Mammoths, Metabolism, and Meta-Species

In March 2023, Vow Food, a company based in Sydney, Australia, announced they had made a “mammoth meatball” (Vow Food 2023a). By this they meant their meatball was not merely large (which it was), but that it was constructed from the extinct woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). Although the last mammoth strolled the tundra over 4,000 years ago, several relatively intact specimens have been discovered frozen in Siberia and the Yukon Territory (Andrew 2019). Vow used DNA recovered from the hair of these animals, applying the emerging methods of “lab grown” or “cultured” meat to make their “meatball.”Although the meatball was announced with great fanfare—unveiled at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands—no one was actually allowed to eat it (van Campenhout and van der Wouw 2023). Leaving aside questions of legality (lab-grown meats are not approved for human consumption in the Netherlands or Australia), the scientists who created it, at least publicly, declared it too dangerous for human consumption, citing the possibility of allergic reactions to ancient proteins (Hunt 2023).Why make an un-eatable meatball? Or, putting it more sharply, why—at a moment when lab-grown meats are just entering more broadly into public awareness and many companies are attempting to normalize these products—did Vow think it necessary to create a monstrous meatball—a product of heightened artificiality that deliberately disrupts boundaries between experiment and eating?What I argue here is that the mammoth meatball (and similarly engineered foods) are attempts to find new regimes of speculation and value through the temporal disruption of food. The meatball’s very inedibility suggests that its value lies less in its consumability and more in its potential for generating new possibilities for value extraction through molecular and metabolic engineering. The industrialization of food production has involved various forms of acceleration, speeding up the growth of crops, the fattening of animals, and the transportation of products. This acceleration has allowed foods to increasingly participate in regimes of exchange and speculation in which their value has less and less to do with their edibility (Cassidy et al. 2013; Schuster 2021) or their relationship to individual plant or animal species. The mammoth meatball doubles down on these forms of temporal intervention, generating new possibilities for consuming flesh that harnesses the deep past in order to exert new forms of control over our risky futures. Lab-grown meats draw on the immortal potentials of engineered cells not to generate new forms of gustation but rather to offer us new ways to reprogram our bodies and biographies through food.Of course, Vow and its meatball do not stand alone. For example, the London-based Primeval Foods also focuses on the production of exotic meats (Saxena 2022); and companies like Finless Foods (Emeryville, California) and Wildtype (San Francisco) aim to produce “high-end” seafood products (Kart 2021). Like Vow, these companies promise products that will disrupt our consumption in various ways. There is now a vast literature on novel proteins—including on their potential environmental effects (Tuomisto and de Mattos 2011; Murray 2018), on their ethical implications (Galusky 2014; Warkentin 2006), on their relationship to biotechnology (Metcalf 2013; Wurgaft 2020), and on their political economy (Santo and Dutkiewicz 2020; Dutkiewicz and Abrell 2021). A focus on the mammoth meatball, however, brings some of the imaginaries surrounding the emergence of these novel proteins into sharper focus. The visceral image of the meatball (figure 1) reveals—in a striking form—some of the assumptions, desires, and risks connected to these novel proteins. In particular, the meatball reveals how the potencies and the speculative value of novel proteins are related to their perceived ability to intervene in and assert control over biological time.Vow was founded by Tim Noakesmith and George Peppou in 2019. Peppou, with a degree in biochemistry and experience working as a restaurant cook, became interested in meat through working as a consultant to the Australian meat industry (Marston 2023). Noakesmith has a background in the medical technology industry and user experience design (Cultivated Meat Symposium 2019). Unlike other lab-based meat companies—the California-based GOOD Meat (formerly EatJust), for instance (which has focused mostly on chicken)—Vow’s plan from the outset was to cultivate exotic flesh. Peppou’s experience with the meat industry suggested to him that making a sustainable meat industry was never going to be achieved by “fixing incumbent industry” (Marston 2023). Rather, a new industry—focused on new animals—should be built from the ground up, Vow scientists believe. The