February Patron Sketch - Future Beef (Patreon)

" Okay, how about this? It's more than half-way into this century, and humanity managed to survive while providing a decent standard of living to most people on the planet. Part of this is thanks to a booming industry of large-scale lab-grown food, which has replaced most of traditional farming. Take lab beef, for instance. Over many generations, the bovine cells were multiplied and perfected genetically so that each sample could be molded into a perfect steak. Today, the original donor steer is long dead, and one food scientist, working late at night all by herself, is starting to wonder. These cells haven't been allowed to grow into a living cow for ages. They mutated the cells with their eyes on what it would do to the finished PRODUCT... thinking of them as "steak cells".  But what was this hypothetical COW they had created, just behind the curtain of reality, this cow which had never been born, but who's very blueprint lay right in front of the young scientist now? So she stole a sample. She had her own lab at home, including an all-purpose artificial womb. Over the course of the following weeks, she managed to create a viable embryo, and watched it grow in the big glass tube. It has been nine months. What is the scientist looking at? "