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Mammoths, Metabolism, and Meta-Species

2024; University of California Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/gfc.2024.24.1.46

1533-8622

Hallam Stevens,

Human-Animal Interaction Studies

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 animals. Organizations like Revive & Restore and Colossal Biosciences are planning to engage in Jurassic Park-style efforts to acquire a mammoth genome, implant it in an embryo, and bring it to term in an elephant (Shapiro 2016). The ready availability of mammoth genetic data for Vow’s experiment is likely to be directly connected to these efforts. Regardless of the actual possibilities of success, the mammoth—and imaginations of its rebirth—play an outsized role in thinking about how to mitigate the effects of climate change (Pennisi 2022).Evolutionary biologists and some conservationists have called attention to the problems of de-extinction. These observers worry especially that the mere possibility of de-extinction will make us worry less (and therefore potentially devote fewer resources to) about the impacts of climate change (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2014). Rather than devoting time to thinking about woolly mammoths or other extinct animals, perhaps our time, money, and efforts (and those of scientists) would be better spent worrying about the animals we still have.This argument has implications for the mammoth meatball too. Although Vow depicts the mammoth as a kind of savior, it could also be a kind of distraction. Just as we should worry about saving the animals we still have, the most straightforward solution to the problems of meat consumption is simply to eat less meat (or none). The possibility put forward by Vow—that we can have our (beef-)cake and eat it too (that we can save the environment and ourselves without compromising our desire for meat)—may serve to push consumers toward continued (or even increasing) meat consumption. Both the de-extinction movement and Vow suggest that if we can save the mammoth, perhaps we can also save ourselves. But both also place an outsized faith in technology to solve problems that can potentially be solved more quickly and cheaply through changing our behaviors.Perhaps unfortunately for Vow’s marketing team, the story of the mammoth’s extinction is not quite as simple as they make out. Although there is considerable disagreement amongst palaeontologists, it seems likely that mammoth extinction was significantly impacted by human hunting as well as by climate change (Sedwick 2008). One paper in PLoS Biology called human hunting the “coup de grâce” for mammoths (Nogués-Bravo et al. 2008).This casts the mammoth meatballs in quite a different light. Rather than a savior, the mammoth becomes a representation of humans changing relationship to animals and their environments. The de-extincted mammoth finds its first manifestation not as a herd on the steppe or as an individual animal but—once again and immediately—as our food. Indeed, in order for the mammoth to save us, we must re-enact the processes of ingestion through which we finally killed it in first place. To resurrect the mammoth, then, requires not just a reversal of time but also a rehearsal of our role in its demise. The mammoth can save us, perhaps, but only if we once more devour it in the process.Indeed, Vow’s efforts should be seen as part of a much longer effort to transform animals into machines for the production of meat for human consumption. For hundreds of years, animal breeders have attempted to control and manipulate the reproduction of cows, pigs, and sheep in order to create more animal flesh more readily. “Mutton for the masses” could emerge from sheep judiciously manipulated for meat production (Trow-Smith, 1959; Franklin 2007). Over one hundred years ago, Hungarian agricultural engineer Karl Ereky published (in German) a book titled Biotechnology of Meat, Fat, and Milk Production in an Agricultural Large-Scale Farm (1919), which described methods for efficiently feeding, fattening, slaughtering, and transporting pigs. Since then, the tools of biotechnology have aimed toward enhancing the processes of animal husbandry, particularly through techniques of artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, and genetic modification. Interventions into animal biology have caused animals to accelerate: to grow faster, reproduce more rapidly, and produce more desirable flesh (e.g., see US Food and Drug Administration 2023). Lab-based meats take this industrial imagination to an extreme by eliminating the need for animal bodies altogether. Bioreactors can produce pure muscle, obviating the need for growing bone, cartilage, connective tissue, skin, or (for that matter) brains (Stephens 2010).This temporal realignment draws us into vastly different relationships with non-human animals. Paleoanthropologists, including Piers Locke and Harald Floss, have argued that—before the end of the last ice age—human and mammoth life-worlds and belief-worlds were fundamentally intertwined (Locke and Buckingham 2016; Hussain and Floss 2015). In mammoth habitats, these animals were omnipresent, dominating landscapes physically and visually. Mammoth sociality, individuality, and their importance for raw materials (ivory) made them an overwhelming factor in shaping human behaviors, beliefs, and existence. From this perspective, the dominance of the mammoth in artistic, cultural, and technological terms becomes unsurprising. The resulting ontologies, they arguedo not craft the animal-human boundary in our terms. Non-human animals are rather seen as active entities with agency, intentionality, and subjectivity. They are seen as coevals, not substantially different from humans in many ways, that share the landscape with them and are equitable cohabitants. (Hussain and Floss 2021)On this view, the mammoth is a representative of a different kind of human–animal relations—a set of relations based on equality and mutuality.As cellular agriculture disaggregates animals into mere components—that is, into lumps of