BONE SCAFFOLD

As a girl I had a recurring daydream in which other children tore me limb from limb and devoured me raw. I was ruthlessly bullied at school. This probably nourished the fantasy. In the moment of its conjuration, however, this scene left me quite unseated by bliss. I dove into it like a retreating soldier happening upon a trench engorged with warm milk and red roses. The wellspring of this pleasure was the thought that my dismemberment would provide other kids some sustenance.

The memory invades my thoughts as I open the oven door to billowing scents of mustard-rubbed meats. Pepper grains nestle in the folds of red-brown flesh I've been preparing for, what, a year now? Ten years? An earthly lifetime?

I seal the oven once more with a satisfying thud. It's a hulking, ancient thing, worlds away from the antiseptic laboratory-level equipment to which I'm accustomed. This kitchen is so rustic I half expect to turn and find a scullery maid curtsying and mumbling something about hedgerows.

Instead I find the wafts of steam that have lately escaped the oven have fogged up the window overlooking the garden. I can still hear the several dozen children tearing up the sod out there like a pre-pubescent Bacchanalia. It's not often they get to race around the museum grounds after dark.

I had only just set my meat creation roasting when I caught a glimpse of the gates beyond the window parting, the flood of juvenile potential cascading into the dinosaur-themed garden. It's not just any child who scores an invitation to a once-in-history dining occasion such as ours. These are the offspring of people who design the future. Or pay for the designing, at least.

Just short of twelve months ago I crossed the threshold of Carnevale, a startup whose founder had personally tracked me down. My head had been hunted. The office had its own DJ-slash-barista, trampoline room and nerf gun battles royale. At my age I was just hoping the air conditioning worked.

People hear what I do for a living and they think who is this old hippy chick? They take one look and decide I'm an old school mung bean evangelist still banging on the same can after fifty years.

The truth is: I'm not even vegetarian.

I'm even more old-fashioned than the hippies.

I'm a scientist.

Food science, don't start, I've heard all the jokes already.

The startup makes... well. The marketing department's focus group focus-pocused a shitload of verbal lingerie for the product.

'Alternative protein.' 'Plant-enriched sustenance.'

Anything but fake meat.

Other companies make fake meat. Carnevale's product is real meat. Grown in a lab, certainly, but morally sterilised and tasty as fuck.

'Ethical cannibalism?'

That was an actual proposition. I was in the boardroom describing some of the advances we'd made in bioprinting when my eyes wandered to the whiteboard and saw what the marketing team had been spitballing.

Bioprinting isn't new. It's pretty much the same 3D printing technology they use to whip up your model aircraft or carbon jewellery or the bloody prosthetic hip they jimmied into me two summers back. You brew some animal cells and plug them into a tricked-out 3D printer, tell it what poundage of flesh you fancy and catch the muscle and cartilage it spits out.

For a long time what you caught was a plateful of protein-rich slurry. Nobody sat up until the Japanese pioneered an organic glue that could help the mush to stick together, and all of a sudden the promise of clean meat that actually resembled meat announced itself.

That's where I made my name. I'd been working in food science labs for the better part of my life and while I had no particular interest in meat alternatives my special area of interest was in meat architecture. Where the meat meets the bone, the way flesh tears away differently when cooked, how the viscosity of blood and introduction of alien ingredients... oh don't get me started.

Others created the conditions for printable meat, but I pioneered the skeleton. Greater minds than mine performed the real science that produced ethical mince, but I established the grounds for a guilt-free suckling pig, rib-eye steak and hocks innumerable. A week after Science published my paper, Carnevale's founder approached me with an offer that on an off day might well have occasioned a stroke.

An adult scream interrupts my reverie. I rub a porthole in the window fog and catch a harried museum staff member stuffed into a stegosaurus suit fleeing the outstretched pincers of an eight-year-old who has peaked early on the infant amuse-bouches.

Tonight's evening is for Carnevale staff and select shareholders but won't show up on any annual reports. The event's ostensible purpose is to celebrate the company's IPO. Those in attendance wouldn't have left home were it not for the menu item I've promised.

DNA sequencing is even older than bioprinting. You remember Dolly. Sourcing the DNA for tonight's main course wasn't difficult, but the museum only came on board when Carnevale's founder promised to hold the launch in the museum's dinosaur playground. Tonight's guests will be the first humans ever to feast on the choicest cuts of the late cretaceous era.

I can't imagine the whiteboarding that prefaced the decision. Would you prefer to wrap your lips around a peak predator or the most massive creature to walk the earth? Does a velociraptor seem too gamey? A plesiosaur not meaty enough? They settled on the gallimimus, a species best known for being edible.

Imagine being resurrected only to be eaten all over again.

I once shared a house with a man who couldn't cook but called himself a 'grill master'.

