Thanks to GM foods we won’t have to eat humans

IN MY sideswipe at the Tim Noakes diet last week, I characterised it as dependent on the incessant consumption of dead animals. I suspect, though, that the Banting rules for losing weight (as exemplified by Noakes and his gradually ever-more violent followers) could easily be extended to eating monkeys’ brains by trepanning them while alive and scooping out the grey matter, rather like Hannibal Lector and one of his enemies in the popular series about this psychiatric monster.

However, that’s irrelevant when one considers that those faddists seeking to eat like Neanderthals are missing out on actual cannibalism – given that it’s logical that our caveperson ancestors probably ate their foes whenever they could. The issue is simple: why doesn’t Woolworths offer (along with its other hyped foodstuff) organically grown humans?

If the most recognisable logo in the world is that of Coca-Cola, where’s the harm in some advertising agency labouring away past midnight to devise a distinctive can displaying cooking instructions for one’s fellows? Jonathan Swift once (ironically) suggested that the problems of Irish starvation and overpopulation could be resolved by families preparing sumptuous dishes comprising their unwanted progeny. He was mad.

However, given the state of the planet – the UN estimates there are 45 million refugees from various largely incomprehensible conflicts – and that the majority of those fleeing in desperation from their homes into deserts and salt pans need food, water, and warmth, it’s unlikely that this displacement can ever be rectified until humanity learns to be humane.

A terribly tall order. But start by not eating people. We must have more energy (by fracking, nuclear power plants, and solar panels on top of cars) and subsisting on genetically modified food. In fact, all food has had its genes altered since history began: hence thoroughbred horses and dogs, fat wheat and grapes – and so on.

We all have huge and messy “carbon footprints”. Optimism requires the faith that improved technologies will do something other than extending unwanted lifespans by centuries during which our brains will run out of storage space.

The alternatives are horrible. Take the news from China that some meat supply companies (for the likes of McDonald’s and KFC) have been shut down since TV broadcasts showed “workers mincing up piles of old greying meat and then replacing it as new”. You never know now whether what you pay for doesn’t comprise fried roadkill or beaks or claws.

So if the viral spread of humanity continues exponentially, there really will be no food in just a few decades. Yet where does technology bring its focus to bear right now? On cosmology (how did the universe pop out from nothing and inflate like a politician’s gut?) and nanotechnology – the invention of tiny machines that swim through your bloodstream and gnash infection or repair your seriously degraded liver.

As Albert Camus pointed out, no one really gives a damn whether the Earth revolves around the sun or vice versa. We need to seriously tamper with the growth hormones, not in Lance Armstrong but in cabbages and asparagus that can swarm up to the height of the Burj Khalifa, the 830m structure in Dubai, useless except as someone’s phallic boast.

Employment as carrot fellers would be assured. There would be no need to eat each other. All that would be needed after such estimable GMO successes would be how to silence the anarchists who refuse their meals and hide out in sea caves slurping jellyfish.

The rest of us will happily devour giant peanuts and prawns. The scientists will then merely have to establish how to turn seawater into beer.