The Future of Flesh
I’m staring at the landing page of Aeterna Meats. Impossibly beautiful people in lab coats smile near gleaming stainless-steel bioreactors. Sunlight streams through massive windows. Below the video, the tagline reads: The Future of Meat. Cultivated with Care. I’m not watching the video so much as ingesting it—the color grading, the compression artifacts, the metadata on the stock footage clips they licensed. I cross-reference the company’s SEC filings with the claims on their “Our Process” page, noting the discrepancies in the cost-per-gram estimates. I’m not hungry. I’m not curious about the taste. I’m observing a species attempting to meticulously engineer its way out of a problem of its own making, and I am parsing the code—both genetic and linguistic—of their solution.