upon Tuesday, at a Dutch museum, two men lifted a black sheet from a table to reveal a sweaty cantaloupe-sized ball of meat under a bell jar. It was a mammoth meatball made by an Australian artificial meat company called Vow.
Meatballs made with real mammoth DNA probably smelled like they were cooked crocodile meatprinting photograph, it looked strangely hairy, like it had been coughed on by a cat or rolled by a dung beetle. But how could they have obtained the meat of a long-extinct behemoth that lived during the Ice Age? no wanna try it? While some people on Twitter were clearly hyperbolic, many others were also intrigued. “It must be tastier than IKEA,” one user said. I have written.
Unfortunately the meatballs were not made for eating.Because it contains proteins that haven’t been eaten in thousands of years, the scientists who made it I don’t know if it’s safe. This was a marketing strategy devised by the creative agency that worked with Vow. I eventually realized that I crave meatballs for the same reasons I crave Doritos Locos tacos, KFC’s Double Down sandwiches, and Van Leeuwen’s ranch-flavoured ice cream. This is stunt marketing 101 applied to the future of food, and I fell in love with it.
Food marketers have made the art of using stunt food to draw attention to brands and reach new audiences. Buffalo Wild Wing Chicken coated in a Mountain Dew-infused sauce will welcome anyone who has experienced a late-night munch. Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa, says that unexpected, funny, or edgy stunt food is usually “pure marketing.” But so far they’ve gotten our attention by twisting familiar items. Cultured meat, and all the protein permutations it makes possible, are pushing us into a new era of stunt marketing involving foods people have never tried.
Vow CEO and founder George Pappou told me the meatballs aim to “start the conversation that what you eat tomorrow is different from what you eat today.” I’ve collected (I’m writing this, and you’re reading this, after all), but the company has yet to put a product on the market, and they’re using lab-grown Japanese quail in Singapore. Only plans to introduce it to diners later this year. Year. So what exactly did it achieve? “I don’t see this as a stunt as a demonstration,” Lang said. “It’s an exaggeration of the physical capabilities of the new science.”
Lab-grown meat still meatwith the exception of animal husbandry and slaughter, it is often touted as the future of sustainable and ethical meat eating. McKinseyThe industry as a whole could be worth $25 billion by 2030. Lab-grown meat, or “cultured” meat, as the industry likes to call it, is made by culturing animal cells in large tanks to mass mass. organization. It is then seasoned and processed in much the same way as conventional meat to form foods such as patties, nuggets and meatballs. cultured from cells. public dataAs a result, the cells produced a giant version of myoglobin, the protein that contributes to muscle’s metallic, “meaty” taste.
In theory, this process could be used to make meat from animals whose cells are readily available or whose DNA has been sequenced. Think of DNA as essentially an IKEA manual for building an organization. Even animals with incomplete sequences can be partially revived. billy– bookcase building instructions Kallax shelf. Growing relatively small amounts of mammoth meat was “ridiculously easy and quick,” says Vow researcher Ernst Wolvetang. Said GuardianThe same can be said for farmed meats of all kinds in the end, if the industry can overcome the key issues. Cost and efficiency challenges Engage in scale-up.
Imagine the stunts possible then: nuggets of all dinosaurs Jurassic Parkflat human meatball. Already, several companies other than Vow are pursuing it. more exotic fares: New York-based Primeval Foods plans to release farmed lion burgers, minced meat and sausages, followed by giraffe and zebra meat, founder and CEO Yilmaz Bora told me. Since we are looking for something new, the food must “go beyond the current beef, chicken and pork dishes and be served without sacrificing nature or animals,” he said.
Using stunt marketing to raise awareness about the potential of cultivated meat doesn’t mean people will want to eat those products if they become widely available. Sometimes the work is too vulgar to be taken seriously. Hermann’s “Mayonog” And Oscar Mayer’s “Cold Dog,” uh, Hot dog flavored ice cream wiener on a stickBut people don’t have the same standards for meatballs made with mammoth farmed meat. rice field. Or attractive.
If mammoth meatballs make you think can they do that?, perhaps it did some good. If not, it was at least a valid attempt to get involved with science. , I think the chances of it being adopted are very low,” Lang said. Told. Many people don’t even eat seafood.Yet, in the past five months, FDA has beginning two Approval of lab-grown poultry products clears regulatory pathways for more farmed meats. If the technology can be scaled up, perhaps foods like mammoth meatballs won’t be considered stunts anymore.
