Have people for dinner: Startup imagines at-home, cultured human flesh kits

In San Diego, cultured meat startup Ouroboros Steak has designed a kit that enables people to grow little human steaks in their own home and even from their own cells.   

The creepy quasi-cannibalism concept was developed by scientist Andrew Pelling, industrial designer Grace Knight and artist and researcher Orkan Telhan. The grow-your-own-flesh kits work by using cells scraped from inside an individual’s cheeks to grow tiny self-steaks on a mycelium scaffolding using donated blood as growth media. An amuse-bouche-sized morsel takes about three months to grow. 

Notably, the process does not include fetal bovine serum, a protein-rich growth medium often used to cultivate meat. The use of FBS is controversial because it is derived from the blood of calf fetuses and requires the slaughter of pregnant cows, despite the cultured meat industry often touting itself as a cruelty-free alternative to animal-based meat. FBS is also extremely expensive and one of the main cost hurdles to large-scale cultured meat production. 

“Fetal bovine serum costs significant amounts of money and the lives of animals,” Pelling tells Dezeen.  “Although some lab-grown meat companies are claiming to have solved this problem, to our knowledge no independent, peer-reviewed, scientific studies have validated these claims… 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.”

The jury is still out on whether or not eating an Ouroboros “steak”—being your own flesh or a friend’s—constitutes cannibalism. For now, bite-size chunks of an undisclosed individual can be seen at London’s Design Museum. 

“We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs,” Telhan says. “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?”