He was a knife guy and like every knife guy was very eager to introduce you to the elaborate history of each knife he'd acquired.

That is how I knew that one knife in particular was a Japanese takobiki blade (blunt-tipped but with a sphincter-clenchingly sharp edge ideal for slicing sashimi) and all of this information was present in my brain when, while absent-mindedly drying it with a tea-towel, I dropped the knife and through muscle instinct sought to catch the falling blade.

True to the marketing, it sliced a divot in the fleshy wedge of hand between thumb and forefinger so cleanly that I felt no pain at all. Perhaps it razored a nerve – in any case if you pinch that little delta there's not a lot of feeling – but the absence of pain left me time to reconsider my prejudicial attitudes towards my housemate's knife obsession. Maybe an expensive knife is expensive for a reason. The wound wasn't even bleeding.

When the knife hit the slate floor the clatter was enough to set my hand flapping and I watched a wedge of skin detach itself and fall to the floor. It was the size of a dried pea. There's something about seeing a part of your body separated from the rest. That and some sublimated version of the ten-second rule had me picking up the lump of meat before I'd really registered it, and so there I found myself twisting and turning in the kitchen, trying to work out where best to stow the thing. That's when the bleed began, too. My hand began really pumping the red stuff all over the place.

There was paper towel under the sink and I knew the rubbish bin was under there too. The thought of throwing my own flesh in the communal trash seemed unimaginably rude. In the heat of the moment I tossed the skin in my mouth and swallowed.

I knew at the moment, and still know to this day, the primal logic that led to my doing this.

But here's me acting the maggot. That's how my mum used to put it. It's a funny old saying.

I take a sip of the grape ferment I've been working on in my spare time. It's not good. It wants to be vinegar, is the problem.

A food scientist once told me that: pretty much everything wants to be vinegar.

'To get by in this world,' he said to me, 'you need a poor palate or a hard heart. So much of what passes for fine dining is simply slowly congealing disappointment with a balsamic glaze.'

My hands form a cone around my eyes as I focus on the meat roasting in the oven. How long is too long for dinosaur meat?

The marketing team were pecking at slivers of my product around the galleon-sized table that dominated Conference Room 3.

This pink-faced bloke with one of those haircuts just yearning for another world war dug a finger into my gallimimus prototype. 'Can we flavour this stuff?'

I felt my gorge rise and swallowed. More than one department at Carnevale had elevated my communication style to HR level. 'The flavour of our product is tantamount. Paramount.' I felt my cheeks filling with blood. 'Ours is a competitive market. The demand for fake meat,' - I immediately baulked at my stumble – 'ethical protein is at an all-time high, and we believe the mouth-feel, resistance and plain bloody juiciness of our product eclipses all competition. Tainting that achievement with other flavours may not be in our best interest at this juncture.'

'I'm just thinking out loud,' he went on, hands windmilling, 'just thinking like truffle infusions. Like truffle meat, chuck a bunch of that truffle flavour in at the molecular level.'

Truffles. I felt I understood this person now.

Truffles are like opera. Nobody has a really outstanding time with either, but one must maintain appearances. Enjoyment isn't the point. It's about turning up.

'Mr... what should I call you?' I asked.

His face was blank.

'I appreciate your feedback,' I said. 'The consumer will appreciate that you've attempted to improve their experience. But I have worked towards this moment since before you were born. I have tasted flesh in each of its incarnations, including my own. God be in my mouth, as the hymn goes, and in my speaking. But please know with absolute certainty that it's not God telling you to bite my arse.'

A part of me wanted the room to rile back in horror. But let's be honest. Around a conference room table you cannot ask for much more than pursed lips and averted gazes.

With the skeleton technology Carnevale purchased from me, the company can grow meat from any protein base. I oversaw early successes with cow, goat, lamb. Some saw it as natural we move onto more ethically challenging fare. Venison and whale and dog. Nobody baulked at the creation. Some refrained from the tasting. Especially when it came to primates.

I lean in close to the oven window and for a moment I see my own dead face reflected back at me. At first I wanted to print a version of me that was young and perfect. But that would be giving them what they wanted all along. No, they can take me as I am.

The flesh I'm roasting may be decided by prehistoric DNA but its architecture is my own.

I yank the oven door open and slide the roast onto the platter I've prepared. A four-lettuce mix studded with radishes, foraged carrots and some frankly bestial turnips will form a bed for the meat golem.

I want you to understand that I'm not upset by the decision to lay me off.

I settle the wig, and apply a thin red gloss to the lips, careful not to dislodge them.

For all my achievements, the creature I have printed on this bone scaffold is not my effigy.

It's not what I had hoped for at all – nothing like looking into a mirror.

But it should provide the children some sustenance.