The Design Museum in London displayed a steak made from human cells as part of a protest against the meat industry’s expanding usage of living animal cells. It ultimately led to a contentious discussion about bioethics and the drawbacks of art criticism. In this article, we discuss the Ouroboros Steak in detail.
What is Ouroboros Steak?
A DIY meal kit called Ouroboros Steak allows you to create premium steaks from your own cells. Users can culture their own cells into little steaks using the beginning kit’s tools, supplies, and instructions without harming animals. The artwork, which was commissioned for the Designs for Different Futures exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a scathing critique of the lab-grown meat business and its assertions of sustainability. Named after the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, Ouroboros Steak eliminates the need for other animals by drawing exclusively from human blood and cells.
The version on display at London’s Design Museum was produced using human cell cultures that can be purchased for research and development from the American Tissue Culture Collection (ATCC). They were fed human serum obtained from expired blood donations that would otherwise have been disposed of or incinerated.
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How Ouroboros Steak can grow your own human meat kit?
In order to raise ethical concerns about the cultured meat industry, a group of US scientists and designers created a concept kit for producing your own steak using human cells and blood. Diners may create their own Ouroboros Steak at home by harvesting their own cells from the inside of their faces and feeding them serum made from used donor blood.
The resulting bite-sized morsels of meat are totally made without harming animals and are now on display as prototypes at the Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition. The designers countered that the same could not be said for the increasingly popular option of creating meat made from animal cells.
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Cost of Ouroboros Steak
Despite the lab-grown meat industry claiming it offers a more sustainable alternative to cruelty-free factory farming, the process still relies on fetal bovine serum (FBS) as a protein-rich growth supplement for animal cell cultures. FBS, which costs around £300 to £700 a litre, is obtained from the blood of fetal calves after their pregnant mothers have been slaughtered by the meat or dairy industry. Thus, lab-grown meat remains a by-product of polluting agricultural practices, just like conventional meat.
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How to preserve Ouroboros Steak?
The amuse-bouche-sized steaks are resin-cured and plated on placemats and cutlery in an implicit nod to American diner culture. As part of a do-it-yourself kit, the team envisions users collecting cells from inside their own face with a cotton swab and depositing them onto a pre-cultured scaffold made of fungal mycelium. For about three months, they are stored in a warm environment, such as a low-temperature oven, and fed with human serum until the steak is fully grown.
Expired human blood usually is a waste material in the medical system and is way cheaper and more sustainable than FBS, but less culturally acceptable everywhere. People think that eating oneself is cannibalism, which technically it is not,” Knight said. Our proposal is scientifically and economically feasible, but also ironic in many ways, Telhan added. We do not promote “eat yourself” as a realistic solution to correct human protein needs. Rather, we ask ourselves: what sacrifices would we have to make in order to continue eating meat at the rate we are? Who will be able to buy animal meat in the future and who will have no choice but to grow their own meat? CertifiedPedia