The “artificial burgers,” made from “artificial meat,” have already reached the shelves of grocery stores: with the right processing, the right additives, the right flavorings, and, of course, the right promotion (and the right social ideations), fake meat is intended to satisfy all sorts of beliefs (and anorexias)… Until, perhaps in the next First-World generation, the word “meat” no longer evokes anything (good or bad…) and so it will disappear, leaving only the fake on our plates.
But the Australian company in the sector, Vow, perhaps for publicity or perhaps because it is “looking ahead”, made a leap. Quantitative and technological. It created and launched an ultra-burger, genetically engineered from fake mammoth meat.
If you have ever heard of it, it refers to a type of animal that has been extinct for 10,000 years. So where did Vow find the mammoth? Nowhere. It bought a copy of its DNA from a paleontology museum… It located (or perhaps imagined) a gene in the mammoth’s genetic code called myoglobin, which (as the company’s CEO James Ryall explained) in meat cells “is related to aroma, color, and taste”… Then it replaced the gene in sheep cells with the artificially manufactured mammoth gene; it cultured the resulting chimeric cells in a lab… The rest was the chef’s job.
Let’s face it. Cooking looks dull or, even worse, a mere pretense. Everything happens in the laboratory—petri dishes, test tubes, DNA printers, under microscopes—via biotech processing. Will the result be edible? Who cares? It will surely be swallowed. After all, we already swallow so much and more…