chicken, fish, cattle, pigs, and sheep that make up most of today’s global meat intake make up just 0.02 percent of the world’s animal species (this percentage comes from Vow, although it is unclear how it was calculated—the category “fish,” of course, includes thousands of species). For Noakesmith, this means that “statistically speaking, it is highly likely that the best culinary experience to be found is not within these five animals” (Neo 2020). Instead, Vow has suggested consuming Galapagos turtles, yaks, lions, zebras, herons, and dugongs (Ho 2020).The development of the mammoth meatball fits within Vow’s mission to bring these unexpected proteins to the dinner plate. In a video on Vow’s website, Philip Davenport, the company’s in-house chef, outlines the culinary and gustatory opportunities of such explorations. Vow’s lab-grown meats will open up a “new playground” for chefs and diners by unlocking “great flavors from animals we’ve overlooked” (Vow Food 2023a).But the mammoth offers more than the possibility of a more dynamic palette. Indeed, Vow has presented their meatball in ways that attempt to align it with the sustainable and ethical value of lab-grown meat (see Crownhart 2023 and Schaefer and Savulescu 2014 on sustainability and ethics, respectively). For companies promoting cell-based meat products, marketing focuses on the environmental and moral impacts of traditional forms of agriculture.Vow promoted its meatball as a solution to many of these problems. Adopting cell-based meats like theirs, the company tells us, will lead to a reduction of the carbon footprint of meat that will make meat eating sustainable (Vow Food 2023a). The mammoth is put forward as a perfect icon for such a message since the animal itself was a victim of climate change, unable to adapt to warming temperatures at the end of the last ice age. “The mammoth is a gigantic symbol of loss,” Vow’s statement on the mammoth meatball reminded would-be consumers, “We hope our meatball will resurrect conversations about meat and climate change” (Vow Food 2023a).Indeed, the mammoth meatball promised to bring back to life not merely conversations about the planet’s future but also to suggest a way in which humanity could save itself. “Let’s eat our way out of extinction” Vow’s website tells us (Thomsen 2023). Eating mammoth—rather than cow or pig or sheep—offers a way, according to Vow, to refigure our consumption to adapt to the crisis facing our planet and our species. Resurrecting the mammoth (in a meatball) presages our own resurrection through cellular eating. The mammoth meatball becomes valuable not merely as a foodstuff but as a symbol of sustainability. Reaching into the larder of deep time allows Vow to proclaim a new kind of (ethical) value in eating.More than a decade ago, scholars of biomedicine were attempting to come to terms with the ways in which biologists were forging new potencies and potentialities from living things. Regenerative medicine, stem cells, cloning, DNA editing, and other techniques were promising a “new biology” that held out immense promise for improving life and health (e.g., see Wilmut et al. 2001). Social scientists attempted to make sense of the developments by accounting for the ways in which they generated new kinds of value for the life sciences. Tissues, cells, bodily fluids, blood, and DNA were talked about in terms of “biovalue” that had currency in the new “bioeconomy” (Birch and Tyfield 2012). “Biocapital” described the ways in which this newly found value accrued to biotech companies, states, or individuals (Helmreich 2008).Important amongst these forms of biovalue was the value associated with the prolongation of life. Stem cells, in particular, seemed to offer revivification and revitalization that offered hope of miraculous cures. Biologists seemed to have harnessed the “immortal” power of stem cells, even finding ways to wind back the clock on adult cells and transform them back into embryonic states. Melinda Cooper (2008) has described how stem cells seemed, in many imagined futures, to re-direct the potential of life. Rather than human potential as developing as a linear, biographical trajectory from birth to death, stem cells seemed to be able “re-route” the potential of life, transforming mere cells or lumps of flesh into life-saving therapies. In short, stem cells were valuable because of their purported ability to re-direct biological time.Vow’s technology draws on the science of stem cells, but now remaps and redeploys it. Rather than cells that can be injected into the body, cells are now grown and reformatted as flesh intended for (extraordinary) consumption. Once again, these cells carry with them promises and imaginations of immortality, here reframed as the possibility of prolonging the human species through particular forms of eating. The potencies and