Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the legendary vegetable lamb of Tartary, said to be a flesh-and-blood animal that grew from the ground. (originally published 04/21/2022)
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're heading into the Old Vault. This episode originally aired April twenty first, twenty twenty two, and it's part two of our series on the vegetable Lamb of Tartary.
Dig in sounds delicious.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on the vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a legendary creature that appeared in medieval and Renaissance European bestiaries and travelogs, such as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. If you haven't heard part one of this series yet, this is one where you should really go back and check that out first so you'll know what we're talking about today. But if you're rejoining us after last time, a quick refresher on these legends. The idea was that somewhere in Tartary, which is a vast stretch of the Asian mainland, including what is now Central Asia, parts of China, all of Mongolia, and the whole eastern part of Russia. There was said to live a type of zoophyte or plant animally a creature with both animal and vegetable properties, combining aspects of a sort of bush or shrub with a sheep or a lamb. And some sources, like Sir John Mandeville describe a plant that grows gourd like fruits, and when you cut these gourds open, they reveal fully formed lambs inside, tiny little lambs which have flesh and bone and blood. He says, they're real lambs, and I ate one of the lambs and it was good. Others or is describe something even more fantastical. I think these are usually sources that come a little bit later than Mandeville. They say that there is a plant that grows a fully formed adult lamb or sheep, which is attached to the ground via a plant stem that grows into its stomach, and the lamb can only survive while there is still herbage for it to graze on within the radius of the stem, so the stem is kind of like a tether, and once it eats all of the grass within reach, it starves to death unless it is killed and eaten by wolves or by humans first. And this lamb or sheep is also said to be a real animal in composition, having bones and blood and in whichever form. This creature is known under many different names, but the most commons the most common ones would be like the lamb of Tartary, the Tartar lamb, or the Boromets or the Barromets. Now, toward the end of the last episode, we talked about phylogenetic reasons that you would not expect to actually see an organism like this, so we can be pretty sure, without knowing anything else, that this did not actually exist. Because of course, plants and animals may have many individual characteristics that are superficially similar, whether for some adapted reason like mimicry or just by chance converging ecological needs and so forth, but a plant will never actually grow a sheep that has actual muscle, flesh, and bones and blood. So the question is where did these legends actually come from? And a couple of major explanations have been offered over the centuries. One very good source that I referred to in the last episode, and I'm going to keep talking about in this one is a book by a nineteenth century English naturalist named Henry Lee, and it's called The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. This was published in eighteen eighty seven.
Now, in that Karuba paper that I referenced in the first episode, the author points out that that various folks over over the years sort of the mythic era of the bora mets ever since at least you know, the seventeenth century, during that period where commentators have known that there's no such thing, but have been curious as to why such a thing might have been invented, and invented over time that that you know, various folks have chimed in on it and brought up various plant specimens, quote natural and manipulated to possibly explain it.
Right.
And so one of the possible explanations that has been brought forth was the the wooly fern explanation and this is this is one of the possible explanations that Rose mentions Carol Rose mentions in passing and specifically it was suggested that the fern's rhizome or you know, the root system might be the lamb in question. And this is actually reflected in the scientific name for this species, Subodium borromets, and it's also known as the golden chicken fern. And I I did a picture of this for you, Joe. I actually ended up going to the Atlanta Botanical Garden over the weekend, and I didn't get a chance to ask anybody if they had one of these around, But I kept looking. I was on the lookout for this chicken fern, for this possible explanation for the vegetable lamb of tardary, but I did not see it.
