Picture this: You’ve brought a pot of salted water to a rolling boil. You slip in your spaghetti and set the timer for 6 minutes; you like your pasta al dente. As you wait, you start mixing eggs, bread crumbs, parsley and HUMAN FLESH GROWN ON A MUSHROOM FROM YOUR OWN CHEEK CELLS to make some meatballs. You pop those in the frying pan and get out some parmesan cheese….
This is the future that scientist Andrew Pelling, artist Orkan Telhan, and industrial designer Grace Knight envisioned when they created their “grow your own meat” product, currently on exhibit at the Design Museum in London.
The concept, named “Ouroboros Steak” after the ancient Egyptian symbol of a snake eating itself, would allow diners to scrape cells from their cheek, culture them with serum from donated human blood, let them grow on mushroom spores for a few months, and eat the resulting meat.
Thankfully, the kit is social satire. While the meat on display is real, plans to manufacture and distribute the kit are not.
The concept is a critique of the lab-grown (animal) meat industry, touted as an environmentally-friendly, cruelty-free alternative to factory farming. However, lab-grown beef requires the use of Fetal Bovine Serum. The serum is derived from the fetal tissue of slaughtered pregnant cows.
So, rather than eating a savory steak created from scratch, you’re eating meat that originated from an animal killed on a farm. The same farms that wreak havoc on the environment. The serum is expensive, about $400-$800 a liter. Despite these drawbacks, the lab-grown beef industry expects to place products on shelves in the next few years.
The Ouroboros Steak team spoke to Dezeen magazine about the motivation for their project, which resulted in small, bite-size pieces of cultured human meat preserved in resin for display at the museum.
Pelling said, “As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype.”
“We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are? In the future, who will be able to afford animal meat and who may have no other option than culturing meat from themselves?”
Good questions. Definitely a lot to ponder. In the meantime, maybe skip the lab-grown meat. Stick to Impossible burgers—made with cruelty-free plant blood and a ton of chemicals. Yum.