A food company has created meatballs from the meat of a long-extinct mammoth

A meat farming company has created meatballs made from mammoth meat, recreating the meat of a long-extinct animal, writes The Guardian. The mammoth meatballs will be on display Tuesday evening at the Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands.

The aim of the project is to demonstrate the potential of cell-raised meat without slaughter, and highlight the link between large-scale animal husbandry and wildlife destruction and the climate crisis.

The mammoth meatballs were produced by Vow Food, an Australian company that takes an alternative approach to meat farming. There are many companies working to replace conventional meats such as chicken, pork and beef. But Vow Foods is committed to mixing and matching cells from non-traditional species to create new types of meat. The company has already explored the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacock and various fish species.

The first farmed meat to be sold to visitors will be Japanese quail, which the company expects to hit restaurants in Singapore this year.

“We have a behavior change problem when it comes to meat consumption,” said George Peppu, CEO of Vow Food. “The goal is to transition several billion meat eaters from eating conventional animal protein to eating foods that can be produced in electrified systems. And we think the best way to do that is to invent meat. We are looking for cells that are easy to grow, that are really tasty and nutritious, and then we mix these cells to get really tasty meat.”

Tim Noakesmith, who co-founded Vow Food with Peppu, says: “We chose the woolly mammoth because it is a symbol of loss of diversity and a symbol of climate change.” It is believed that this prehistoric creature was driven to extinction by human hunting and the warming of the world after the last ice age.

The original idea came from Bas Corsten of creative agency Wunderman Thompson: “Our goal is to start a conversation about how we eat and what future alternatives might look and taste like. Cultured meat is meat, but not as we know it.”

Plant-based meat alternatives are now widely available, but cultured meat mimics the flavor of regular meat. The farmed meat, Good Meat’s chicken, is currently only sold to consumers in Singapore, but two companies have already gone through the U.S. approval process.

In 2018, another company used the DNA of an extinct animal to create gummy bears from the gelatin of a mastodon, another elephantine animal.

Vow Food worked on the development of the mammoth muscle protein with Professor Ernst Wolvetang of the Australian Institute of Bioengineering at the University of Queensland. His team took the DNA sequence of mammoth myoglobin, the key muscle protein that gives meat flavor, and filled in a few gaps using elephant DNA.

This sequence was inserted into sheep myoblast stem cells, which replicated to grow to 20 billion cells, which were subsequently used by the company to grow mammoth meat.

“It was ridiculously easy and fast,” Professor Wolvetang said. “We did it in a couple of weeks.” Initially, he says, the idea was to produce dodo meat, but the required DNA sequences do not exist.

No one has tried mammoth meatballs yet. “We haven’t seen this squirrel in thousands of years,” Volvetang said. “So we have no idea how our immune system will react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we certainly could do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulators.”

Volvetang said he can understand why people are initially wary of this kind of meat: “It’s a little strange and new – it’s always like that at first. But from an environmental and ethical point of view, I personally think that farmed meat makes a lot of sense.”

Large-scale production of meat, especially beef, is causing enormous damage to the environment, and many studies show that in order to end the climate crisis in rich countries, it is necessary to significantly reduce meat consumption, writes The Guardian.

Farmed meat uses much less land and water than livestock and emits no methane. Vow Food has stated that all of the energy it uses comes from renewable sources and that fetal bovine serum, a nutrient derived from bovine fruit, is not used in any of its commercial products. To date, the company has attracted investments in the amount of 56 million US dollars.

Professor Wolvetang believes that technologies used in medical research and human stem cell research will increasingly overlap with canned meat production.

For example, cells can be programmed to develop in response to their immediate environment, which means that cuts of meat containing muscle, fat, and connective tissue can be grown.

Seren Kell of the European Good Food Institute comments: “I hope this exciting project will spark new conversations about the exceptional potential of cultured meat to produce more sustainable food. However, since the most common sources of meat are farm animals such as cattle, pigs and poultry, much of the sustainable protein production sector is focused on realistically reproducing the meat of these species. By growing beef, pork, chicken and seafood, we can achieve the greatest impact in terms of reducing emissions from traditional livestock production.”