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Blog Post

The following is an unpublished blog post announcing the inclusion of Waag's project, The Other Dinner, in the book, Experimental Eating.

Blurb: Waag has been published in the book, Experimental Eating (published by Black Dog Publishing).

Interested in noshing on lab-grown meat? Nibbling on an hors-d'oeuvre of cheese made from the bacteria inhabiting your armpit? Or perhaps you would prefer a steak seared over molten rock?

Experimental Eating contains a review of a variety of creative, experimental, food-based projects across several disciplines (including art, design, science, and socio-politics) from the 1960's to present. The projects within seek to “embrace other ways of consuming and destroy the assumption that there is a correct way to eat.”

The book outlines some fascinating multidisciplinary works. Take for example artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, who grew miniature, thumbnail-sized steaks from the biopsied cells of living frogs in an attempt to create renewable meat in a project entitled Disembodied Meat. Another project at the intersection of biology and art, Self Made, explored making cheese from the bacteria found in human sweat. Of course, not all of the projects in the book required clocking hours in a wetlab. Bompas and Parr's project, Cooking with Lava, involved, as you might expect, preparing a meal over blisteringly molten rock.

Nestled amongst these provocative artworks is the Waag's project, Other Dinner, which was organised by intern, Chloé Rutzerveld, in 2013. The project sought to merge a “dining experience and a lecture on the future of meat consumption” through combining a DIT Bio workshop (wherein participants grew meat in vitro) with a dinner during which guests were served unconventional meats. The eccentric meal incorporated dishes comprised mainly of offal from both convential animals (like pigs and chickens) and species we don't often eat (like muskrats and mice). In conjunction with the dinner, participants were treated to cooking demonstrations, presentations by speakers, and a class on growing cultured meat cells.

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