The makers of a new kind of "human" derived meat claim that their product does not "technically" constitute cannibalism.
According to a report from the New York Post, the strange speculative product is called Ouroboros Steak - named after the mythical symbol of a snake eating its own tail.
The so-called Ouroboros kits would give its users the opportunity to grow a steak in three months, using cells taken from the cheek with a cotton swab, and then deposited onto pre-grown scaffolds made from mushroom mycelium.
Per Dezeen Magazine, the product was created by scientist Andrew Pelling, artist Orkan Telhan, and industrial designer Grace Knight, on commission by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It was recently nominated for the "design of the year" award given out by the London-based Design Museum.
The installation used human cell cultures, purchased for research and development purposes from the American Tissue Culture Collection, and arranged the steaks in small discs on a platter.
However, the product is not yet for sale. Instead, the installation was intended as a critique of the lab-grown meat industry, which is experimenting with ways of developing meat using fetal bovine serum as a protein supplement for animal cell cultures.
In a recent interview with Dezeen, Knight stated:
"Expired human blood is a waste material in the medical system and is cheaper and more sustainable than FBS, but culturally less-accepted. People think that eating oneself is cannibalism, which technically this is not."
Meanwhile, Telhan stated: "Our design is scientifically and economically feasible but also ironic in many ways."
Telhan continued: "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?"
Pelling added: "Fetal bovine serum costs significant amounts of money and the lives of animals. 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."
