I don't eat meat. I just can't bring myself to eat anything I wouldn't be comfortable taking the life of. If I cannot look an animal in the eye and accept responsibility for ending its life, I have no business benefiting from someone else doing it for me.

Meat substitutes have been around for a while, mimicking its taste and textures. But now there's something else: Labs have been growing meat that requires no death. Chicken wings with plant-based proteins engineered to bleed and char and pull apart exactly like flesh. No animal suffering or death involved.

It would seem that there's no moral quandary here. And yet, for some reason, I have a discomfort with it. Is it irrational? Quite possibly.

Or, perhaps, it's the "wisdom of repugnance" at play, a term that philosopher and bioethicist Leon Kass had coined, arguing that while out minds might not have caught up to it consciously, our emotional reaction of disgust towards certain things, do have some moral meaning.

Perhaps what I find unsettling isn't the physical imitation of meat, but the meaning behind it. It's a simulation of death. It's sort of like death's version of uncanny valley.

Whether that makes it wrong, I genuinely can't say. But I find myself wondering. Logically, the discomfort doesn't make sense. Morally, there's no victim. And yet...