potentials of stem cells (and other biomedical technologies) have now been repurposed into different imaginations of and promises of technology, of health, of ethics, and of climate possibility. The potential disruption and re-ordering of time plays the central role here: the mammoth’s novelty and value lie precisely in the fact that it represents a reversal of biological time—a resurrection from dead animal into living cells.Vow’s products are for “change-makers, rule-breakers, and taste-seekers,” its website tells us (Vow Food 2023b). Such language is the now familiar language of “disruption”—of moving fast and breaking things. This is the world of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, of pivots, pitches, and platforms. If Vow’s target is disruption, then what does it aim to disrupt?Most immediately, of course, the company aims to disrupt what we eat: that is, our diets. It aims to redirect our meat consumption into pathways that are potentially more sustainable, more ethical, and healthier. Silicon Valley has maintained a considerable interest in diet, with many companies investing heavily in restaurants and kitchens to serve their employees at work. In particular, the idea of “hacking” (or “biohacking”) one’s diet in order to improve performance, productivity, attention, mood, or sleep has significant currency within the global start-up culture (Clark 2018). In 2013, a company called “Soylent” began producing a “meal replacement” that could be purchased as a powder, bar, or liquid. Founded by a software engineer and funded by Alphabet and Andreessen Horowitz, Soylent promised that its products contained all the nutritional elements necessary for a healthy diet. Calling itself “the world’s most perfect food” Soylent gained a significant following amongst other start-up employees, apparently too busy to think about preparing and eating fresh food (Soylent 2023).The moniker “Soylent” derives from Soylent Green, a 1973 dystopian movie (based on a 1966 science fiction novel) in which pollution and overpopulation have devastated the planet and humans are fed on the reprocessed bodies of the dead (Fleischer 1973). Adopting that name was no doubt intended as a joke, but Soylent appealed to the kinds of faddish, even messianic devotions of Silicon Valley and finds synergies with the notion of disruption itself. If diet and nutrition could be conceived of as an engineering problem, then it could be “solved” through the displacement of traditional modes of eating.The mammoth meatball presents itself as a similarly tech-oriented solution to the “problem” of eating: the (ethical and environmental) problems caused by our meat consumption can be engineered away. Again, the mammoth, in this context, takes on a significant meaning. One recently popular way of attempting to re-engineer our diets has been to examine our evolutionary history. According to some accounts, our not-so-distant ancestors ate a diet high in meat (including fats), vegetables, and nuts but did not include dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, or other processed products. Our bodies, these accounts continue, remain (in evolutionary terms) adapted to such diets. Such “cave man” or “paleo” diets, it is concluded, form the ideal basis for human health and nutrition (Mayo Clinic 2022).Notwithstanding the flaws in this dietary reasoning, the mammoth meatball offers remarkable “paleo” possibilities (Ungar 2017). Alongside trends in which individuals adopt paleo clothing, paleo exercise routines, and attend paleo conferences, consumers may be able to soon eat more literal “paleo” foods—like the mammoth—re-engineered from ancient DNA (Chang and Nowell 2016). Vow suggests a way to more completely fulfill the promise of rebooting our bodies through novel dietary interventions, offering accelerated possibilities for re-imagining not just what we eat and where we eat but when we eat. This further temporal reimagining, now of diet and consumption, is central to the mammoth meatball’s value.Each of these temporal dislocations—the dislocation of the mammoth extinction, the dislocation of biological time, and the dislocation of our diet—generates new forms of speculative value. Lab-grown meats further disconnect food from individual animals, from species, from organismic processes, and, ultimately, from eating itself, drawing both food and humans more deeply into regimes of bio-industrial control.The selection of the mammoth for Vow’s marketing stunt directly connects their work to other efforts to “science our way out” of climate change-induced problems (Scott 2015). The woolly mammoth has become an icon for the so-called “de-extinction” movement—that is, attempts to use ancient DNA to resurrect extinct like and are to in efforts to a mammoth it in an and bring it to in an 2016). 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