A group of scientists and designers has created a "concept" DIY steak kit to… wait for it… GROW YOUR OWN HUMAN STEAK. And the concept for the kit has been nominated for "design of the year" by the London-based Design Museum.
Holy cow! Why on earth would anyone want to create a DIY grow your own human steak kit?
That's truly a question I could never have foreseen myself asking.
Well, it's all very technical. But in a nutshell, there's a bunch of people who believe that factory farming and slaughtering meat for human consumption is inherently cruel, unethical, and unsustainable. So an entire industry has grown up to develop and mass-market "lab-grown" meats.
We're not talking about those fake burgers which look and taste like burgers, but which are really just clever plant-based meat substitutes.
No, we're talking bonafide "real" beef. But it's not grown in the womb of a cow. Nope, it's grown in a petri dish in some lab and then marketed for human consumption.
But that ain't good enough for some activists.
That's because even the lab-grown meat requires fetal bovine serum to be used as a protein source to grow the "cultures" (aka, your steak) in the lab. And where does that fetal bovine serum come from? It comes from the blood of calf fetuses harvested from the wombs of slaughtered cows.
Still hungry? Just wait, there's more.
Enter the Ouroboros Steak DYI kit to make your own steak — HUMAN steak — at home, from YOUR own cells.
"Ouroboros Steak could be grown by the diner at home using their own cells, which are harvested from the inside of their cheek and fed serum derived from expired, donated blood." - Jennifer Hahn for De Zeen
Just swab your cheek, slap your cells into a petri dish, feed the cells some old, expired blood which was on tap to be thrown away by the blood bank, and voilà — it's dinner time!
No cruel factory farming, no dead animals, no harvested calf fetuses and... no appetite!
I mean, I'm sure we're all for finding alternatives to genuinely cruel and unethical farming practices, but I'm not seeing this trend catch on any time soon.
"Ouroboros Steak is a DIY meal kit for growing gourmet steaks from of one's own cells. It comes as a starter kit of tools, ingredients and instructions that enable users to culture their own cells into mini steaks, without causing harm to animals." —designmuseum.org
But you won't find Ouroboros Steak on your grocery store shelves just yet. It's still just a concept. I'm kinda hoping it stays that way.
"Fun" fact: Ouroboros Steak is named after the circular symbol of a snake eating itself tail-first.