Yeah, a nice furry fern, I mean, does look an awful lot like fur. This explanation, I believe first arose at the end of the seventeenth century. So, as we discussed in the previous part, by this time authors were already skeptical of the zoophyte story and they started coming up with alternative ways of sourcing the myth. And Henry Lee chronicles this by noting that in sixteen ninety eight, a Sir Hans Sloan offered a presentation to the Royal Society of London of a very strange object, and in his paper he provides an illustration. Rob I've attached a copy of this for you to look at, but we can read his illustration and then add anything we want. So I'm going to read from the section of Sloan's paper that Lee quotes here, but I made some abridgements because it was kind of long. So Sloane writes, the figure represents what is commonly but falsely in India called the tartarian lamb. Sent down from Thence by a mister Buckley. This was more than a foot long, as big as one's wrist, having seven protuberances, and towards the end some footstalks about three or four inches long, exactly like the foot, like the footstalks of ferns, both without and within. Most part of this was covered with a down of a dark yellowish snuff color, some of it a quarter of an inch long. It seemed to be shaped by art to imitate a lamb, the roots or climbing parts being made to resemble the body, and the extant footstalks the legs. I have been assured by mister Brown, who has made very good observations in the East Indies, that he has been told by those who lived in China that this down or hair is used by them for the stopping of blood in fresh wounds, as cobwebs are with us. And I'll come back to that, and that they have it in so great a esteem that few houses are without it. But on trials I have made of it. Though I may believe it innocent, yet I am sure it is not infallible. Now, I have several things to say about this. First of all, I suspect Sloan is wrong that the Lamb of Tartary is actually a legend in India or anywhere in Asia, because as far as I can tell, this was a legend in Europe about Asia, not a legend in Asia itself. Like we talked about Engelbert Camphor in the last episode, who traveled all about Asia, and he certainly went to Persia, but like different parts of Russia and all over. And I think he said that nobody knew what he was talking about when he asked about.
This, right, Yeah, they don't know what it's about. They don't know what I'm talking about when I bring this up. It's just pure invention, and the European invention, to be clear.
But the other thing I would add to this, and this is a sidebar, but I couldn't let it go were cobwebs, as in spider webs, actually used by the English to stop blood flow when somebody had a big cut they're bleeding profusely, like, oh no, Johnny got brained with an ax. Somebody get a bunch of spiders.
Yeah. I had not heard this before, and I feel like it would have come up. I would have at least seen it on Outlander, you.
Know, yeah, exactly. So I looked this up and yes, this apparently was a remedy for bleeding in some traditional European medicine. So the source I found on this was a book by Kathleen Stalker called Remedies and Rituals Folk Medicine in Norway in the New Land, published by the Minnesota Historical Society in two thousand and seven, and this comes in a section of the book talking about home remedies of Scandinavian peoples, and she says that in some cases they would cram parts of beehives and wasp nests into their wounds because they believed it would help make the blood clot And apparently some of them did the same thing with spiderwebs. So here's a quote that Stalker includes quote stopping blood with cobwebs was so common that children learned to apply the remedy themselves, says Hilda Kongsburg born eighteen ninety nine in Rollsoy, East, Norway. And then this is quoting Kongsburg. When we children were playing, we sometimes fell and got hurt. Even for deep wounds or a badly pinched finger, we would find cobwebs, Kinglevev in her dialect, sprinkling. Finally shaved sugar in the wound. First we would stuff it with the Kingelvev and wrap a rag around it. Soon it would heal. Folks, don't try this at home. I think there may be some hygiene issues here. I would recommend sticking with sterile bandages if at all possible. The other detail also gets me. So it's not just putting, like framing spider webs in your wound, but also sugar shaved sugar.
Yeah, sugar, something sweet, and then also a little spider web, a little bit of that Kinglevev.
Yeah yeah, Well, I was wondering if the reasoning is you want the blood to clot and these are both things that are sticky, sugar and spiderwebs.
Maybe I don't know. I mean it does go to show that. Yeah, I wouldn't see this an outlander. I should be watching that show Vikings, and then I'm surely somebody's gonna stop up a wound with some kinglevev.
