The Explorers Club and the wooly mammoth meal
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The Explorers Club and the wooly mammoth meal
It was billed as a fancy dinner with a 250,000-year-old main dish. But what was actually served?
Hello, Snackers. Today we have a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma … buried under a glacier and covered with a bitter layer of conquest. Bon appétit!
This story is an updated version of a Snack Stack post originally written for paid subscribers earlier this year.
From the time of its opening, in 1904, The Explorers Club in New York City has had a reputation as the dimly-lit clubhouse of swaggering white men with large bank accounts, massive egos, and a fondness for pith helmets and pistols. In those early days, members were famous for venturing around the world, far from New York. The fuel for their trips was a combination of brash colonialism, wide-eyed exoticism slash racism, and genuine curiosity.
Here, for example, is a dispatch from one of the members in 1948. You can practically hear the old-timey newsreel voice in the phrasing.
EXPLORER FLAG NO. 127 IS BACK
Captain and wife return from trip from French Guiana
New York, Nov. 11—Flag No. 127 of the Explorers Club has been returned to the club by Capt. Hassoldt Davis, who carried it with him to the unexplored upper reaches of the Maroni River in French Guiana and into the region of the Tumuc-Humac mountains in the confines of Brazil.
He returned to New York after a five-and-a-half-month expedition which was the first even to venture into the region and come back intact. One group of 50 lost 49 of its members; the survivor happened to be asleep in a tree, hidden by leaves, when the group was attacked by the Oyacoulet or “Long-Ear” Indians.
Davis was accompanied on this trip by his wife, Ruth, on what was also a honeymoon voyage.
… The Davises’ 500-mile trip up the Maroni and its tributaries was made in dugout canoes, paddled, poled and pulled at the end of long vines over 86 rapids.
(NB: Ruth Davis wasn’t a member of the Explorers Club because women weren’t allowed to join until 1981.)
Lest you think that tale was an outlier—I assure you it’s not—here’s a story about the Explorers Club from Popular Mechanics in 1932. You can read the text if you squint, but the images and headline give you the gist of it.
Part of the Explorers Club’s whole deal was that its members would not just head out into the world but come back and share their tales at the club’s headquarters in New York City. It’s a brick building on the Upper East Side, between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue, on the same block as a Prada store and the Austrian consulate. We’re talking old money. The interior continues the theme. It looks exactly how a set designer (or Wes Anderson) would decorate a place called the Explorers Club: dark paneling, a fireplace framed by giant tusks, assorted animal heads on the walls, an entire stuffed polar bear in one room. Imagine the atmosphere and then go to Google Images and have your stereotypes confirmed.
* * *
Sometimes, as with any club worth its Himalayan salt, the Explorers Club serves fancy meals. Possibly the most famous of these was on January 13, 1951, when the club promised to take its members on a journey back and time. For one night and one night only, members could sample 250,000-year-old giant sloth meat.
The club’s announcement billed the meal as “an especially delectable epicurean connoisseur’s experience never before put before man on earth.” That’s their original awkward wording, by the way.
It went on:
Just think what you will be able to tell your family and friends: that you actually did eat prehistoric meat of some 250,000, first cooked in “The Pit of Hades” and then as quickly placed in Mother Nature’s quick-freeze to remain as good as new unto Eternity!!!
Again, their words. Subtlety and thoughtful prose were not the priorities of these wannabe Hiram Binghams.
The cost of the meal, which included a small piece of super-aged giant sloth and a cocktail with ice also flown in from Alaska, was a relative bargain of $9.50 for members and $11.50 for guests. That works out to $102 and $123, adjusted for inflation, which is quite a bit less than a tasting menu at any Michelin-starred restaurant.
Those costs were a reduction from the original estimates of $495.74 per plate for a larger serving of mammoth meat. That earlier amount was due to the extreme difficulty of unearthing the mammoth from “‘cold storage’ beneath six miles of glacier ice near the erupting Aniakchak volcano in Alaska.” A good story can help sell a good meal but, of course, there are limits.
If any of this is starting to sound suspicious to you—they dug up a mammoth or maybe a sloth from six miles of ice in 1951 and it was intact enough for people to eat?—congratulations on being more attuned to the realities of the world than the Explorers of the 1950s.
The question of what the event attendees actually ate was a mystery that lasted for decades.
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It’s worth noting here that, today, Explorers Club has started to realize just how problematic it was back in the day, in much the same way that National Geographic has begun to acknowledge the incredible racism underpinning its stories and its very mission for many decades. In 2021, as a small step toward changing its ways, the Explorers Club, created a new program, a list of young “field scientists, anthropologists, and expedition leaders—a way to identify new members that could bring the club future prestige through their own history-making accomplishments. And unlike the club’s dominantly affluent, male, Eurocentric makeup, they represent true diversity in gender, race, socioeconomic status, and creed.” (Whether this effort will shift the organization’s core perspective, or make any real attempt to make up for lost time and rectify past misdeeds … well, that’s a different matter. National Geographic still has a lot of work to do, as Vox found when it made some calls last year.)
The mammoth-cocktail incident, I think, is a good indication of the ways Explorers Club members understood the world in the 1950s—namely, their high levels of ignorance and gullibility. They desperately wanted every possible wonder to be available to them to see, to hold, to literally consume. They believed it was their right, as wealthy white Americans, to have it all—even the things that stretched the bounds of plausibility.
For some reason, in the press coverage, the club’s promise of ancient giant sloth meat got edited—in every single instance I found—to be a dish of wooly mammoth instead. But even this inexplicable change did nothing to deter the tale from being spread. If anything, it may have helped, since wooly mammoths have a greater role in the cultural imagination than giant sloths. In any case, the underlying point was the same: The Explorers Club had served its members very, very old meat. How droll!