cells or flesh—individual animals, as well as the relationships between individual animals and humans, are no longer necessary. This is reminiscent of the ways in which human cells lines are removed and manipulated outside the body for a variety of medical and scientific purposes. Most infamously, Henrietta Lacks became “immortalized” as the HeLa cell line, parts of her body (but propagated beyond her body) growing and expanding into laboratories across the globe (Skloot 2010). Hannah Landecker (2010) has written about the ways in which such proliferating cell lines disrupt our expectations about the boundaries and potentialities of bodily life. The cells we may consume in a lab-meat future will be in a similarly distant relationship to any previously living individual animal.By hacking the temporality of food—disrupting the expected patterns of birth, growth, reproduction, and death—Vow aims to completely rework the categories through which we think about meat. Their intention is to “invent entirely new meats that have never existed before” (Peppou 2022). Such meats will no longer be “chicken” or “pork” or “cow” or “mammoths,” even as abstract conceptions. Rather, “Vow will select different specific types of animal cells, based on its functionality, such as taste, protein content and texture” (Ho 2020). Delivering on the promises of immortality entailed in these new consumptive desires will require engineering meats to order. Such meats could be tailored to particular tastes, but also to particular nutritional, social, economic, or medical needs. Vow already articulates this possibility. Its designer meat, it promises, will “add ingredients and essential micronutrients to nourish them to grow into a complex finished product…We believe the only way to change the future of food is to master a diversity of options that match needs and desires of different people all over the world” (Ho 2020). Although taste figures in these speculations, it is subordinated here to the functionality of food—a set of fungible molecules and metabolites engineered to order.This would sever almost entirely the connection between animals and flesh. Such a breach would be not only physical but also semantic and symbolic—meat detached from animals as individual beings and as species. Our multi-species dependencies will be replaced by relationships with communities of cells and genes upon which these new forms of consumption would depend (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). What remains is what we might label “meta-species consumption”—a fully molecularized meat-eating, entirely divorced from animals as both individuals and species.What happens to the human within these new circuits of consumption? Biologists, chefs, and dieticians have advocated for “genomic gastronomy” (Center for Genomic Gastronomy 2023) or “nutritional genomics” (Elliott and Teng 2002). Borrowing from visions of personalized genomics, these movements argue for utilizing the techniques of personal genomics to design specific menus or diets for individuals. But the parameters of such diets have so far been set by foods that already exist. Cell-based meat opens up the possibility of more radical design—tailoring not just the menu but the substance of the food itself to individual consumers. Such engineering of food would allow us potentially to eliminate pathogens or allergens or other unwanted compounds from our intakes. It would allow us to purify our diets to ensure that our ingestions are perfectly matched to our bodies, our lifestyles, or our work.Able to tune and re-tune our bodies via our diets, we too can become more efficient metabolic machines. The “biotechnology” of Ereky and others aimed to harness the metabolic work of animals more effectively. As Hannah Landecker (2013) reminds us, the notion of metabolism was first conceived in terms a “factory.” Inside the animal, “thousands of minute workshops” would transform plant matter into work and energy (Landecker 2013). Lab-grown meat represents a full realization of this vision: the raw materials can be delivered directly to the cells (in the form of growth media) and the cells can be harvested directly. But the metabolic cycle is only complete when we ingest these products, allowing them to animate and sustain us. Bespoke cellular eating entails a co-optation of our bodies into the metabolic cycles that can make us more perfect productive machines.Ultimately, this permits—even recommends—a form of self-eating. In the extreme, the safest, best, and most agreeable flesh may be made from cells cultured from our own bodies. The health-giving and immortalizing potentials the mammoth meatball, then, are ultimately realized in self-consumption. As in the world of Soylent Green, we can save ourselves only by metabolizing our own flesh, drawing us into a regime of autophagic immortality in which we can propagate ourselves forever (see “Human Deli” in Cerpina and Stenslie 2022). Biological cycles of birth, growth, and death are re-routed via self-ingestion. The harnessing of cellular meat into our diets suggests ways in which it can re-direct our own biographies, short-circuiting the processes of metabolism, and reordering them for maximum efficiency and productivity. Cellular eating offers a fantasy of re-wiring our biological time via our diets.As we peel back the layers of mammoth flesh, we expose how the regimes of cellular meat are likely to further decouple us from our companion species and deepen the instrumentalization of both animal flesh and our own bodies as mere “nutrition machines.” The mammoth meatball is suggestive of the ways in which—rather than contributing to sustainable consumption—cellular meats double down on models of industrial agriculture. By transforming the deep past into a molecular resource, they generate both new modes of accelerated production and new fantasies of temporal control. The plating of an un-eatable meatball suggests how these fantasies are being realized less as novel tastes or culinary experiences, and more through tapping into the speculative values of our personal and planetary futures.