’m eating�
What wrong with a good bowl of noodles?