An exhibit featuring “human steak” is causing people to lose their lunch — or at least their temper — in London, where it’s on display at the Design Museum. The controversial “Ouroboros Steak” exhibit, named after an ancient Egyptian symbol of a snake swallowing their own tail, includes four bite-size pieces of human flesh, which were cultivated using human cells and a blood bank byproduct. The exhibit appeared in U.S. museums without incident, but at the Design Museum installation, people are accusing artist Orkan Telhan of promoting cannibalism. He says he’s simply questioning how far people will go to get meat.
If the thought of eating “human steak” — which was produced in a laboratory and caused no living beings to suffer — turns your stomach, it might be time to take a hard look at what’s on your plate.
For years, PETA has been encouraging people to eat vegan foods rather than animal-based ones. And although PETA has made considerable progress (the number of American vegans increased by 300%, about 9.6 million people, in the past 15 years alone) billons of animals are still raised and killed for food every year.
Animals are made of flesh, blood and bone, just as humans are. They feel pain and joy, form strong family ties and grieve when they lose a loved one. They’re sentient individuals with unique personalities and likes and dislikes, and they value their lives as much as we value ours.
It makes no sense to claim that certain animals should be treated with kindness while others can be killed and eaten. There’s simply no humane way to turn cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys into beef, pork and drumsticks. The process involves separating them from their loved ones; confining them to filthy warehouses, cages, crates or stalls; mutilating them; and subjecting them to a terrifying, violent death.
Workers cut chickens’ and turkeys’ throats while they’re still conscious, cut off piglets’ tails and testicles without giving them any painkillers, suffocate or cut open fish on the decks of fishing boats, and take calves away from their mothers within hours of birth, lock them in crates or small pens, and kill them for veal.
If you don’t want to support such cruelty — and I doubt anyone does — you don’t have to resort to cannibalism to eat meat. Today tasty vegan meats, such as those made by Beyond Meat, are available in most grocery stores and restaurants.
Cultured meat is another exciting prospect. No matter how you look at it, eating cultured meat is better than eating meat from factory-farmed animals. It will spare billions of sentient beings immense pain and suffering, and it’s environmentally friendly. Sometimes referred to as “clean meat,” it requires only 1% of the land and 4% of the water that’s currently used for conventional meat production, and it may reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 96%.
It’s no wonder that many start-ups, including Memphis Meat, Mosa Meat and Finlesss Foods, are working to create affordable, appetizing cultured meats — and that conventional meat companies are clamoring for a stake in them. The laboratory-grown meat industry is expected to reach $214 million by 2025.
The mere concept of cultured meat shows that more and more humans realize that it’s unethical and unsustainable to eat butchered animals. But why wait to make the switch to a more humane way of eating? Meat-eaters and vegans alike can enjoy all the tasty vegan meats that are already available in stores and restaurants. I think we can all agree that they’re much more appealing than both animal flesh and human steaks.
