How are we, mere monkeys chattering in front of the cobra’s basket, to feel anything but mystified by the recent unveiling of a meatball made from the DNA of a woolly mammoth? If you didn’t know, an Australian “cultured meat startup”, whatever that is, recently displayed the fruits of their demanding work at the NEMO museum in the Netherlands. We were gifted this meatball, they said, in order to “get people excited,” and because they wanted to “see if we could create something that was a symbol of a more exciting future…”.
Right.
My excitement for lab-grown meat knoweth no bounds. This is true because, as we are often instructed, ruminants are destroying the world and, even if they aren’t, who wouldn’t crawl naked through broken glass to eat a New York Strip grown in a beaker by the wonderful people at Moderna? It’s notable that the mammoth meatball, which was, incidentally, plated to Michelin worthy sophistication–complete with a smear of puree and covered in a glass cloche–isn’t meant to be eaten at all, only to represent, in its softball-sized solemnity…progress.
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