[ WP ] You are sent on a quest to the unchartered corners of the world for the rarest of meats in the world : beef .

Since around 2110, there's been an ever growing cultural obsession with the cows and pastures of long bygone eras; those eden-esque utopias of rolling green hills and walking black-and-white slabs of succulent and flavorful flesh, adorned with horns and bells, and completely oblivious to their own deliciousness. Beautiful utopias later replaced with large metal hauls-like barns—mostly aluminum or steel, and usually painted nice colors to avoid *absolute* soulessness—in order to keep up with near-insatiable market demand. 
 
 The density of these barns populations, as well as the pervasiveness of deliciousness-favoring selective breeding, eventually led to extremely immunodeficient and genetically imbalanced cows; climaxing in a massive outbreak of internoratic lingesia, an airborne disease that causes cows to slowly collapse inward, until they're turned entirely inside out. Afflicted cows can easily survive in the already life-support like environments of industrialized cow and dairy farms, but their now-external meat will slowly atrophy and rot, rendering it useless for consumption. 
 
 The lingesia pandemic spread so rapidly that the then-massive beef industry collapsed practically overnight. The final nail in the coffin being the fatal stroke suffered by one Gerrald Ingver—owner of the last sizeable bastion of non-lingesia-stricken cows—in 2069, and the subsequent mix-up during the estate distribution, which resulted in of 80 % of the non-imploded cows being sent to farms that by all sensible metrics should have been quarantined. 
 
 After the initial wave of shock and cultural reconfiguration swept through a hambergerless, stakeless, and deeply saddened American populous, the following forty beefless years went incredibly smoothly, meat-wise. Pork sales rose, substitutes were invented, and deer were domesticated. But in the last 16 years there's been a palpable change, as if a large crowd were slowly but inevitably approaching rather than growing in size; and all shouting in unison: a war call, a rousing song, a great and mighty chant: `` Where's the beef?'' 
 
 In 2120, congress and senate caved to mounting pressure and created the `` Department of Beef Location'' with unprecedented bipartisan support. It took the D.B.L. a full year before locating even a single right-side-out bovine. This `` Golden Calf'' ( a popular nickname for the cow, its real name is Weizen ) was found on a rural wyoming ranch owned by the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Ardlen, who still to this day believe their prized animal was abducted by cow-mongering aliens. It's unclear whether they mean this in the extraterrestrial sense, or if the Ardlens are in fact rather xenophobic. 
 
 The D.B.L. then set up laboratories in hopes of cloning the beloved Weizen and disseminating delicious clone-meat to the masses. Giant underground bunkers the size of airplane hangars, completely sterile and white, and filled to the brim with expensive equipment and people with lab coats and too many degrees, were kept running all hours in its inexhaustible pursuit of conjuring any life form at all cow-like from its test-tubes and incubators. 
 
 Weizen gained an almost fanatical following in popular culture, her image gracing everything from shirts and mugs, to action figures and cg children's shows. There were even several cults and religious dedicated to her; one reaching such a substantial size the federal government was forced to recognize their holidays, as so many people were refusing to come into work on Weizenween—the eve of her holiness' discovery, celebrated by burning sage and dosing yourself in milk as an offering to Our One True Heifer. 
 
 Three years and uncountable dollars were sunk into the replication of the great Weizen; but lo, persistence prevailed, and a new beef-blessed age was dawning. The Weizen-spawn were kept in individual pens, sealed off from all potentially lingesia-tainted air, and pumped full of antibiotics and various flavor-enhancing substances. The recipes of yore returned, pork and deer prices fell—chicken is unflinching and basically a gold standard of meat prices—and Weizenites everywhere rejoiced immensely. 
 
 But the obsession continues. Demand for pasture paintings is still rising, tourism to old and long defunct dairy farms is booming, and milk crates are now an exorbitantly expensive and prized collector's item; all fueled by a massive and ever growing nostalgia: that vague longing, not just for a flavor or texture or dish, but for a moment in time when cows freely roamed and munched grass and did whatever else cows did with their pre-our-meal lives.
