Food technology company Primeval Foods plans to launch an entire menagerie of exotic meats that didn't actually come from animals, including lion burgers, tiger nuggets or giraffe ham. As the meat-alternatives market becomes increasingly competitive, food tech companies are coming up with ingenious ways of makingtheir products stand out. No animals are actually hurt in the process of growing these exotic meats in a laboratory, as they are actually grown from cultured cells, but the simple idea of consuming lion or tiger is just weird, if not downright off-putting for a lot of people. "The reason we consume traditional species like beef and chicken today is not that they are the tastiest, healthiest, or most nutritious ones," says Yilmaz Bora, managing partner at Ace Ventures (the company behind Primeval Foods). "It's because they are the easiest to domesticate. Since cultivated meat allows us to go beyond domesticated species, now we can explore the tastiest, healthiest and most nutritious options."
Witty response to ticket typo
in January of 2004, Aucklander Justin Lee got a speeding ticket coming home from the Parachute music festival at Mystery Creek on Auckland Anniversary weekend. He very quickly noticed a typo making the date of the offence 30 years beforehand, in 1974 — on the day he was born. He wrote a long and wonderful letter... He said: "Firstly, the 'date of offence' is listed as the 23rd of June 1974 with the time being at or around half past six in the evening. This is of grave concern to me because I was not issued a driver's licence until sometime in 1990 ... I do not have a clear recollection of very much at all before I was three and a half years old, so I rang Mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that – coincidentally – I was born that day!! Mum mentioned that I was born at around five o'clock in the evening... For me to have travelled from Porirua to the foot of the Bombay Hills just out of Auckland by six thirty, I would had to have crawled into the first car in the hospital parking lot and headed for Auckland at around 1000km/h. For this reason, it is entirely possible that the constable who clocked me back in 1974 was holding his laser equipment upside down and instead of doing 116km/h as per the infringement notice, it is more likely that I was doing 911km/h." The police replied humourlessly saying they decided "on this occasion to waive the offence".
"I asked the restaurant I'm going to for a birthday lunch today if we could bring a cake to be brought out at the end of the meal. They said yes, but they'd charge us cakeage (yes, cakeage) at £10 a head. What is this world we live in?"
