Picture this: you walk into a restaurant in 2035 and instead of bacon sizzling on the grill, there's a carrot sculpted into the shape of a pig's arse. "It oinks when you roast it," says the waiter, who is either being ironic or has been microdosing LSD before his shift. Welcome to the dazzling new frontier of food: vegetable animals.
The idea is deceptively simple: you genetically (or, if you're posh, aesthetically) coax vegetables to grow into the shapes of animals. Cauliflowers sculpted into cows. Broccoli sprouting into bunnies. Tomatoes fattened up until they resemble a plump, juicy salmon.
It's the vegan dream. Or nightmare. Or fever dream. Honestly, it depends how many oat flat whites you've had. Because let's be real — this is veganism's final Pokémon evolution. We've already had soy pretending to be sausages, mushrooms dressed as steaks, and that one horrifying thing where beetroot juice is engineered to "bleed". Now we've reached the logical conclusion: vegetables cosplaying as livestock. Apparently, it's to "ease the transition." Meat eaters, so the theory goes, won't miss animals if the aubergines are already mooing at them. Which is a bit like saying you won't miss your ex if your Roomba starts wearing their clothes. Technically true, but also completely insane.
Because let's be absolutely clear: if you want a carrot, eat a carrot. If you want a pig, eat a pig. What we don't need is a genetically modified beetroot in the shape of a Labrador, staring up at you with kale-leaf ears while you decide whether to throw it a stick or roast it with thyme.
The first time I saw one of these vegetable animals, I nearly ran it over. Not because it moved, but because it looked exactly like a sheep. A sheep made of spinach. What are we doing? Humanity has been through wars, plagues, and the entire discography of Coldplay, and now our big food innovation is teaching lettuces to resemble Labradors.
Yes, yes, it's "ethical". No animals are harmed, they say. But here's the problem: the vegans want meat substitutes without guilt, but instead of accepting that, they're reinventing guilt in 3D vegetable form. Imagine your child biting into a sweetcorn chicken nugget and crying because it looked too much like Peppa Pig. Congratulations, you've traumatised a generation.
Where does it end? Onion horses you can ride into town? Courgette giraffes blocking the motorway? Will we one day sit down to a Sunday roast where the centerpiece is a turnip in the exact likeness of your family Labrador? Probably, yes. Because humans are idiots. We'll buy it. We'll queue up for it. We'll Instagram it with captions like "Plant-based piggies #blessed." And then we'll eat it, and pretend it tastes just like pork. Which it won't. It'll taste like turnip.
Vegetable animals are the future of vegan food. Which is to say, we've officially run out of ideas. When historians look back at this era, they won't talk about AI or space travel. They'll talk about the time we genetically engineered cucumbers to look like golden retrievers. And they'll say, "This was the exact moment civilisation gave up."
ORIGINAL CONCEPT by Rankin
AI GENERATOR Rankin
STORY WRITTEN by AI
