Battle of the Bulge

Hudson Valley Grade A Duck Foie Gras
(fr. dartagnon.com)
$109.99 per 1.8 lbs.

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[Addendum to From Twinkies to Fuel]:

Lipofuel is actually a serious proposition, and quite reasonable, once we get over ourselves.

One of its major attractions is that it's fully renewable, especially if it were possible to re-mine living sources. In the distant future when we have depleted other extant sources of fuel we will see that re-purposing our own "waste" matter will be a logical decision, and will be divested of any prurient scatological associations.

Much as with electric cars, the people whose fat is farmed might submit to periodic suctionings. Obviously, they would incur no cost for the liposurgery, and as a donor they would enjoy the very lucrative benefit of grazing copiously and being able to shed themselves of their avoirdupois as it became burdensome. Each may divine the line of sloth for himself, and decide whether the transgression can actually be transmogrified into a good.

Lipo would no longer be relegated to the back rooms of shady plastic surgeons but could become a perfected art, the domain of top surgeons and not just inferior pimple doctors. There would be no more jokes about "did she or didn't she"; yes -- she did give to her country, much as a blood or plasma donor does today. Instead of a little blood drop stick pin, a little golden fat globule to wear proudly, like the "I Voted" sticker.

Perhaps not to you, but to some people, that freedom to graze would be felt as a great blessing. For those amongst us who are weight-challenged, the battle of the bulge can become a debilitating daily fixation. The types of diets are legion, and sadly, science is telling us that once grown the fat cell never returns to a slimmer state. For the person who has shed weight, her newly lean cells are simply fat ones in hiding --imposter thin cells -- ready to chow down on any calories thrown their way. Ingest all the Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HGC) you may, a fat cell is a "fat" cell. It will always have space to grow.

Rather than occupying space as inert lumpen who may only use their minds or physical exertion to produce meaningful results, why not farm the last readily-accessible frontier -- the human body -- and allow people to produce? Why can we only accept organ donation upon death? Why these odd lines? If organ harvesting is for a good purpose, then so tissue farming (blood is a "tissue").

Unfortunately, humans are wont to ideate and fall into the slippery-slope fallacy that if fat were farmed from corpses -- and perhaps willing live donors -- than it is just a hop away to breeding humans who would sit inertly in a lab and be force-fed like like geese to produce fois gras, except they would be sucked of their fat.

Here is a perhaps vulgar thought question, but what is so different from the human who goes from cubicle to home office, sitting before a screen all day and ingesting chips and soda which the body converts to fat, and the immobile goose force fed to produce its succulent fois gras?

We think nothing of re-producing offspring -- expulsing genetic material into the world. Why not put some of our inert matter to good use? Instead of having it sit in front of Facebook 24/7, give a little back to the world.

If we think nothing of mining the liquified remains of long-dead animals processed naturally, then why not our own?