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"...if you want to know what your future looks like, don't waste your time on Analog; read Time magazine. We are already saturated in the future. "
- Peter Watts

ChickieNobs  
  Chicken meat sliced from a transgenic organism.  

"This is the latest," said Crake.

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.

"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.

"But there aren't any heads..."

"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."

Technovelgy from Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood.
Published by Nan A. Talese in 2003
Additional resources -

Would you eat one? The characters in the story aren't too sure - "it would be like eating a large wart."

Compare to artificial food from The World Set Free (1914) by H.G. Wells, synthetic food from Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Keller, syntho-steak from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein, vat meat from The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz, Chicken Little from The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth, animal tissue culture vat from Uller Uprising (1952) by H. Beam Piper, carniculture plants (factories) from Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper, butcher plant from Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford Simak, pseudoflesh from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert, and vat-grown meat from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Oryx and Crake
  More Ideas and Technology by Margaret Atwood
  Tech news articles related to Oryx and Crake
  Tech news articles related to works by Margaret Atwood

ChickieNobs-related news articles:
  - Do Mutant Chickens Offer 'Maximum, Diabolical Meatiness'?

Articles related to Food
3D Printed Cheesecake Not Quite Food Replicator Quality
Porcine Fat Cells For 3D-Printed Whole Pork Products
Microbial Protein Production More Efficient Than Crops
NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge!

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