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"Cocoon, the fish and meat maker, is the winner of the Electrolux Design Lab 2009 competition."

"The appliance will supposedly grow meat and fish from prepackaged 'genetically modified' meat and fish.... Apparently the genetically modified prepackaged food, can be 'grown' in the cocoon during cooking, like microwave popcorn.  The process isn?t like the food generators on Star Trek. It doesn?t create food out of thin air, nor will it clone food from natural fish and meat sources.  If it isn?t the genetically modified meat or fish, you can?t grow it."

You can't actually buy the Cocoon yet. But would you want one? ("Cocoon" suggests we're going to be eating insects!)

It reminds me of "Chicken Little" ? "a huge mass of cultured chicken breast, was kept alive by algae skimmed by nearly-slave labor from multistory towers of ponds surrounded by mirrors to focus the sunlight onto the ponds" in "The Space Merchants," by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth). Here's the description in the book:

Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.

And click on that list for a nice list of food in science fiction, with clickable details. You mayb be interested in the Butcher Plant, Carniculture Vat, ChickieNobs, Pseudoflesh, the Yeast-Beast Machine, etc. etc.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 29, 2009 (boomark / email).