Well, as a commentary note on this sidebar, I will also say this just makes me think of regression to the mean. We have a whole episode on that concept if you want to check it out. But as a note of scientific intellectual hygiene, you can't know if a treatment works just by giving it to somebody who's in a bad state and then seeing if they get better. Eg. If a person with a cut stops bleeding. Because people often get better on their own, you have to have a control group. You take bleeding people, split them up randomly, some get spider webs, some get some kind of control, and then you'd have to see if the people with spider webs do better than the control group, not just if somebody with the spider web happens to get better.
Right right. It's like if you're having some sort of ailment that's bothering you and you just decide to try some sort of a weird tea and then you end up feeling better. Well, maybe the tea helped, But maybe it didn't. Maybe you just happened to be drinking the weird tea whilst your body was going about the It's regular healing regime, right.
Anyway. Coming all back to Hans Sloan, So Sloan at the end of the seventeenth century, this was the year sixteen ninety eight. He believes he has identified the origin of the Borometz legend, and it is this little quadrupedal plant sculpture that is built out of the downy rhizome of a Chinese species of fern. Now, over the following centuries, a few additional specimen of this sort of Chinese plant sculpture were publicized by European collectors and museums, and many authors clearly believed this was indeed the source of the myth. They thought they had cracked it. You'll remember in the last episode, I read that passage from Erasmus Darwin's naturalistic poem The Botanic Garden, where he writes about the boromets. The lines were even round the pole, the flames of love aspire and icy bosoms feel the secret fire cradled in snow and fanned by Arctic air shines gentle boromets thy golden hair. So why does Darwin specify golden hair there when a lot of the older sources said white hair. If they said the color at all, well, Henry Lee in his book believes this is because Darwin is buying into the rhizome theory. So these lamb or dog sculptures had a more golden or tan color because that's the nature of the plant. The fibers coming off of the fern rootstock were white, they were like golden or tan or brown. So Lee thinks this is not the correct explanation for the origin of the lamb legend, and I think I agree with him, But what's his reasoning. Well, he goes on a long discussion of the known properties of the ferns used to make these sculptures. He says, first of all, it is worth noting that we have no evidence of these sculptures pre dating the legend. Examples only show up long after the legend was already known. So if there is any link at all, and we don't know that there is. But if there is any link, why not suppose that the legend inspired the fern root sculptures and not the other way around. Furthermore, there are actually only a handful of specimens of these sculptures, so that they are a little, you know, quadrupedal animal looking things. Somebody is clearly made out of this this fern rhizome with the stems cut to look like legs of a sheep or a dog or something. But are we sure, I mean, so we have like four or five of these maybe in total. Are we sure they were ever widespread enough to have given rise to this story? But then so these are I think the more minor concerns. Lee gets to the really serious objections to this explanation after this. First of all, he says, these ferns do not grow in the land that was then known as Tartari. So Tartari again was the more northern part of the Asian mainland at the time. These plants are from the southern part of the Asian mainland. They're from like parts of northeastern India, and they're from southern China and like a I believe, the Malaysian Peninsula. So this would have the legends sourcing them in the wrong place. And also the fern in no way really matches the botanical properties of the plant described in the stories, except that it is downy, so it's said to grow from a seed that is like a gourd or a melon. Ferns are nothing like this. They don't grow from a seed like a gord or a melon. Furthermore, some of the legends say that these seeds were deliberately planted by the people around Indi, hating that this plant, whatever it was, if it existed, is used in some kind of agriculture, and these ferns are not like that. Also, what are we to make of the early version of the story, like the one told by Sir John Mandeville or the person claiming to be Sir John Mandeville saying that, Okay, you take one of these gourds, you cut it open, and then inside the fruit, that's where you find the lamb that doesn't resemble this fern, you know, animal sculpture in any way. And finally, the color thing. The legends describe the wool of the vegetable lamb as white when they mentioned the color at all, and the wooly fibers of the fern rhizome are more golden or tan.
