In the not so distant future, meat isn’t really a thing anymore, at least not meat from animals.
Cultured meat is grown in a vat and never involves creating anything that could be mistaken for a brain. Even edible plant parts are routinely produced by cellular culture, simply because it’s cheaper, easier, and more flexible. After all, why grow a banana tree when all you need is the banana? The feedstock for these cultures consists largely of single-celled algae powered by the sun.
The DNA of these cells is, of course, directly engineered, making them streamlined and more efficient, to the point that they could not live as an independent organism anyhow. Your beef not only never had a brain, but doesn’t even have the DNA to code for one.
Meat from animals isn’t strictly illegal, but is nearly so. Its production and consumption is culturally unacceptable among all but the most conservative or deviant. The required farming and slaughter is considered cruel and barbaric, even more so than, say, hunting deer is seen by many today. Animal-welfare laws quite intentionally make it prohibitively expensive or just plain impossible (think foie gras) to produce meat from animals. Like I said, not really a thing anymore.
With this as the background, the sort of people who are vegans today still exist, but in the form of no-cell advocates. True to their name, they refuse to eat anything made up of once-living cells, instead subsisting on fully-synthetic food created by nanotech-assisted chemistry, lacking DNA or even cell walls. It’s organic material, of course, which is all we really need to live.
The reasons given for no-cell are all over the place, including stated concerns about the ability of cells to suffer, the evils of genetic engineering, and of course, alleged health benefits. Since it’s somewhat more difficult and expensive to maintain this lifestyle, it has become a status symbol; a mark of wealth and culture, of both physical and ideological purity. The President of North America, for example, does not lower herself to consume cells.
No-cell food is referred to by many labels, including no-cell, but the standard marketing is to call it inorganic.
There’s not enough here for a story, but it looks like good background material. Since I’m not making any use of it, and since you can’t copyright ideas (especially those as obvious as this one), I’m making it freely available for you to steal.
Attribution welcome but not required.
