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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

I never liked this story. Meat, according to Wikipedia, is "animal flesh that is eaten as food". So they're familiar with biological creatures very similar to those on earth, and they eat them? But at the same time, they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense.

And why then do they keep using this term "meat", which refers only to some parts of animals?

Maybe that's just me, but I feel like the point of the story is to gross the reader out by repeatedly calling them "meat". ;)

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I don't think it's trying to imply they eat meat. It's written for humour to make human existence feel absurd. They could have used the "flesh" to the same effect, although "meat" sounds a bit funnier.

You can imagine the individuals speaking are something exotic to us, like a "hydrogen core cluster" or an "electron plasma", who clearly think meat is one of the least likely materials sentient life might be made from. The humour comes from making the reader think, "huh, when you put it like that, humans are kind of absurd." Of course, this absurdity works largely because of our own human associations towards meat. Replace "meat" with "cells" and the humour fails.

Basically, descriptions like, "they talk by flapping their meat at each other." sound funny by giving the reader a different perspective of "talking".

"Flesh" wouldn't work either, though. Just having a word for that implies familiarity with creatures similar to animals on earth, and it's not believable that a super advanced space-faring species would have missed the fact that animals can have (possibly extremely primitive, to their eyes) intelligence.

> Of course, this absurdity works largely because of our own human associations towards meat. Replace "meat" with "cells" and the humour fails.

Yes, that's actually a great way of putting what rubs me the wrong way about it. If the story expressed a great idea, it should work with "cells" or "tissue" just as well.

You're overthinking this. It's not a scientific analysis of how real aliens would perceive humans. It's just funny.

Sure, there is a core idea in there about how aliens might have prejudices and skepticism against a vastly different form of life (just like humans might have similar prejudices), but the main purpose of the skit is to be humorous.

Yes, clearly that is the main purpose. But does that mean any discussion of those alternate interpretations needs to be downmodded to the bottom of the page? I thought this was an interesting perspective.

The point is the arrogance of the alien race towards something that in their limited view doesn't seem worthy. By this they disregard all the beauty the human race often exhibits, something which is obvious to us, the human readers.

The aliens seem to be light-years ahead of us in technology, yet these beings of supposedly supreme intelligence, still make the same mistake of not being able to identify and counter their own biases. Although because they're able to travel quicker in space they probably do feel intellectually superior to us.

The point that the writer wants to make is that this bias is not limited to the visiting aliens. Humans do this all the time (with animals, foreigners, poor people, children) but we're rarely challenged in this assumption.

A lot of people rationalize eating meat by discrediting the intelligence and “soul” of the animals they eat. As a friendly vegetarian myself (I don’t ever try to convince anyone or inconvenience anyone - just avoid products myself), I sometimes get “attacked” along the lines of “oh, so you're vegetarian? But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc right?

Also, some languages use the same word for “meat” and “flesh”, maybe that’s the same in the alien language? After all, they don’t seem to have any fresh anywhere.

This rationalisation seems to go a long way. Like, how science about animal cognition and behaviour for a long time took utmost care not to compare any behaviour or thought processes of animals with those of humans - because after all, we can never know whether or not an animal experiences things the same way as a human does, so we must not jump to conclusions assuming that they do.

Oddly, jumping to the opposite conclusion - that they don't - is perfectly acceptable and is used to justify all kinds of horrible treatment.

So how do you deal with the fact that plants clearly display varying levels of intelligence?

Personally, my response to that is: "We can't live without harming anything else. I draw my line at plants, you draw your line at non-human animals, cannibals draw their line at human animals. We have different philosophies and preferences".

(And a Simpson's quote comes to mind: "Ha! I'm a level 5 vegan. I don't eat anything that casts a shadow")

It's a much simpler, broader, different intelligence and not much embodied in the part destroyed for food. In many cases consumption of the plant (fruit) is the plant's method of reproducing and sustaining life.