Yeah, I mean, you look at at actual photographs of this fern and it does look it looks furry. It looks like alf hath dyed and ferns hath sprung from his body, you know. And I'll also add that this illustration you shared with the stems coming up, this is from Philosophical Transactions, black and white illustration. You know. These these actually to me anyway, they look kind of like lamb chops. The way that they have them angled. There's curvature to them, and you do see that curvature in images all of the actual fern, the actual willly fern. But but but I only really draw this comparison when I'm thinking about lamb and lamb meat, and I'm looking at these two images. I'm not sure if I saw this in the wild, I would think, whoa, this is totally the body of a dead brown sheep.
Yeah, if it were, I mean, if it were the lamb chops thing. Obviously, like you're saying, they would have to be subliminal, because I think these these these footstalks here are supposed to be the legs of the lamb, Like the downy part the rhizome is the body and then the stalks coming off of it are the legs. But yeah, they do look like the bones poking out of a rack of lamb. Yeah, after the so called frenching is done to the bones.
Yeah, that's term. But certainly the whole thing with the if you cut into the rhizome, you're not going to find blood, You're not going to find bones and so forth. So yeah, that doesn't hold up at all.
So anyway, Lee summarizes by saying, even if I had no better explanation to offer, I should be led to the conclusion that the identification of these tawny toy dogs made in China from the root of a wild fern, the spores of which are as small as dust, with the vegetable lambs of Scythia that being another name for this another name used for this region known as Tartari, you know, the Central Asian kind of region whose white fleeces were found within the ripe and opening fruit of a cultivated plant raised from a large seed, was obviously erroneous, and that the origin of the rumor must be software elsewhere. And you know what I'm going to say, I agree, But Lee has another explanation, and I think he offers some pretty compelling evidence that this is the right one. The other explanation is that the lamb of Tartari legend originates from a confused string of misinterpretations of observations of the cotton plant.
That's right, because what do we have with cotton, Well, we have pods ripening and opening to reveal wool essentially, or something very similar to wool. And this lines up very closely, you know, with what we see in the myth as well. Lee throws this back to the writings of Herotodas and Theophrastus, whose writings do seem to describe something like cotton. Herotodas, writing in the fifth century BCE, on a plant found in India, says quote and further, there are trees which grow wild there, the fruit of which is a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep. The natives make their clothes of this tree wool, right.
Okay, So this is a mysterious plant to Herotodus, because he comes from you know, he comes from a culture in which cotton is not normally known. So he says, you know, I've read reports that something's going on in India where they can grow sheep's wool out of fruits on trees. I don't know how they do that, but it's really good wool. Another quote from Herodotus. This is in chapter forty seven of the same work. He tells a story about a corselate that was sent as a gift by King Almos the second of Egypt to Sparta, and he says that it was quote ornamented with gold and fleeces from the trees, and in Lee's explanation, this probably means it was padded with cotton that had been acquired from the cotton plant fleeces from the trees. Lee also cites the ancient Greek writer Tesius that's usually spelled Ctesias.
Quote.
Tesius also, who was the contemporary of Herodotus and was made prisoner and kept by the king of Persia as his court physician for seventeen years, was acquainted with the use of a kind of wol, the produce of trees for spinning and weaving amongst the natives of India. For he mentions in his Indica a fragment quoted by Photius quote tree garments, and that he thus referred to clothing made from these tree fleeces. We have testimony of Vero quote. Tizia says that there are in India trees that bear wool, and also one of Alexander the Great's military commanders named Niarcus, apparently spoke with wonder about trees in India that somehow bore wool like sheep, which was of a surpassing whiteness.
Theophrastus, on the other hand, shares the following about the island of Tylos in the Persian Gulf. Quote, wool bearing trees which grow there abundantly have leaves like the vine, but smaller. They bear no fruit, but the pod containing the wool is about the size of an apple while it is closed, and when it is ripe it opens. The wool is then gathered from it and woven into clothes of various qualities, some inferior but others of great value. And Karuba says that the word Theophrastus uses for apple melon is also used for sheep.
