When it comes to giant publicity stunts, you can’t go wrong with the woolly mammoth. Or so believed the American explorer Wendell Phillips Dodge who organised the infamous 1951 annual dinner of The Explorers Club where, reports of the day announced, the meat of the woolly mammoth was served (some guests later said that what they’d eaten was actually the meat of the giant sloth or megatherium). Research on the remains of the dinner done by Yale University decades later, however, showed that no extinct Pleistocene giants were served that night. What the dinner guests had chowed down on was the green sea turtle — an exotic meat by most standards, but far from a headline-grabber.
There is perhaps a little more mammoth in the humongous meatball created and cooked this week by the Australian cultured meat start-up Vow at Nemo, a science museum in Amsterdam — but only just. The meat was made with sheep cells, with a single mammoth gene, myoglobin, inserted into it. But even this gene sequence was incomplete and needed a little help from the mammoth’s closest modern relative, the African elephant. The whole thing sounds a little too much like the Ship of Theseus paradox — is it really a woolly mammoth meatball if there is barely any woolly mammoth in it?
The good news is that the mammoth meatball is not going to be available for commercial consumption. Even this single exhibit was merely cooked — reportedly emanating an aroma similar to crocodile meat — and has not been tasted. The animal has been extinct for far too long, leading to serious concerns about allergic reactions. The whole exercise, according to the makers, was designed simply to draw attention to how the current food systems affect the planet and to highlight the role that cultured meat can play in making human consumption more sustainable. Too bad that under the mammoth shadow cast by the meatball, this message was lost.
