A Chinese company has invented the first vending machine that dispenses live crabs, a development that has delighted Chinese seafood lovers and distressed Chinese arthropods. The crabs are stored in plastic containers and kept at a near-freezing temperature to make them "sleepy," which sounds better than "paralyzed."

The overall appearance of the machine immediately brings to mind The Matrix, which in turn brings two other things to mind. The first is that if one of the crabs wakes up, escapes and learns kung fu from a computer, we shouldn't say we weren't warned. Secondly, maybe The Matrix can teach us something about how to relate to our food.

The very thought of putting live animals in a vending machine is likely to make me have one of those nightmares that sets off neighborhood car alarms, but I have to admit those crabs are in paradise compared to how we treat many if not most of our food animals. Maybe the onward march of technology will make it possible in the near future to give our cows and chickens a life that will make even Michael Pollan think we're kind of spoiling them.

We could go all the way with the Matrix thing. Hook the chickens up to a giant cybernetic simulation that makes them think they're living the chickeny good life. How much processing power does it take to make a chicken happy, anyway? It's not like we're going to have to re-create Renaissance Florence. Once you get the grass- and worm-simulation subroutines going, you're 90 percent of the way there.

However, as much as I am thrilled at the idea of a warehouse full of chickens wearing little VR helmets, this doesn't seem completely fair to the creatures. Chicken Paradise sounds like a nice place if you have a brain the size of an olallieberry, but it still leads to a headless chicken and a nugget-extraction device.

If virtual reality is an acceptable substitute for what we assume is the real world, then why insist on eating actual dead birds? We should be like that one jackass from The Matrix, happy to fool ourselves into thinking we're eating half-cooked flesh as long as we can't tell the difference.

That's why I am patenting, then waiting for someone else to invent so that I can sue them, VR: The Vegetarian Restaurant. Everyone gets a knife, a fork, a plate of spackle-grade tofu and a VR helmet that convinces them they're eating whatever their inner carnivore desires, from wine-poached chicken breast to vivisected velociraptor.

The current line between vegetarians and meat-eaters will split into dozens of factions.I like the idea of saving chickens and making Tofurky palatable, and I especially like the idea of making unearned millions off the idea. But what really gets me going is the controversy this will inspire.

The current line between vegetarians and meat-eaters will split into dozens of factions. For example:

• Technivores, who avoid meat in real life but see no problem with eating a purely digital chicken.

• Hypercarnivores, who eat meat in real life but use the VR to sample impossible or forbidden foods like quagga and Tom Cruise.

• Neo-paleocarnivores, who only eat meat that they have hunted and caught themselves on the plains of a virtual Serengeti.

• Dairy Cheats, vegans who can't bring themselves to eat meat in any form, even virtual, but who use the VR helmets to gorge themselves on cheese pizzas and ice cream.

• Propers, vegetarians who don't have a problem with virtual meat, but who refuse to use the helmets because they're built with rubidium mined under unsafe conditions.

• Psycho Veggies, who never eat meat at all in real life, but who insist that all their virtual meals be beaten to death with a microphone stand while they watch.

• LocaVRs, who happily eat virtual meat, but insist that the tofu beans for the stand-in meal be grown within 75 miles of their homes.

I think it was someone I made up who said, "The finest inventions are those which both improve our lives and give us something to argue about on internet message boards."

I try to live by those words.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to draw a surprising number of chickens.