Mario Kart World's expanded roster is a wonderful thing, but it also brings up more than a few questions. If Bone Fish is behind the wheel, do all creatures in the Mario universe have sentient skeletons? How can the likes of Goomba, Cheep Cheep and Dolphin drive without any real limbs to speak of? And, perhaps most pressingly, is Cow getting in on the Dash Food fun and eating beef in the process?
The first two of these will likely be lost to time (or pending a Nintendo Life deep dive at some point), but we do have an official comment on the sworded issue of cownibalism thanks to a recent IGN interview with Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki. And before you get your hopes up, it ain't all that definitive.
After rehashing a lot of the same comments on Cow's MKW origin that we read in the recent Ask the Developer interview, Yabuki-san was put on the spot to answer whether Cow's Dash Food is real beef or some kind of vegetarian replacement. The truth, apparently, isn't for us to know: "Sorry, that's top secret," the producer told IGN with a laugh, "I can't say."
Nintendo and its secrets, eh? In a desperate attempt to help us sleep at night, we're going to take the optimistic route and assume that Cow is eating a bean burger of some form, and not developing a taste for its own flesh in the process... eesh, what a thought.
Elsewhere in the IGN interview, Yabuki continued to play his cards close to his chest when asked about whether Diddy Kong and his fresh redesign might make an appearance in the game, "I'm afraid I can't say anything at this time," he coyly responded.
We might not have the answer to the meat mystery any time soon, but we are mere days away from getting to see the entirety of Mario Kart World in action when it arrives alongside Switch 2 this Thursday. We're going to go out on a limb here and say that Cow is going to be a pretty popular pick in early online match-ups, so expect to see an awful lot of veggie burgers being prepped to go... we hope.