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...

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