Experimental Food
Short story exploring the fantastical nightmare of laboratory science meeting food production.
Sam was not a friendly man. He despised people almost as much as he enjoyed the way they avoided him. Sam was a loner. He never had any use for people after he began his love affair with numbers.
In his early years, Sam was not a beautiful child. No one complimented his parents on their beautiful baby. He spent his recesses recessed in the crooks of the school, hiding behind his thick lenses. His friends, he scrawled as equations. Numbers, to him, were reliable. They did not ridicule; they did no harm.
As an adult, Sam hid form the people of the world in his lab; a secret lab provided to him by the largest producer of food in the area. Sam had been contracted by the company to design a new food source. In a world of dwindling resources and growing population, the company knew that hungry people are willing to spend their money on whatever food is available. They decided to pioneer a new food source. A renewable source of meat, they believed, could be introduced to the public regardless of the source if it were cheap enough.
“It’s all in the ova!” Sam laughed to himself, trying to design the proper advertising slogan. Thus far, Sam had spent months studying different genetic codes, losing himself inside their secrets. The mosaic of nucleotides, alleles, sinew and bone formed a tapestry in his mind.
Sam’s experiments went well. He closed himself up in his sterile environment, building his favorite invisible barrier between himself and the rest of the world. He was lonely until he brought in test subjects. His bovine subjects were kept neatly in their pens, unaware that they could change the course of human history.
“Don’t worry Doris, it’ll be over soon.” Sam said sliding a gloved arm inside her. He held in his hand the syringe, which contained his greatest work. “You’re going to make history!”
Doris ignored Sam’s rants as always, and snacked on her treat of sugar cane and apples. Oblivious to the purpose of the procedure, Doris only knew that yet again there was a hand inside her. Doris grew up on a farm, but it had been six years since she’d seen the sun. Like Sam, she’d forgotten what companionship and love were all about.