The vanished woolly mammoth has, in a way, come back—but this time as a meatball. An Australian company that specializes in cultured meat unveiled a sphere of lab-grown flesh in March 2023 that was made using the elephant-like mammal's Genome sequence.
But, you won't find this item in a grocery store because it isn't currently intended to be consumed. The "mammoth meatball" instead seeks to draw attention to the negative effects conventional farming methods have on the environment and to advocate the use of cultured meat as a future source of food.
According to Tim Noakesmith, a co-founder of Vow, the business that created the meatball, "We wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different from perhaps what we had previously" (AP). "We believed the mammoth would spark conversation. We aimed to produce something that may serve as a representation of an exciting future that is better for the earth as well as for ourselves.
Currently, agriculture consumes billions of acres of land, and the greenhouse gases produced during food production account for nearly 30% of all emissions in the world. Growing meat from animal cells, or cultured meat, requires less land and water than rearing livestock does. According to a statement from Vow, cultured meat may be tailored to satisfy taste and nutritional demands because it is produced in a lab.
The mammoth meatball, according to Seren Kell, science and technology manager at the nonprofit Good Food Institute, which promotes alternatives to animal products, "will open up new conversations about cultivated meat's extraordinary potential to produce more sustainable food," Damian Carrington of the Guardian reports.
Between 700,000 and 4,000 years ago, woolly mammoths roamed Eurasia and North America, according to Riley Black's 2021 article for Smithsonian magazine. The species was eradicated after the last Ice Age, possibly as a result of both human hunting and climatic changes. The entire animal's DNA was sequenced by scientists in 2015. The gigantic meatball was made possible thanks to this information.
The spherical object is between a softball and a volleyball in size. It was created by combining genetic information from African elephants, the mammoth's nearest living relative, with the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a protein that gives meat its color and flavor. The final meatball was created by coaxing 20 billion cells to proliferate after the sequence was introduced into sheep cell lines.
At the Dutch science museum Nemo, Vow debuted its take on mammoth meat. Audience members reportedly compared the product's aroma to that of crocodile meat as the start-up slowly baked the meatball before blowtorching its exterior.
Despite the fact that this might make the enormous meat sound enticing, Vow's meatball cannot be eaten. The reaction of contemporary human immune systems to the product is unclear to scientists.
James Ryall, chief scientific officer for Vow, tells CNN's Katie Hunt, "We're talking about a protein that hasn't existed for 5,000 years." "I don't know what this specific protein's potential allergenicity might be."
The culinary experts at Vow are upbeat about the prospects for cell-based meat substitutes in the future. Only Singapore now offers cultured meat, but businesses like Upward Foods and GOOD Meat have received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for their lab-grown goods.