Farm-to-table wasn’t a marketable concept yet, but glacier-to-plate? Sure.
* * *
The dinner took place at the Grand Ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, which closed in December 2020. Again, picture old-money New York of the early twentieth century and you get the aesthetics. The menu also included spider crabs from the Pacific Ocean, green turtle soup, and cocktails made with ice flown in from a glacier near Juneau, Alaska. There was also a full line-up of entertainment on the schedule, including a toast by Lowell Thomas (arguably the most famous travel writer at the time), lectures on “The Wahgi Valley of New Guinea” and “The Home of the Ribbon Tail Bird of Paradise,” and something called “The Ethnological Follies” featuring “girls chosen as the highest ‘feminine beauty throughout the geographic earth.’”
But the sloth-or-mammoth was the star and the main selling point. It was the headline item that got people to the event. Speculation swirled around what it would taste like and “how many Alka-Seltzers will be needed to chase it.” Some observers doubted that the meat was really that ancient—it was probably not actually 250,000 years old, some scoffed, but a mere 25,000 or sold. This, however, seems to be the extent of the doubts, at least among published accounts.
Curiously, despite all the hype and discussion before the event, it’s hard to find details of how the meat—whatever its content or age—actually tasted. The Omaha Evening World-Herald said it was similar to roast beef and a captain in the Navy meteorological service said it tasted like veal. But that’s about all I can find.
Then again, that was never really the point, was it? With a meal like this, for a crowd like this, the actual sensory experience is secondary to the atmosphere and the joy of feeling like part of the in-crowd, experiencing something from far-off lands of mystery. Who cares about the nuances of flavor when you have vibes?
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One member of the Explorers Club, named Paul Griswold Howes, couldn’t make it to the dinner that January night, but was so enamored of the idea of it that he had the evening’s organizer, Wendell Phillips Dodge, send him a wooly mammoth slash giant sloth doggy bag. Think of it as Goldbelly for the pith helmet crowd. You can imagine his excitement upon receiving it; I’d bet money he told the delivery driver exactly what was in the package.
Howes wasn’t going to eat it, though—he wanted it for his museum, in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Eventually, the jar of meat ended up at Yale, where it continued to sit on a shelf until 2016, when some grad students decided to run some tests. They went in with the assumption that it was genuinely ancient meat, which, The New York Times noted, “meant that testing for DNA was more complicated than testing a more recent bit of flesh.” The possibility that it was the genuine article also offered some exciting scientific possibilities: “If the meat was really Megatherium [giant sloth], that would extend the species’ known range from South America all the way to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.”
Or maybe …
Maybe it was all a big prank by Wendell Phillips Dodge, the organizer of the evening.
Could that be the answer?
Here’s the solution to the meat mystery, from the official Yale press release:
A Yale-led analysis has shown that a famous morsel of meat from a 1951 Explorers Club dinner is not, in fact, a hunk of woolly mammoth. It is green sea turtle meat, most likely set aside from the soup course.
…
“I’m sure people wanted to believe it. They had no idea that many years later, a Ph.D. student would come along and figure this out with DNA sequencing techniques,” said Jessica Glass, a Yale graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology, and co-lead author of a study published Feb. 3 in the journal PLOS ONE.
“To me, this was a joke that no one got,” said Matt Davis, a Yale graduate student in geology and geophysics, who is the other co-lead author of the study. “It’s like a Halloween party where you put your hand in spaghetti, but they tell you it’s brains. In this case, everyone actually believed it.”
Dodge sorta kinda confessed his hoax in the Explorers Club newsletter after the event, saying that he had perhaps stumbled, as the Yale group later documented in their research paper on the matter:
However, we found archival evidence that Dodge admitted the prehistoric meat was a hoax and misled Howes about its authenticity. In a circumlocutory editorial published soon after the dinner, Dodge fancifully described the sloth’s fossil history but hinted that he may have discovered “a potion by means of which he could change, say, Cheylone mydas Cheuba [sic] from the Indian Ocean into Giant Sloth from the ‘Pit of Hades’ in The Aleutians”
* * *
I can’t quite decide how I feel about this, but I’m leaning toward Man, that’s hilarious, although it would have been even better if the reveal had happened at the dinner itself, as a way of pulling back the curtain on the Explorers Club’s whole … thing.
The last laugh, though, goes to an entirely different group of people: some scientists who, in 1984, actually did unearth prehistoric meat and make a meal out of it. In this case, it was 50,000-year-old bison—and there was photographic evidence of the whole thing.
The scientists spoke to Gastro Obscura about their unlikely dinner back in 2019:
Researchers were amazed to find that Blue Babe had frozen so well that its muscle tissue retained a texture not unlike beef jerky. Its fatty skin and bone marrow remained intact, too, even after thousands of years. So why not try eating part of it?
It had been done before. “All of us working on this thing had heard the tales of the Russians [who] excavated things like bison and mammoth in the Far North [that] were frozen enough to eat,” Guthrie says of several infamous meals. “So we decided, ‘You know what we can do? Make a meal using this bison.’”
There may well be other real examples of ancient snacks that people have dug up and eaten. It’s possible, apparently.
But the meal at the Explorers Club in 1951? That one was a hoax through and through, and one that reflects the worldview of both the man who pulled it and those who were duped.
Happy snacking!
— Doug
Bonus content!
This just in: I wrote a story for Saveur about the history of jalapeño poppers, and you can read it now, as part of an excellent larger package on foods of the 1990s.
And if you like podcasts, you should check out Proof, from America’s Test Kitchen. Every episode focuses on one story about food history … and I reported a piece on old-timey candy for the upcoming season (my piece will come out in mid-November).