In the climactic scene of Soylent Green, the 1973 Malthusian sci-fi flick, Charlton Heston realizes the cheap government-provided processed food being fed to the poor is made of ... human corpses. His on-screen horror reverberated in audiences of the time: "Ugh!" we all cried, "How revolting." Those were the days: Computers were the size of your kitchen, calculators the size of shoeboxes; the height of medical experimentation was the heart transplant. And viewers were grossed out by the idea of indigents biting into dry crackers made of the dead.
How quaint it now seems. This year moviegoers have devoured the gorily realistic depiction of cannibalism in Hannibal. And every day, from every direction, come stories of genuine rather than fictional horrors. Not the usual nastiness -- famine, child abuse, battlefield atrocities -- but really original stomach churners: cloned sheep ageing at twice the normal rate, human ears mounted on the backs of mice, cloned pigs with human lungs and livers. Some of these stories are only theoretically horrible. Others are pressingly so: Mad cows, poisoned by the cheap processed flesh of other cows, lurch across European farmyards. Now Parkinson's sufferers are twitching with freakish new palsies produced, scientists say, by the dead baby tissue implanted in their brains that was supposed to cure them.
It's awful -- yet, really, why should anyone be surprised?
We are living in a time when utilitarian rationalism has triumphed over our atavistic "ugh" reflex -- a time when high-sounding motives have all but silenced that crucial inner twinge, that involuntary repugnance we cannot fully explain. We don't know where we got our fear of snakes, for example, or reluctance to eat blue foods, but these are instincts that God or nature was wise enough to breed in us for our own protection. Likewise, we don't need to be told there's something creepy about incest. That it produces lunatic and deformed offspring only confirms what most societies have always known. The same goes for human cannibalism, practitioners of which (the brain-eating ones) die horribly of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) -- famous now for its corollary's maddening effect on cows.
The animal-feed producers who had the idea of serving livestock a sort of bovine Soylent Green had a strong utilitarian argument. There was a great supply of protein going to waste in slaughterhouses. Didn't it make sense to shovel the bones of yesterday's hamburger into a grinder and mix them into the feed for tomorrow's meat? Cows grew faster on this grisly diet, which was helpful to farmers and meant more and cheaper beefsteaks for consumers. Perhaps the feed processors thought bone meal could be so thoroughly sanitized that it didn't really count as bone meal, exactly. No wonder it all went wrong, for any child could have spotted the flaw in the argument: "Feed live cows with dead cows? Yuck!"
Yet on it goes. Farm animals are being rapidly replaced by genetically altered "pharm" animals -- yuck. Highly educated adventurers are racing to clone humans -- ugh. (One of these pioneers, Professor Severino Antinori of Italy, protests disingenuously: "We're talking science, we're not here to create a fuss.") Most people I know are deeply uneasy at the blistering pace of scientific experimentation, yet how quickly and weakly they add: "But I suppose there will be great therapeutic benefits ..." That's what the Parkinson's victims thought when they had holes drilled in their heads and fetal cells inserted. Now 15% of those who had the implants are afflicted with devastating "side effects" worse than Parkinson's -- and doctors are reportedly powerless to help them.
Last week, the celebrated chef Jamie Kennedy told the CBC that he will not cook with genetically altered salmon, however plump and delicious it may be, because he has a "gut reaction" against it. The interviewer's immediate follow-up was to ask: Yes, but what's your argument? Like most of us dealing with this topic, Kennedy didn't really have one. Indeed, the disquieting science erupting all round is hard enough to understand, let alone argue against cogently. The only ammunition most people have is a vague queasiness, deep down, that urges caution; that, and examples of things that have already gone awry. You have to wonder if mad cow disease -- which, having passed into the human food chain as CJD, has killed nearly 100 Europeans -- would have occurred if farmers and the feed producers had paid attention to that inner "ugh."
Obviously, if people obeyed their primitive instincts all the time, no one would fly, or eat mouldy blue cheese, or get a painful vaccination. To some degree, doing all these things requires the rational mind to override the gut. But it's just as foolish to listen only to our brains and the neat economic and medical arguments they can produce. A bad gut feeling is a useful warning system. It doesn't come from being ignorant, it comes from being human.
Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer based in Toronto.
© 2001 National Post Online
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