Soy Patties and Cricket Poppers (Short Story)

It was the emotional argument that lasted the longest. There were other arguments, because such polarizing, controversial topics always spawn multiple arguments, but the others were put to bed long before the emotional argument.

By contrast, the emotion argument was one of the first to go, when a particularly ambitious neurologist proved that emotion is simply the conscious or semi-conscious experience of animal instinct. Logical people, of course, had known this essentially forever. They just hadn't been able to prove it. Now that they could, the phrase “human emotion” began to be acknowledged as nonsense, and with it the argument that humans are exceptional in their experience of emotion.

For a while, there were attempts to couch the emotional argument in scientific terms. People said that a reverence for human life follows logically because we all share a genome. This was easily unmasked as pathos in logical clothing. The truth is that people share DNA with a whole lot of things. If geneticists suddenly insisted on making a thorough count of base pairs and then rounding at three significant digits, chimpanzees would be humans. In fact, humans share a preponderance of their DNA with banana slugs, and a majority with bananas.

The semantic argument lasted longer. Previous generations of politicians had succeeded in making the word “euthanasia” political poison. People came out in droves to vote on euthanasia, and they voted nine to one against.

But politicians know that the way to win an unwinnable fight is not to fight it. People knew to vote against euthanasia because it sounds like suicide to Protestants and eugenics to progressives. People didn't really know what to make of “advanced strategic expedited senescence,” except ASES, but they didn't seem to have a problem voting for something that sounds like “aces.”  The final challenge was to make ASES pay for itself, because the people were not about to vote for another program that would need to be funded,

This turned out to be harder than it sounded. By the time ACES was really gaining steam, only one person in ten thousand had ever tasted what people in the previous century had referred to as “real meat.” The ever-increasing population and the ever-decreasing space devoted to agriculture made it impractical to raise livestock on any but the smallest of scales. This led to scarcity, scarcity led to demand, and demand priced “real meat” too high for all but the wealthy. With things like Cricket Poppers and Soy Patties now being legally marketed as “meat,” most of the rest didn't know what they were missing, and so assumed that there was nothing to miss. Curiosity and fetishism can only create so much of a market, and the commercial demand for certain kinds of meat will always be minimal.

So ASES found another market. At this point, the only remaining holdouts were those truly dedicated to the emotional argument, idealists who wanted to live in a world where humanity is an exalted principle, not an agricultural product. Unfortunately for the idealists, they live with everyone else in a world of Soy Patties and Cricket Poppers, and trying to get people worked up about cricket feed and soy fertilizer has always been a losing battle.