Hmmm. Oh, you can immediately see how that would perhaps cause some confusion.
Yeah.
Now there's another thing Lee gets into where I feel I need to quote from him directly for his comments on our old friend Plenty the elder, whom he blames for a literary blunder that introduces one of the main components of the medieval version of the legend. So this is Lee characterizing Plenty. He says, then comes Plenty, who, incompetent and worthless as a naturalist, though admirable as a writer, obscured this subject, as he did many others. In his natural history. He mentions cotton in four different paragraphs, and in every one of them inaccurate. He confuses cotton with flax and the fabrics woven of it with linen, and treats of silk as a downy substance scraped from the leaves of trees. And in transcribing or translating the passage from Theophrastus relating to the wool bearing trees, he distorts the author's words and states that quote, these trees bear gourds the size of a quince, which burst when ripe, and display balls of wool out of which the inhabitants make cloths like valuable linen. Plenty therefore seems to have been the author of the gored portion of the story, which afterwards obtained currency in Western Europe. Okay, so going all the way back to John Mandevila, remember he's writing about the Gowerdees, the gourds. That Lee makes a pretty compelling case here that this is just a result of Plenty the elder mistranslating the work of another ancient historian.
Wow.
So in all kinds of ancient Greek and Roman literature, you have people who are not very familiar or not at all familiar with the cotton plant or with tech styles made from it. So you can imagine their confusion if they say, visit India and see what's being done with cotton there, or if they encounter a garment brought from India, they would be like, huh, so, wait, there's a sheep in this tree, or the tree is growing wool somehow, Like it's kind of like trying to imagine a tree growing meat or giving milk.
Yeah, and kind of goes back to what we were talking about in the last episode. If you're not aware of the actual gulf between the development of mammals and plants, you might encounter something like this and think, well, you know, wolf from trees, Well, what else is possible? Yeah, but I do really like this theory, and I think it does match up with everything we know about about cotton plants as well, because you know, briefly accounts of cotton plants goes back. These accounts go back quite a way, so at least in Neolithic sites and what is now India and Pakistan five hundred BCE as a date that is frequently given out. Evidence of cotton usage even dates back a good five thousand years in meso America. But it wasn't until the late medieval period that cotton became known, not in Europe, and its exact origin wasn't understood at first, other than it came from a plant. Here is something like wool and it comes from a plant.
Yeah.
So yeah, I feel like this theory seems quite sensible. You can imagine how these accounts would have drifted and grown as they were related from individual to individual, from book to book, from language to language, translation and mistranslation in place, etc.
Yeah. Lee argues that the legend rises from embellishment of stories originally based upon ambiguity or confusion in literary sources, and this has two major factors. One is the misinterpretation of ambiguous or figurative language, and the other is the superficial visual similarity of two completely different objects. And so the direct linguistic example Lee gives is that Okay, what you originally have is reports by people like Herodotus and others a plant that quote bore as its fruit fleeces which surpassed those of lambs in beauty and excellence. And this was soon paraphrased and garbled by other authors as quote a plant bearing fruit within which was a little lamb having a fleece of surpassing beauty and excellence. So the fact that there is in India actually a tree with pods that bear wool gets paraphrased, mistranslated, embellished into all these other stories a plant that's got goreds, it's got lambs in them, or perhaps it merged with the pre existing weird stories about a ferocious beast who is tied to the ground by a stem that attached to the navel. Well, what if that beast was actually one of these these lamb plants or these sheep plants, and that's where the wool comes from. So, even though Lee was writing in the eighteen eighties, I think this ideology of the legend still holds up pretty well. It seems totally plausible to me absolutely.
