On Tuesday, two men at a museum in the Netherlands lifted a black sheet off a table to reveal a cantaloupe-size globe of overcooked meat perspiring under a bell jar. This was no ordinary spaghetti topper: It was a woolly-mammoth meatball, created by an Australian lab-grown-meat company called Vow.
The meatball, made using real mammoth DNA, supposedly smelled like cooked crocodile meat, and in press photos, it looked oddly furry, like it had been coughed up by a cat or rolled around by a dung beetle. Still, meat from a long-extinct behemoth that lived during the Ice Age—how could I not want to try it? Although some on Twitter were clearly grossed out, many others were also intrigued. “Bet it tastes better than Ikeas,” one user wrote.
Disappointingly, the meatball was not made for consumption. Because it contains proteins that haven’t been eaten in thousands of years, the scientists who made it aren’t sure it would be safe. It was a marketing ploy cooked up by a creative agency that worked with Vow. I eventually realized that I wanted the meatball for the same reasons I wanted the Doritos Locos Taco, KFC’s Double Down Sandwich, and Van Leeuwen’s ranch-flavored ice cream: sheer, dumb novelty. This was Stunt Marketing 101 applied to the future of food, and I was the sucker falling for it.
Food marketers have made an art of using stunt foods to draw attention to brands and court new audiences. Starbucks’s unhinged Unicorn Frappuccino begged to be Instagrammed; Buffalo Wild Wings chicken coated with Mountain Dew–infused sauce pandered to anyone who has ever experienced the late-night munchies. Typically unexpected, funny, or edgy, stunt foods are “pure marketing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa, told me. They work because they’re bonkers enough to break through the noise of social media and get people talking, he said. But so far, they have caught our attention by twisting familiar items. Lab-grown meat, and all the…
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