Found: RonCo Meat-O-Matic

This QVC gizmo lets you culture your own vat-grown meat in the comfort of your home

One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at Wired magazine was the monthly back-page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e., the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers, illustrators, and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print—which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.

This piece ran in the March 2008 issue of Wired. I remember that everyone loved the QVC-home shopping-RonCo angle on future tech. We initially explored laser knives, but we ended up going with cultured meat. The onscreen artwork of the home vat-grown meat-growing appliance is by John MacNeil, and the surrounding context is a Corbis stock image.

Detailed images and full text below.

Offer Expires 2/29/2016

RonCo™ Meat-O-Matic

Vat-grown Kobe beef in the comfort of your home!

RETAIL VALUE: $900​
QVC PRICE: $699.95

FREE S&H

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No Bones! Kosher! Halal! Plus, if you act now ...
... you'll qualify to receive Iberian ham, veal, whale, swordfish, and woolly mammoth tissue cultures AT NO EXTRA CHARGE!

ITEM KL-805262.1-V17001 QVC Kitchen Ideas