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New York Carnival
Chapter 35: The Realities and Unrealities of Meat

Chapter 35: The Realities and Unrealities of Meat

Memory Transcription Subject: Chiri, Gojid Refugee

Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136

David and some of the other humans shooed the crowds away, as I tried to get my heart rate and breathing back under control. “You okay, buddy?” asked David, holding my paw in his hand for support.

I sighed. “I am becoming more okay,” I said stiffly. “It’s an ongoing process.”

David chuckled. “Fair.”

I made a noise in my throat tinged with disgust and self-loathing. “I feel like I fucked up again.”

David shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye on social media, but I don’t think you said anything too out of line.”

I shook my head. “I need to get better at dealing with new humans if I’m going to be tending bar. I mean, I also need to learn how to mix a few more drinks.”

David nodded. “Alright, I think I’ve got a few books on the subject. How to mix the classics, how to design new cocktails.”

I snorted. “I still can’t read English, doofus.”

David nodded over towards another section of the store. “A holopad might be able to translate an ebook for you. Wanna head over to electronics?”

“Nah, let’s finish up with food first.” I looked over the produce some more, trying to identify anything. I wouldn’t know the details of alien fruits and vegetables, but the categories still held up. I knew what a berry was, even if I couldn’t identify those little red and dark purple ones with the tiny clusters of orbs.

“Raspberries and blackberries,” David explained, as he put them into the basket. “We don’t usually cook those. They’re snacks, or dessert toppings.” He looked around at the cart and the surroundings. “I think we’ve actually got all the fresh ingredients I need. Let’s loop back to the dry goods section for the rest. Anything else you want while we’re here?”

“Meat.”

David snorted. “Anything you want that won’t kill you?”

“Hmm… maybe some pastries or something,” I said. “Can we at least look at the meat section? I don’t care what that asshole said, I’m not gonna judge.”

David looked at me with concern. “Are you sure? Like, I don’t… I know you’ve been talking up a big game, but the visual might be a bit visceral for you.”

You’re pushing yourself too far today, said the critical voice.

It’s not people, said the odd voice. It’s not even real.

“I think I can handle it,” I said, but I couldn’t make the conviction come out in my voice. “It’s just bioreactor stuff, right? It never lived.” I kept pace with David as he pushed the cart back towards the clean and tidy shelves of cans and jars and burlap sacks. “I mean, it’s all gonna be neatly packaged up for transport, right? Or is it more like the produce section? Do they keep it loose and dripping or whatever to make it look appetizing?”

David snorted. “No. The produce was loose because we eat raw fruit all the time, but raw meat is kind of a rarity. It takes a lot of prep work to make raw meat palatable--thin-sliced morsels like sashimi, cold-smoked cuts like lox, or tossing it in lime juice like ceviche--and some humans still find it so gross that they won’t eat it at all.”

I almost choked on my own spit laughing. “I’m sorry, you have a dish that’s raw meat tossed in fruit juice?”

David grinned. “Yup! Little aquatic creatures, diced up with lime and onion and cilantro leaves and such. There’s so many great meat-and-plant dishes that I can’t wait to show off to you once it’s safe.” He shrugged. “But yeah, long story short, humans don’t really have the literal bloodthirst you think of with regards to predator species. I’m pretty sure we came from a scavenging background like you guys did, if you go back far enough over evolutionary time. Raw meat is a disease vector. Gotta burn it a bit to purify contagions out, and get the nutrients to break down into something more bioavailable. Consequently, meat doesn’t smell appetizing to us until the fire gets at it.”

“Until the fire gets at it,” I repeated, deep in thought. Purifying contagion with fire felt familiar, and my thoughts drifted to go fetch the details. On the outside of my head, between the two of us, David and I carefully lowered an industrial-sized sack of flour down into the cart. “So does that get weird, then, when the Exterminator squads break out the flamethrowers for a predator infestation?”

David almost dropped his side of the sack. “We don’t have Extermination squads on Earth, Chiri,” he said stiffly. “I dunno what the Federation’s been teaching you. You’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine tipping over than by a wild animal attack.”

That cannot possibly be accurate, said the critical voice.

Wild predators can be territorial, said the odd voice. Maybe they just learned to avoid human settlements. ‘No trespassing here, the hunters with the weapons already called dibs.’

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“Alright, well, clearly you’ve either got a better relationship with wild predators than we do, or else you’ve got extremely unstable vending machines,” I said, as we set the flour down. “That wasn’t really what I was asking, though.”

David went silent for a moment as he slowly pulled down a more moderately-sized sack of dried beans. “I’ve heard stories,” he said slowly, a look of grim disgust blossoming on his face. “Someone has a heart attack in a hot tub, for example, and doesn’t get found for a couple hours. When the first responders show up, they say it smells like soup. It’s incredibly unsettling for us.”

Oh! I’ve got the memory of what soup smells like stored around here somewhere, said the critical voice, jumping to attention. A nice warm root vegetable stew? Should I go ahead and associate that memory with boiled bodies?

You’re mixing up your food groups, said the odd voice. If Gojids are like Humans, I’m more curious about whether or not cooked meat smells like food to us as well.

The critical voice went quiet, considering this.

“What kind of soup?” I said aloud.

