Two odd “meaty” things have come across my purview lately, which is my cue to pretend they’re related and try to hang a post on them.

The first was a wonderful refrigerator ad campaign done in Germany. Bosch’s “VitaFresh” technology promises to keep food fresher longer, so they placed packages of “fresh dinosaur meat” in supermarkets to hyperbolically illustrate how long they could keep food fresh.

I adore this kind of fake-artifact thing; the packaged “meat” puts me in mind very much of the products sold in 826 stores. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to create something similar out of carved styrofoam and/or polymer clay, and they’d make awesome decorations at a time travel-themed party.

The other meat-related thing is BiteLabs, an organization which purports to grow meat from “celebrity tissue samples” and use it to make artisanal salami.

We start with top-quality ingredients, and time-honored recipes for the creation of fine cured meats. We mix celebrity and animal meats, grown in house through a proprietary culturing process, into curated salami blends. Starting with biopsied myoblast cells, we grow our healthy, rich, meats in Bite Labs’ own bioreactors.

Our process yields high-quality, luxury protein, in a sustainable manner that eliminates the environmental and ethical concerns associated with traditional livestock production.

Much like the Bonsai Kittens of old they play it completely straight, with blurbs touting their “vision” for a healthier planet and a request that fans urge their favorite celebrity to contribute cells. There’s even a wish list of celebrities they particularly want to incorporate in their sausages, along with a description of what each product would taste like. The Ellen Degeneres salami, for instance: “As a salami, we see Ellen Salami composition blended with ostrich. Black pepper and garlic with a playful kick of mustard give the Ellen salami a highly approachable and well-rounded flavor. A hint of brandy and shallots will finish off the Ellen salami in exquisite fashion.”

It’s an amusing trip down the rabbit hole, and it’d be fun to see how many friends you could convince that it was legitimate. Even better, serve salami at your next party and then provide a printed “fact sheet” about which celebrity sausage your friends had just eaten. (Shadow Manor takes no responsibility for lost friendships or punches in the nose which may result from this suggestion.)