False Idols - Published Version

Chapter 11

The world went dark and for a moment the three were in the endless blackness of the ether. Then Nick recreated a replica of the first Langar Foods lab near Woodstock, New York. Since his first attempts to form his own bedroom, he'd made great strides in building realistic worlds. To help him make an accurate portrayal of the lab, he combined his own memories, satellite photos of the plant, design information in private company networks he was able to break into, and footage from public sources.

They stood in a huge, well-lit room with a low roof. The walls, floors and ceiling were all white, and lit by regularly spaced, diffused lighting fixtures. Around the room were large transparent plastic vats, which held a viscous translucent liquid. A handful of men and women, dressed like surgeons in disposable paper garments, hair nets, and face masks, scurried around the facility, checking on vats and reading computer displays.

"Well, I have to admit this is kind of impressive," said Laura as she took in the view. "I taught myself the science but I've never bothered to look at a facility. It is bigger than I imagined."

"So how does this pile of kak turn out heaps of yummy chow?" asked Kobus, slipping a few more blueberries into his mouth.

"I'll show you." Nick shifted the world from the hangar into an old-fashioned industrial farm. They floated below a clear blue sky over an endless sea of corn stalks, which rustled slowly in a breeze. "Twentieth Century agriculture increased crop yields by introducing huge quantities of inputs. Water, pesticide, fertilizer, and so on."

"Yes, yes, we know. And eventually the water table receded, and fertilizer became more expensive, and the food supply was breaking down," interjected Laura impatiently.

"Yes," said Nick, slightly wounded at Laura's insouciance yet determined to impress her. He made a gesture with his hand, and one of the corn plants, complete with its tangled roots, lifted out of the ground to float alongside them. "Food production was so... inefficient. If you look at this corn, well, you have the roots, and the stalk, and the leaves, and the cob that holds the corn kernels. None of these are eaten, but they must be grown anyway."

"No, they're eaten. They're fed to animals," interrupted Laura.

Nick stifled an angry sigh at Laura's repeated interruptions and shifted the world to a cattle station, with hundreds of cows and bulls jammed muzzle to tail in a giant feedlot, and continued talking. "Yes, some of the waste material from agriculture was used to raise livestock. But if you think about how they grew meat, it was still an even worse waste of resources. For every steer ready for slaughter, you need bones, organs, a brain – a ton, literally, a ton, of wasted production that no one was going to eat."

"And there's always the ethical issues of animal mistreatment, ne," added Kobus, rubbing his furry chin with his bear's paw.

Laura gave him a scornful stare.

"What?" growled Kobus.

"Anyway," continued Nick, amplifying his voice slightly to regain his audience's attention. "You also have to consider that in order to grow a mature adult cow or steer, you have to grow the beast from newborn calf – from fetus, actually – to full-grown animal. That means you're supporting all those useless organs and bones for months or years before you finally get to harvest the meat. It took eight pounds of feed to make one pound of grown cow, and of that one pound less than half was usable meat, so you're really talking about almost twenty pounds of grain to make a one pound steak. So, in a way, you could say that for one person to get a steak dinner, twenty people had to miss lunch."

"If you feel this strongly, you must eat only vat food yourself," said Laura.

Nick paused and looked down. The private chefs his family employed to cook every meal certainly didn't use vat foods in their gourmet dishes. "I, uh, eat vat foods sometimes."