The first time I heard about eating a mammoth was in the mid ’70s – a huge exhibition was held in Turin, sponsored by the government of the USSR, and among the exhibits there was a baby mammoth.
And there was this brochure that explained that mammoths were found along the Lena river, in Siberia, and almost certainly one or two specimens had been “consumed as food” in the decades immediately before and after the Revolution.

But it turns out that there’s been a long-standing… story, or legend, or piece of spurious news, about that time they served mammoth meat at the Explorers Club in New York.
It was in 1951. The story was reported in The Christian Science Monitor, and a newspaper like that would never lie, right? Continue reading →