Selling people their own pets
People eat pigs and love dogs, and the line between the two is cultural, not biological. Our team built a company that pretended not to know that, and took it to New York.
The argument
The Biodesign Challenge asks school and university teams to use biology and design to say something about the future. Our entry, Meat of the Matter: A Flesh Perspective, went at speciesism, the line people draw between the animals they eat and the animals they love.
Arguing that directly convinces nobody. So we did it twice, in two registers.
One half was straight research on the environmental and welfare impact of meat production. The other half was Eat Your Pets: a fully realised brand for a pet-to-table service, presented completely deadpan.
Building it out
Satire only works if the execution is sincere. A half-built version would have read as a joke and been forgotten in a minute. So the brand got a logo, a cookbook, a product range, service tiers and a recipe card, and visitors were left to work out for themselves why something so professionally put together felt so wrong. That discomfort was the argument.
My part
I worked on the research through the year and built the project’s website from visuals the rest of the team produced. The two sites were the primary artefacts, since a service brand that exists only on a poster is not convincing.
Ten of us worked on it, eight travelled to New York, and seven presented on stage. I was one of them.
Result
Outstanding High School Project, Biodesign Challenge Summit 2025.
This was a team project and the credit belongs to all ten. I have described only my own contribution (research, the website, and presenting) rather than implying the concept or the artwork were mine.
What stayed with me has little to do with biology. An argument people can pick up and turn over in their hands lands harder than the same argument written down, and that applies to much more than a competition about meat.