Or intelligent slime (aka the Blob)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YWbY7kWesI

> But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc

Those people clearly don't know anything about animals then. Animals are incredibly aware and intelligent, anyone who doesn't recognise that is just, IMHO, lazy. I'm not vegetarian, I think we owe it to the animals we eat to recognise that they're not some inanimate object without awareness.

Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair, "It is very hard for a person to realize something, when continuing to enjoy their favorite food depends on not realizing it".

I mean, referring to humans as "meat" is quite clearly a comedic device.

I'll grant that it's not going to win any awards but it's a work of creative humor, you have to cut it some artistic license here. A story like this is meant to be enjoyed for what it is, not dissected for accuracy of language or scientific principles.

So to indulge in that spirit, there's actually quite a bit going on but the central point is to shift the reader's perspective. It's a turn-around of the popular sci-fi trope about human space explorers coming into contact with various bizarre life forms. ("It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.")

> I'll grant that it's not going to win any awards...

For what it's worth it was one of six nominations for Best Short Story in the 1991 Nebula awards [0] and the Stephen O'Regan film adaptation [1] someone else already posted here won the 2006 Grand Prize at the SIFF Science Fiction Short Film Festival [2].

[0]: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nominated-work/theyre-made-meat/

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060521202739/http://www.sfhome...

> A story like this is meant to be enjoyed for what it is, not dissected for accuracy of language or scientific principles.

Why not both? I am certainly enjoying both aspects of this discussion.

Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things. The humor is based on our human notion of some arbitrary superiority over other beings on our planet and our expectation of being treated as equals by other species who may in fact view us as something more like talking slime mold.

Regarding the wikipedia/dictionary definition of meat including the idea of it being food for the ET characters, I believe you may be reading too much into the denotation and not the connotation held by the word (which you acknowledge, but not, I feel, with the weight the author intended).

> Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things.

For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.

> For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.

If we extend the setting a bit such that multicellular life is vanishingly rare, you could replace "meat" with "scum", and add a few more lines about mobile chunks of scum, chunks reproducing by extruding a smaller mobile chunk, chunks of scum growing by absorbing other chunks and then inefficiently breaking them down to the molecular level and building more scum from scratch instead of just repurposing the absorbed scum, thinking maybe the planet is intelligent with an adjunct distributed network of chunky-scum-based manufacturing, storage, and compute units, etc.

I don't think "biological tissue" works either. The aliens are living things, so isn't their tissue biological by definition (no matter what it is made of)?

I'm not a native speaker so every time I hear of "meat" in this story, I think "flesh", as compared to what the other creatures are made of, circuits/machines/plasma or something like that. But today I learned that "meat" is indeed specifically the parts you eat, while "flesh" is just soft tissue, so "flesh" would maybe be more appropriate here.

> they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense

I'm not sure we (humans) were any better than that just very recent ago. Animals were believed to not feel pain at all before, and some people still feel fine with boiling lobsters alive. It's not super far off to imagine that other species sees humans the same way we've seen them before.

Some other languages do not discern that much between "meat" and "flesh".

German "Fleisch" means both and in my native Czech "maso" can definitely used be in context of living humans as well ("až do živého masa" = "into the living flesh").

For us outsiders the wordplay probably works better than in original English.

Consider it translated, with "meat" being the closest word. There's an artistic choice to it as well: "They're made of out organic tissue" or whatever you might find more palatable just doesn't have the same ring to it and really wouldn't convey the proper sense of incredulity.

Haha, I don't like it for the same reason... And why would these presumably advanced aliens stop at "meat"? There's so much more going on inside the meat.

It's all meat. Even your bones have meat in them.

Yeah but if it was an electromechanical construct, we'd be talking about how the cells/nanobots reproduce themselves, fix everything, adapt to the evironment, and how the ligaments are stronger than steel while being extremely flexible, etc. And that's just "dumb humans" talking about something new they found/created, not aliens who have space travel capabilities.

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