David didn’t look particularly pleased by this line of questioning. “I think I’ve heard pork?”

I tried to redirect the conversation back towards actual food, and away from gruesome tragedies. “Okay. So you guys make, like… meat soups? Like, you mentioned meat and plant dishes. I’m just kinda trying to wrap my head around meat as a valid choice of ingredient.”

David shrugged. “Yeah, fair enough. Chicken soup with a bit of vegetables, maybe some rice or noodles, tends to get treated like a remedy for minor illnesses. It’s nutritious and warming when you’re not feeling well.”

Fuck it, just tell him what you’re thinking, muttered the critical voice.

“I guess I’m just wondering if cooked meat would smell good to me,” I said. “The cheese was absolutely amazing, but it was the flavor that did it for me, not the scent. I’ve never actually been near cooking meat.” I was hoping he picked up the hint and started cooking some in my vicinity.

David caught the hint, but looked away awkwardly. “I mean… I was planning to just give up meat for a bit. Make dishes we can both eat.”

My eyes widened. “What? No!” I protested reflexively. “You need it to… live…” I trailed off, the fuzzy memories from the night before seeping back in. I rubbed the fur in my face. “Wait, no, hang on, you covered this already.”

David nodded as he pulled down a big can of tomatoes. “Exactly. Humans can, and have, survived on buttered potatoes alone for most of their lives. And nobody’s suggesting anything quite that extreme. All the human refugees on Venlil Prime are already going no-meat-no-eggs while they’re on the planet to avoid bothering the Venlil sensibilities.”

“It’s not gonna bother my sensibilities!” I said. “At worst, if it smells delicious, I might get jealous!”

David started pushing the cart over to the next aisle, and I followed. He tapped the cart’s handle idly as he thought. “Alright, well, maybe we can do a bit of trickery, then,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about plant-based meat?”

I stared at him, my jaw open. I instinctively imagined a bloody carcass growing on a tree. “Okay, is this like the eggplant thing where it just kinda looks like eggs, or…?”

David did a double-take. “Oh! No, that’s not… Okay, look, before we got the bioreactor technology working--”

“You grew meat on trees?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” he said. He was amused, but still struggling to choose his words for tact. “Look, most humans are bothered by suffering, including by animals. That being said, most of human history was defined by long periods of famine, where you had to eat whatever you could to avoid starvation. There was a period of time, after we’d figured out how to solve famines, before we’d invented bioreactors, where we probably didn’t need to eat meat, but we did it anyway because it was delicious, animal suffering be damned.” We were out of the dry goods section now. The aisles were changing from shelves to refrigerators and freezers.

“Right,” I said slowly, as a bit of social context seeped in from last night’s fog. “Meat was the kind of decadence only the rich and powerful got to indulge in regularly. Then I’m guessing you invented the meat-farming version of chemical fertilizers or a combine harvester?”

David opened his mouth as if to correct me, but stopped himself and just shrugged. “Sure, close enough,” he said. “So anyway, there was a market opportunity for something that tasted like meat, but wasn’t meat, and did no harm. We were talking earlier about stacking savory flavors in meatless dishes? This was the culmination of that.” He stopped abruptly in one of the aisles, right in front of a glass-fronted refrigerator. “A couple of industrial food scientists figured out how to take plant-based proteins and recast them structurally, so that they had the same texture and mouthfeel as meat. You’d chew them, and you’d feel the tear of the muscle fibers coming apart. After that, it was just a question of isolating certain flavor compounds to make it taste like meat, and we’d known how to do that for years. You can make anything taste like anything, if you know the right tricks, but in this case?” David nodded towards the fridge. “We called the result plant-based meat.”

I tried to press my face up against frosted glass to better see, before I resolved to just open the freezer door to get a proper look. Inside was… clean and neat packages of frozen reddish bricks. I picked one up, and examined it closely, but couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I didn’t really know what to compare it to. If someone told me it was meat, I’d have believed them, but if someone had told me it was a frozen block of mashed red beans sweetened with cherry juice, I’d have believed that, too, from the color alone.

You didn’t know what raspberries were, but cherries, those are just in your vocabulary now? asked the critical voice.

Fuck off! I like stone fruit. It’s what my family grew!

Did you learn the word ‘maraschino’ before or after?

“So, according to humans, a species that eats meat,” I said slowly, “this tastes nearly identical to meat, but contains no meat whatsoever? Nothing that can trigger my allergies? Nothing that can hurt me?”

David nodded. “Correct. Nothing harmful in the slightest. It’s all extracts of beans and grain and the like. As for flavor, I’ve heard the earliest versions could be hit-or-miss, but with modern protein extruders and food aromatics tech? Yeah, it tastes nearly identical to meat. People fail blind taste tests all the time, as long as it isn’t just cooked plain. When it’s prepared in the right context, in a full dish, by a competent chef?” David smiled confidently. “It’s pretty much impossible to tell the difference between this and real meat.”

I knew I had to put it into the cart eventually, but for a few moments, I clutched the frozen brick of plant-based predator food like an exterminator was about to take it away. This was the key to it all. Wasn’t it? The key to unlocking the secrets of my stolen heritage. It was such a tiny thing, and it was, on the merits, a false thing. But considering what had been taken from me, and what had been inflicted on me, this felt like my best chance to finally be whole again.