Now. Originally I was thinking about getting into related creatures of myth and legend here, and I do, and I think we're going to save exploration of other specimens for later perhaps, but I do want to read just a quick quote from Jorge Lewis Borges and his Book of Imaginary Beings. He says we might recall another such case, that of the man drake or Mandagora, which screams like a man when it is pulled from the ground. There is also in one of the circles of Hell, that sad forest of suicides, from whose quote broken splints come words and blood at once. And that tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds that nested in its branches, and which put out feathers instead of leaves when springtime came. That's a great book, by the way, the Book of Imaginary Beings, and he chronicles several different beasts that were dream by various writers that he was familiar with, which makes sense. Borges was very interested in dreams as well as creatures and mazes and daggers and so forth. But I think we might be able to come back and do something on the mandrake. I was doing some more reading on that, and I was like, well, this too may have legs and demand its own episode. Now, one thing we sort of teased in the last episode that I wanted to get to as well, is the idea of this, well, the vegetable lamb, the vegetable lamb of Tartari. Will it ever become a reality? Now, on one level, we have to say, yeah, no matter how mad sciencey your mad science ideas are. I think the idea of, say, genetically engineering a plant that grows a fully bodied sheep is ridiculous. I mean again, we come back to that gulf between these organisms.
Right, and also like, why would you do that growing a fully formed lamb that had like a brain and was grazing on the plants around it. Well, it's mad science too, yeah, oh okay, okay, so mad's assuming you just want to do it for the heck of it. Even then, I'm skeptical that that'll ever happen.
Or alien mad scientists they just read plenty and they think this is what's up. So we can set that aside, I think. But you know, it is interesting though from a modern perspective, we have to ponder the fact that, Okay, we're talking about this vegetable lamb and we are seeing some amazing advancements in recent decades, in recent years concerning flesh that feels very much at home in the imagined gardens of tartary. For starters, there's of course the realm of plant based meat alternatives. Now, the practice of using plant products to simulate meat is of course nothing new and can be found in various cultures. Because remember, while modern cuisines are sometimes based on meat for every meal, this is not the sort of thing that traditional societies could necessarily depend on. Certainly, you can find some instances of say Arctic cultures that depend quite heavily on meat, but other times, like meat is something that is a part of a diet that otherwise has a lot of fruits and vegetables in it, and you're not going to necessarily have that kill, have that meat that's going to be a part of your diet day to day.
Yeah, for a number of reasons, many of them are economic.
Yeah. Yeah. So for starters, I guess we should point out that various fruits and vegetables have long been prized for their meat like textures, even if they're not being overtly described as such. And I'm not going to get into a lot of detail on these because it becomes more complicated nailing down meat substitute definitions with foods that are not themselves food products. For instance, if you cook an eggplant or a jackfruit the right way, prepare it the right way, you get some strong meat vibes. But I'm not sure we can really classify a culinary process like that as something that can be defined as a meat substitute.
Yeah, And I don't know how often some of these substances that are considered meat substitutes in dishes today how often they were originally thought of that way. Like there's a lot of uses of say tofu in Chinese cuisine that seemed to me to indicate that it's not being treated as just like, well, here's an alternative to meat. It's a food in its own right. It's just a food like any other food that has its own qualities that are prized, And I feel like I can appreciate it that way. But I know a lot of times Americans might think of tofu as like, Okay, this is something you have instead of meat.
Right, And I think with the tofu example, you know, when you're talking we're talking about tofu, we're talking about coagulated soy milk, so you know it's soybean based and it's thought to date back about two thousand years to China, and so you have something that you know, even if you're definitely classifying it as a meat substitute, it doesn't mean that it's going to be in a dish that's devoid of meat. You look at a lot of Chinese traditional Chinese dishes, and they have a lot of ingredients and sometimes there may be a little bit of meat in there. If you had meat, you might throw it in just because it's going to add to the flavor and all, but it's not. You know, it's not going to be a just a big old, necessarily a big old chunk of meat out there on the plate. We get into this a bit in our Invention episode on chopsticks and why chopsticks were so well utilized at least for various Chinese cuisines within a large portion of Chinese history.
