Cradle to Market Design
Oddtopia Design Fiction Shorts #7
Welcome to the future of cattle—the age-old industry made completely human-free, completely out of sight.
Cattle enjoy a bespoke, serene existence from birth to butchery, cared for by the robots and personalized virtual realities that cater to their every need. They never perceive their reality as cattle, instead living in landscapes of lush green fields and endless blue skies—environments designed to ensure they never experience a moment of distress. While some claim it is cruel that these animals live their whole lives never interactive or even perceiving another living thing, data shows otherwise. Advanced sensors continuously monitor their health and happiness, adjusting virtual scenarios in real-time to keep them in blissful contentment. The new "Guilt-Free" label ensures you that what you're buying is an ethical product in the meat revolution.
Take pork, for example. Pigs enjoy six sublime months in VR, right up to a weight of about 300 pounds (140 kgs). When their algorithmically determined harvest date arrives, a seamless transition occurs—thanks to VR headsets that ingeniously double as bolt-guns for instant, painless euthanasia. From there, they are automatically transported to disassembly, where robotic butchers process them with surgical precision. This method maximizes yield and minimizes waste, ensuring that every part of the animal is utilized.
This streamlined process slashes production times, much to the delight of factory owners, and completely eliminates the mental health issues once faced by human butchers. For consumers like us, this means a dependable supply of high-quality, ethically produced pork that you can feel good about.
“Guilt-free” is the promise. Meat is just a commodity, after all. In dark abattoirs, lit in the soft glow of VR headsets, cattle becomes material, integral resources of a sophisticated, automated process. This system ensures that while the concept of animals might have vanished from collective memory, our reliance on meat production has never been stronger. If a child asks, "Where does meat come from?" We simply shrug and say, "I don't know... factories, I guess."
Notes from me:
I find that in my life, almost all of my unhappinesses come from me knowing about something that I can’t do anything about. I find willful ignorance to be so underrated.
Do you also wrestle with this? Are you also burdened with the knowledge of a cruelty that you are not in a position to do anything about? I hate it. I try so hard to stay uninformed. And somehow… I still more or less know what’s going on in the world. And if you buy Peter Singer’s argument that inaction despite knowledge is basically evil…
Well… Fuck, I’ll see y’all in hell!
Oddtopia
noun
Neither utopia nor dystopia, but a cultural milieu defined by an (over)embracing of quirky, idiosyncratic societal norms.
If you missed the others, check a selection of them out here:
