Spud
The potato lobby was not happy.
In fact, it was furious.
This was a turf war that it was digging in to fight, and fight hard.
“First we got ‘milk’ that’s not from cows,” said the speaker, addressing an emergency session of the National Tuber Council’s Potato Awareness Committee.
“Then it was lab-grown meat!” remarked the junior marketing director of the Back to Basics groceries group, causing a ripple of outrage to spread through the room.
“Call that meat?” someone else shouted out. “Call it what it is: a bloody travesty!”
“That may be,” interjected the speaker, trying to regain control before things got out of hand. “But we have a bigger problem. Potatoes from Petri dishes!”
Pressing the slide advance, he projected a glaring headline onto the screen: “Spudcells: Possibly the greatest feat of bioengineering yet.”
Several hundred miles away, in an unassuming lab, two biotech researchers were reading the same article.
“Interesting name for a synthetic cell,” remarked one of them.
“I guess the media folks needed something to make such a nebulous-looking blob of chemicals sound sexy,” said the other. “Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if someone genuinely thought it had anything to do with spuds.”
They both chuckled to themselves as they went back to their work, aware that the launch of the company’s new line of ‘micro-fries’ — derived from lab-grown potato substitute and poised to upend the industry — was only a couple of months away.
Author’s Note
I wanted to play with a few things here: the food/farming association lobbying against threats to their products — lab grown meat (“don’t call it meat”), nut milks (“not milk”) and so on; what is often a knee-jerk response to headlines where action precedes understanding; and recent breakthrough research on synthetic cells, and the so-called “spud cell.” It was, admittedly, rather a lot to squeeze into a few words, but that was the nature of the challenge I set myself.
I’m not sure that the association with synthetic cell research works that well, unless the reader’s keeping tabs on the field or is a dab hand at using Google or AI for background research. And I suspect that the title is so obscure it’s a discoverability-killer! But I was pleased with the cadence and the layering of the story anyway!