I think I've gone on record on the show before about my love of Mapo tofu. It's one of my favorite dishes. But yeah, most of the time there's going to be some kind of meat in it. So if you're like a vegetarian, be checked beforehand.
Tofu, of course, can be super delicious. I just had some last night. It was it had been marinated, and then it had also been battered, and then I it was fried up. It was super good, haded on buns like a burger. Now some other of the main meat substitutes out there. We of course have satan, and that is the gluten based meat alternative that dates back probably to sixth century China. We have tempe. This is a fermented soybean cake and while the details of its origin seemed to be subject to debate, it seems to have originated in Indonesia, but the time period varies from centuries ago to thousands of years ago, and I'm not sure exactly what the predominant theory is there in Chinese traditions. We also have mocked duck. This is a fake duck meat. That's another gluten based product that I believe dates back to medieval China. Have you had mock duck before, Joe, I have not. It can be quite good. I've had it before where I was like, this is great, I look forward to having more of it. And I've had it before too where I'm like, I'm not so certain about this mock duck, but I have had it before where it's really good. Yeah, you can frequently purchase it. I've never prepared anything with it myself, but you can get it like in cans, So suffice to say, yes, you can. You know, we've long known that you can take plants and things derived from plants, and you can make things that scratch your itch for actually consuming meat. But of course today we have a number of more technologically advanced examples. You know, we have artificial plant based meat, such as you know, Beyond Meat. It's a company that makes beef, pork, and poultry substitutes. You have Impossible Meat that I think is mostly known for the Impossible burger. Beyond Meat, I've read is based on pea protein, rice protein, mung bean protein, and various other plant products, including red beet juice, which is interesting to give it that kind of bloody consistency.
Yeah, simulate the myoglobin, yeah.
And then Impossible Meat is based on the the heme heme molecule, a precursor to hemoglobin, and processing various plant ingredients to replicate it. But then there's this, and those products are fine. I've greatly enjoyed some of these plant based meat alternatives, especially of late. But then there's this realm beyond the realm of cultivated or cultured or cell based meats, in which actual animal cells are grown in a lab setting, right.
So this would be talking about actually, like the cells themselves are animal muscle cells, but they're not growing in an animal's body. They're just growing on some other substrate right now.
To be clear, they're not growing on plants. I'm suggesting that, but it's not merely a fact of it resembling meat or tasting like meat. It is meat, it is, but it is meat that is grown in like a lab setting, as opposed to growing as part of an organism in a domestic or wild scenario.
I've been reading about this in bits and pieces from years and always very interested in it, and I hadn't checked in in a while to see what the recent progress on this kind of stuff is.
Well, there seems to be a lot of movement, and there's been a lot of funding that has gone into it. I think some of the big questions are going to be like, Okay, how does this actually roll out as a commercial product that you know, at what point do we reach this place in its development? Where it's truly economically feasible and so forth. These are concerns with any kind of innovation, right. We've talked about that before on invention, Like it's one thing to create the thing, but then how does it become affordable and desired, etc. Yeah, but I was reading about this a little bit. I was curious what the latest was. And for instance, there's a company in Australia called Vow Foods. I was reading about them on the Conversation in an article by Catherine Wynne and Michelle Colegrave. And they're already growing pork, chicken, kangaroo, alpaca and water buffalo. Now none of this is commercially available yet, but it gives you a taste of what's possible. I've also read about lion meat being produced in such a manner by a different company, because I guess the thing is, it's all on the table if the meat is sourced from a lab rather than a farm or the wild.
Oh yeah, I mean you don't even normally think about eating like land carnivore meat.
No, And I can't. I can't imagine i'd want to, but I could see I can see the strategy here, Like you want to get people interested in the novel aspect of it, you know, someone who might not otherwise, like why would I Why would I go out and have a lab grown hamburger when I can have a hamburger from the wild. But if you offer them a lion burger, like what's their alternative, They're gonna go out and they're going to kill their own lion. They're gonna get lion meat on the black market. Interesting, and it does seem like there are a number of different Australian companies that are involved in this too. So so companies like this are using some of the same biomanufacturing technologies that have been used in the pharmaceutical industry for years, and again they've garnered a lot of investment, especially in recent years. And some of the outlying questions, you know, come down to just how economically feasible does this become? Does it become desirable by the population at large in the same way that plant based meats seem to be becoming.
