Synthetic

The journal Science Translational Medicine published information about results that indicate successfully bioengineered blood vessels.  Cells from a donor are taken and injected into a "degradable polymeric scaffold".  This plastic is the same material used in degradable sutures, so after a period time, wherein the donor cells have had time to secrete "extracellular matrix proteins", the proteins in the synthesized tissue strengthen, and when the polymer degrades, the remaining product is a fully functional blood vessel.  Upon implantation, the prediction is that the bioengineered vessel would not cause an immune response because, presumably, it appears to the body, for all intents and purposes, to be organic.  In other words, it's what knock-off designer goods hanker to be, it's a really good fake.

So, this got me to thinking about what I'd read lately on bioengineered food.  Some of the pros like the ability to feed lots of people and to commandeer the quality quotient insomuch as leaving out of the equation unsavory variables like mad cow and e. coli make it seem like a reasonable effort.  There remains something entirely unsavory about the prospect though.  For as much as I am intrigued with medical findings like the blood vessel engineering, I waver on the line when it comes to food.  Is it because I know I have the option, that I want to exercise some sort of right, or is there something inherently amiss with eating beef that never saw the juicy confines of a real hide?

Yet, I'll eat cheetoes till I'm blue in the face (or orange, as the case could be).  I'm thinking, as I bite off more than I can chew with this topic that perhaps initial testing should be done with the folks who have employed the use of plastics in their own anatomy.  For example, if a woman has breast implants, presumably, she is at terms with partially synthetic anatomy.  So, she should eat the synthetic pig first and tell the rest of us how it goes down.  Maybe with each plastic surgery procedure, the patient gets a pack of food stamps for bioengineered goods.  It's a win/win.  The patient saves money for the next set of plastic, and the bio foods industry has human test subjects.

Of course, it remains possible, in a Philip K. Dick/Spanish speaking Chihuahua sort of way, that we've been eating bio foods for a while; Taco Bell is being sued for their lack of 100% beef in their tacos.  Low and behold it's a powder meal substance made to look and taste a lot like beef.  So, ehhh, six to one, half dozen [fake] eggs to the other I guess.

Life sometimes can be synthetic.
Synthetic: –adjective
  noting or pertaining to compounds formed through a chemical process by human agency, as opposed to those of natural origin