How To Grow Your Own Meat (Not A Penile Enlargement Come-On):
The Shojinmeat Project helps people grow their own meat, almost like a plant, without an animal having to die.
It’s called cultivated meat, and it’s made by taking a few animal cells and helping them grow in a tank called a bioreactor. It’s real meat, but it doesn’t come via a farm and slaughterhouse.
The founder and director of the Shojinmeat Project is called Yuki Hanu. He describes his company as a not-for-profit citizen science project, which aims to enable “restaurant chefs or hobbyists to grow designer meat in their premises”.
The project hasn’t quite reached the level where they’re growing whole pork cutlets, but they’ve made a good start.
“We have been successful in establishing an entirely DIY version of animal cell cultural protocols,” says Hanu, explaining that the project provides people with instructions, including a list of items to buy, for cultivating small amounts of meat at home. And these items aren’t lab-grade gadgets; they’re all readily available online or on the high street.
Some items you may wish to acquire include a fertilised chicken egg, a towel warmer, a sports drink and a collagen-coated dish – but you can customise the components.
The idea is to replicate the kind of cell culture that happens in a lab. Hanu explains: “When the right cells are placed in the right culture media, under the right conditions for a sustained period of time, cells proliferate.”
The sports drink is for you to consume while setting up this process? Nope:
So, once you’ve bought everything you need, you take cells from a fertilised chicken egg, and you keep them at 37°C (98.6°F) and at an acidity level of pH7.4 – so, just slightly more alkaline than water.
That’s where an incubator would come in handy, but luckily for you, you’ve got a towel warmer, which should (pretty much) do the trick.
The chicken cells need something to stick to, called a cell scaffold. That’s what your collagen-coated dish will do.
And you’ll need to feed the cells with sugar, amino acids, vitamins and minerals – something Hanu calls the ‘basal medium’. Hence, you’ve got your sports drink.
There ya go.
Artist Of The Week–Kerry James Marshall:
The day before his survey exhibition “The Histories” opened to the public — his largest presentation of work in Europe, with more than 70 works made over four and a half decades — Kerry James Marshall sat in one of the soaring picture galleries of the Royal Academy of Art.
On the walls were his newest paintings, from the series “Africa Revisited,” several of which focus on the considerable role African elites played in capturing and selling other Africans to European slave traders. It is a subject that has been widely written about by historians, but has rarely, if ever, been broached in the visual arts.
The series is pure Kerry James Marshall, a painter who has spent his career depicting all facets of history, with little regard for mythologizing or uplift. “I’m not a romanticist about anything — I’ve seen too much for those fantasies about any kind of perfect Edenic past to be relevant to me,” he said.
“These paintings are not unique just because they’re about Africans, but because there’s complexity in the way we are being asked to think about and understand that history,” he added. “I am always trying to make the pictures that nobody else is making.”
“Haul,” 2025, features an ebony-skinned woman lounging on a bag of cowrie shells, surrounded by a bounty of luxury objects.Credit…via David Zwirner, London; Photo by Kerry McFate
Neko Case, Avowed Enemy Of Victorianism:
By the mid-1800s, Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin decided he’d had enough of the Romantic penchant for sentimentality. He believed that all art ought to strive to capture nature as accurately as possible, and the poets of the era were spitting on that noble pursuit with every ridiculous metaphor they penned.
In response to a line from Charles Kingsley’s “The Sands of Dee” that described sea foam as “cruel” and “crawling,” Ruskin scoffed: “The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” He dubbed this literary phenomenon the “pathetic fallacy,” and derided those who fell prey to it for being weak in mind, body, and spirit—so weak, in fact, that their inability to resist being “borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion” left them forever blind to the reality of the world around them.
By 2025, defining voice of folk, alt-country, and indie rock Neko Case has long since decided she’s had enough of this old-fashioned fascistic insistence on repression. “I just want for people to regain their connection with their animal nature and with nature in general so badly,” she tells me over Zoom, clenching her fists for emphasis. Case, fifty-four, is currently sprawled out on a blue couch, embroidery materials scattered on the table in front of her, her face wildly emotive and her now-white-streaked red mane bright even through my laptop screen.
“We need to get back to our instincts, which we have worked so hard to suppress since the Victorian era.” A guttural sigh of frustration rips its way from her throat as she leans her head back in exaggerated anger. “God, fucking Queen Victoria was such a fucking asshole. Don’t even get me started. If only she didn’t hate women and also literally everyone else.”
Great interview. The album will appeal most to those who know/knew the musicians she eulogizes/honors on the album.
In June of 2012, when Mike Fitz was working as a park ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwest Alaska, he decided to set up cameras to capture the moose, bald eagles and bears in their natural habitat. As a longtime ranger, Fitz had observed the animals up close honing their hunting and fishing skills and preparing each year for hibernation. Now he wanted to give others that chance as well. The cameras, positioned at key sites around the park, could livestream 24 hours a day into the homes of wildlife enthusiasts, many of whom might never get the chance to visit Katmai’s remote location.
“When I started to work at Brooks River, I got to see the same bears every day, and I learned that most of the bears that we see at Brooks River come back to the river every year. It was kind of like a light-bulb moment for me,” he said in a recent interview. “I got to see animals with different personalities and dispositions, different ways of making a living. I started to interpret those stories to the general public, and found that the public really engaged with the stories.”
More than a decade later, eager fans collect in subreddits to discuss the bearcams; they write lengthy online guides and post TikToks of their favorite cam moments; there’s even a hashtag. And of course—most famously—there’s Fat Bear Week.
A collaborative effort between Explore.org, Katmai National Park and the Katmai Conservancy, the annual competition pits the Katmai bears against each other as they prepare for hibernation to see who represents the fattest and “most successful.” In late summer, Fitz works alongside the park rangers to identify a list of contenders, which they arrange into a March Madness-style bracket. He writes lengthy biographies for each bear—which are tagged with a number and occasionally a nickname—and posts before-and-after photos showing the bear’s weight gain over the course of the summer. Throughout the week, online users vote in the single-elimination tournament before the year’s fattest bear is crowned.
This Mike Fitz is my kind of obsessive:
With plenty of salmon to go around, 2025’s bears are even chunkier than usual. “The bears are extremely fat this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing how people react to how fat they are,” he said.
In a world where “things suck for wildlife and ecosystems around the world,” Fitz said, Fat Bear Week provides a temporary antidote, spotlighting a fully intact ecosystem with wildlife that’s thriving.
“I think Fat Bear Week resonates with so many people because it’s a celebration of the success of wild animals. It’s a showcase of a healthy ecosystem. And those are things worth celebrating,” he said.
Check out the article for a couple of profoundly-fat bears.
For those of you who have lamented my failure to tip my sombrero to Sweet Stavin Chain, here’s my apology. Oops, no video available. Let’s bring in Dave Van Ronk from the bearpen (even though I’d forgotten that he sucks):
