It is well known that the recently proposed model of mimetic gravity can be presented as general relativity with an additional mimetic matter. We discuss a possibility to analogously reformulate the embedding theory, which is the geometrical description of gravity proposed by Regge and Teitelboim, treating it also as general relativity with some additional matter. We propose a form of action which allows one to describe this matter in terms of conserved currents. This action turns out to be a generalization of the perfect fluid action, which can be useful in the analysis of the properties of the additional matter. On the other side, the action contains a trace of the root of the matrix product, which is similar to the constructions appearing in bimetric theories of gravity. The action is completely equivalent to the original embedding theory, so it is not just some artificial model, but it has a clear geometric meaning. We discuss the possible equivalent forms of the theory and ways of studying the equations of motion that appear.