The Mammoth Meatball Marketing Stunt
That's a-spicy meatball!
Hello humans,
Yes, it has been a long while since No Breakthroughs found its way to your inbox. There are a dozen reasons for that, but none of them are exciting.1 What is exciting for all of us is getting absolutely livid about some bad science stories and explaining what we can learn from them. That’s why you signed up for this, right?
So, let’s get back into that with a story about how a Melbourne-based start-up owned last week’s headlines with a monstrous story about making pretty meatballs from extinct proboscideans.
Over the past year, I’ve been writing a lot about “de-extinction” projects and some of the moral and ethical quandaries we’re going to need to confront if resurrection really is on the agenda. So when I see a story about mammoths or dodos or Tasmanian tigers, I get excited. A lot of people get excited! At first blush, the idea of bringing back extinct species sounds like a tantalizing mastery of Science.
Then you remember Jurassic Park and you freak out a little bit. Then you recall Earth’s current, staggering biodiversity crisis and you wonder if this is really the best thing we can be doing right now.
Then you, if you’re anything like me, look at the headline again. It says Mammoth Meatball. Damn. It’s even fun to say mammoth meatball. Just, it feels chewy to say it. Give it a go. Ma-mmoth-meat-ball. I can see why this captivated the Everybody. And gosh darn it, you just have to click.
The story starts at The Guardian, where the (really great) environment editor, Damian Carrington, got this story as an exclusive. It’s fair to say this is where all the coverage of the mammoth meatball begins but even without the exclusive, this is exactly the kind of science-adjacent story that goes viral so no-bad on The Guardian's behalf. This story just has all of the ingredients (sorry).
Quick, dirty explainer: The meatball was produced by Melbourne's Vow Foods. It was unveiled at the Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands. It is not an April Fool's joke. It's part of a growing area of research looking at creating "cultured meat," where animal cells are grown in a lab to make meat. I have eaten a cultured meat burger.2 You cannot eat the mammoth meatball. The mammoth meatball, apparently, smells like cooked crocodile. And, lastly, the real kicker: The idea came via a “creative agency” — Wunderman Thompson, a brand specifically designed to “inspire growth for ambitious brands.” I imagine the marketing firm had an extremely good weekend celebrating just how much coverage this stunt received.
What happened here? There are a few problems with the presentation of the science that appear to have been completely glossed over here because… well, it’s a mammoth meatball.
It’s probably good to start with the reason it was created at all. According to a bloke at the creative agency, Bas Korsten:
“Our aim is to start a conversation about how we eat, and what the future alternatives can look and taste like.”
Which is a really nice way to say, we wanted you to see our brand and MAMMOTH MEATBALL was the best way to get that to happen. DODO MEATBALL was our second option. The idea of starting a conversation about cultivated or cultured meat is a noble goal but are we sure this kind of stunt has any lasting impact on that conversation? Is that impact … worthwhile for humans, or is it self-serving?
It seems pretty obvious when you look at Vow’s Twitter feed. That didn’t become a teaching resource for elephantid-meat-curious folk to learn about the future of food. It became a billboard for the company’s forgedbyvow website, which was constantly linked in each post.
What’s so bad about this for science reporting? The reporting that spun out of the Mammutball has been particularly error-prone and contributed to a bunch of science misinformation.
To start, Vow’s own video says the mammoth’s closest living relative was the African elephant. That’s not the case, it’s the Asian elephant. The video also contains UNSW’s Merlin Crossley stating “I never thought I’d be eating a meatball made of mammoths.” Of course, he won’t be. The mammoth meatball isn’t for sale and we’re not even sure how our immune system would react to the meat.3 Is it going to be produced at some point in the future? Doubt it, but if so -- the basic science doesn't fill me with much confidence this is even worth calling a mammoth meatball (except in the sense that it's really big).4
The reason for this — and I’ve barely seen this reported — is that it’s predominantly a lamb meatball. The cells used by Vow are sheep cells. Vow adds in the “myoglobin” gene from a mammoth (spliced with African elephant DNA) and then inserts that into the sheep cell DNA. That myoglobin gene is not meaningfully even a mammoth myoglobin gene (it can’t be if you’ve spliced it with elephant DNA). Basically, these cells are 99% sheep. It’s like adding croutons into your soup: It doesn’t suddenly become bread because of this addition…
Myoglobin does change the taste of meat a little. But so do a ton of other proteins. This isn’t mammoth meat at all. It’s a marketing ploy.
Other stories were fodder for a more pernicious kind of Melbourne misinformation (it’s like regular misinformation but just way more underground and less mainstream than the usual stuff) in which tiny, silly statements hint at a dystopian every-meat-you-can-think-of future, but fall short of what science can actually do.
Take this line, from The Atlantic’s coverage:
“Imagine the stunts that could be possible then: nuggets for every dinosaur in Jurassic Park.”
That’s an impossible stunt, given we don’t have — and can’t acquire — the DNA of dinosaurs from 66 million years ago. As much as you might enjoy a bucket of KFC (Kentucky Fried Compsognathus, hello!), you’re not going to get a chance to eat that ever. I’m sorry.
My final concern is the use of, or even the impression of the use of, capital S-Science, being used for this project in some revolutionary way. The experimental method to do this is not some amazing advance. We’ve been able to add genes into cells for decades. Other cultured meat start ups and businesses are much further down the track with actual products. This is, in reality, a distraction.
That means it doesn’t advance the conversation at all. Instead, it detracts from it. In how many articles about the meatball has considerable space been dedicated to the idea of cultured meat?5 Did Colbert and the Daily Show mention anything about cultured meat in their jokes this week? What’s the Twitter discussi— Oh god, I gotta get out of there.
The twist in the tale? A Belgian company is considering legal action because they previously had the idea (patent pending) to create plant-based mammoth meat. They have had people in their lab eat it! What does this mean?
Well, if anything… it just shows the power of marketing.
And if you learnt something today, please share! God knows the awful Twitter algorithm won’t help me find an audience. But maybe you can :)
I’ve spent a decent chunk of the last six months travelling and am currently stationed in Vienna, Austria.
I still have to write that story and I will. Sorry SciFi.
We’d probably be fine, but I haven’t interrogated this at all and I think it’s one aspect of the whole idea that received no attention.
Vow didn’t respond to a request for comment before deadline.
The Guardian covered it quite well, I feel.