Printed Meat and Nattering Packages
Business 2.0, May 2003

Business 2.0 commissioned this short-short story from me as a sidebar to a feature of way-out technologies written by my pal David Pescovitz (who co-edits Boing Boing with me. It was really challenging trying to squeeze all those technologies into such a short piece!

Rennie stood among the sculptural displays of ready-to-eats at D'Agostino's, thinking There are way funner things for a 16-year-old to do on vacation in Manhattan than go grocery shopping. But that's how it goes: Over lunch Dad had announced that he had to catch a supersonic back to California for a second lunch with clients. Come evening, Mom was so pooped from sightseeing without another adult to ride herd on Gemma, Rennie's kid sister, that she crashed at the hotel with the brat and sent him out to buy dinner.

Rennie knew exactly what he wanted: a big tube of SteakyPaste Extreme! SteakyPaste was blue and swirled with gold, tasted better than a Big Mac, and gave Rennie hard, fast twitches that demanded he burn off his energy playing Ultima Extreme! Just try finding SteakyPaste at D'Agostino's, though. The store didn't even have aisles -- it had sophisticated "food experience clusters" that made him feel 1 inch tall and a million miles from home.