So how fast can you can you grow like large masses of meat from these starting cell cultures?
Yeah, exactly. As for the taste, I have to stress I have not tried any of these myself, I have not had the opportunity to, but accounts I've read by such such as documentary and Liz Marshall, who did a documentary titled Meat the Future with meat spelled like meat. You know, she says that it is meat and it tastes like meat, so it's not particularly surprising. I've seen some other people weighing in where like, Okay, maybe you can get into questions of texture, but for the most part, like it's meat, it tastes like meat.
One of the things I read about this would have been many years ago now, but like some early prototypes of this were people trying to make a lab grown burger and one of the main comments was that like in many ways it tasted right, but it didn't have the fat content wasn't quite right yet. Though, I think that's the kind of thing that seems like that'd be pretty easy to get around.
Yeah, now as far as actual lamb and cheap meat goes, because we are talking about the vegetable lamb of CARTERI. After all, you know, lamb is a mammal meat that many fine quite delicious, and I have to say back when I ate mammal meat, I was really partial to a particular lamb tagine stew. So definitely it can be super delicious, and it's an animal that has a fairly large carbon footprint. So if you could find a way to produce that meat without you know, having to have the end of the same environmental impact, then that would that would make a lot of sense. Yeah, And so at first I was thinking, I was looking around and I wasn't finding anything, and I was like, Okay, maybe the age of the vegetable lamb of tartari coming more to fruition is We're just not there yet. But as reported by Jennifer Marston on The Spoon, that's thespoon dot Tech, which is like a really cool looking like news blog about food technologies. According to Marston here in twenty twenty one, the Australian cultivated meat company Magic Valley dubbed itself quote the world's first cultured lamb company. So they're saying this is it. We're going to be the ones that grow the sheep. She also writes that while lamb consumption in the United States has been down in recent there's still a big market for it in many countries, so it makes sense for a company like this to to, you know, to stake their claim to the lab grown lamb meat of the future. Though again I have not actually tried any of these cultured or cultivated meats, but I would love to have the opportunity to do so. I find this research very exciting. I think there's still a lot of questions about like where where we'll ultimately get to with these technologies, But I mean there's a lot of a lot of movement behind them, so I'm excited to see where it goes.
I agree it is very exciting. Oh one one kind of wants to be the John Mandeville of the future that says, I ate one of the lambs and it was delicious, except this lamb was grown in a lab instead of inside a gourd.
Now, one thing I wonder about. Okay, so we see that they're already thinking about what are all the exotic animals of the natural world that people might wish to eat that they normally wouldn't have access to. Will we go a step beyond Will we see chimeras emerge, be able to buy, say, manticore meat?
Will you be able to eat dinosaur meat?
Oh?
Yeah, well, I guess you already do. If you eat chicken.
But it's true people are having their their Dino nuggies regularly already. But but yeah, what else is possible Willie Mammoth steak?
Oh wow, so somehow I imagine that'd be quite gamy. Anyway, Should we wrap up there?
Yeah, yeah, let's go ahead and call it for this episode. But yeah, there's there's a lot we could continue to discuss, just in like the related realm of things like the Man Drake. But then also we could we could easily go back to our previous discussion about plant intelligence, plant and memory plant communication and explore this topic more so. In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Would you like to hear more on this matter or related matters? Is there a particular direction you would like to see us go in? Just ride in and let us know. In the meantime, you can listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, we have our core episodes there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Listener mail on Mondays, a short form artifact or monster fact on Wednesday, and on Friday we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most important matters and just focus on a weird film.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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