Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

If there was an overarching theme on last friday’s meeting (Feb 27), it was clearly food. Lent, superfoods, miracle fruit, in-vitro meat. Was Joe hungry when he thought these topics up?

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Meeting Discussion

We started off with Lent: what’s that all about? Going by an ex-Catholic’s account (ie mine), it represents the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert, being tempted by the devil. It is followed by Easter Sunday, which celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus. Lent is a time to give things up; in my tradition I always gave up non-fish meat on Fridays (unless it was really inconvenient). Actually, I liked the tuna sandwiches better than my usual lunch…

Keeping with the theme on food, we discussed “superfoods”, which are foods that are supposedly really healthy. The obvious logical fallacy involved is a sort of naturalistic fallacy—natural is always better. One thing led to another, and we started discussing how people’s fears of Big Pharma affect their health decisions. Some people thought there was at least some merit to these fears. Andrew thought companies might have incentive to look for new meds rather than study old ones. And Robin mentioned “restless leg syndrome” as something companies invented just so they could cure it.

But we also had several responses. Matt said there’s a false dichotomy between a “good company” and a “bad company”, when any real company would be a mix. We are attributing motivations to corporations (the reification fallacy). Spencer said that all talk of Big Pharma is irrelevant to the question of whether meds actually work and whether superfoods are actually all that healthy.

Speaking of superfoods, have you ever heard of miracle fruit? Miracle fruit contains a molecule known as miraculin, which binds to the tongue, causing sour foods to taste sweet. Ana tried some over the summer and told us all about it.

The last topic was in-vitro meat, which is the maybe-future-technology of growing meat in a Petri dish. I thought the idea was infeasible, since you would need to add a circulatory system, a renal system, an immune system, etc. It would be easier to breed cows to be dumber and dumber, as we are already doing. Ana countered that cows have a lot of unnecessary functions which waste maybe 90% of their energy, and that in-vitro meat was not as difficult to grow as I thought. Joe asked if there were any moral issues involved. We quickly agreed that in-vitro meat has no more moral status than yeast or even stem cells for that matter.