Woolly mammoth meatball? Australian food company reveals extinct meat grown in a lab
The waiter sets a large plate of spaghetti in front of you. You twirl your fork around the noodles drenched in a rich garlic-infused tomato sauce. You poke one of the juicy meatballs and take a bite — into woolly mammoth meat?
That’s the culinary experience an Australian food company is envisioning and, more importantly, already starting to create.
The company, Vow, is creating a variety of lab-grown meats as a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional meat production, the company said in a joint news release with Wunderman Thompson on Tuesday, March 28.
Vow has taken a “different approach” from other cultured meat companies that focus on lab-grown alternatives to common staples like chicken, beef and pork, The Guardian reported. The company has “investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.”
To show the “potential” of cultured meat, Vow unveiled its most recent project: the mammoth meatball, the release said.
To create the meatball, researchers used preserved DNA from the extinct mammoth and filled in missing fragments with the species’ closest living relative, the African elephant. The cell culture was “placed into a bioreactor, where the cells are allowed to grow and multiply just like they would in an animal,” according to the project’s website.
After a couple of weeks, the team had regrown enough mammoth meat to create the meatball, Ernst Wolvetang, a researcher at the University of Queensland who was involved in the project, told The Guardian.
The result doesn’t look too different from a traditional beef meatball, photos show.
But there is one major difference: “The Mammoth meatball itself is not intended for human consumption,” Vow said.
“Since we are dealing with an extinct protein, it will take some time before we can guarantee that Mammoth meat is safe and healthy,” the company said on its project website.
The mammoth meatball is a first of its kind creation, the company said. “No one has ever before brought an extinct protein like this back to life.”
For that reason, no one has tried it — yet. “We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” Wolvetang told The Guardian. “So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it.”
Another type of lab-grown cultured meat, chicken made by Good Meat, is available exclusively in Singapore, The Guardian reported. Starting this year, Vow plans to sell its first product, Japanese quail, to diners in Singapore.
For now, Vow’s mammoth meatball is serving a different purpose, the company’s founder, Tim Noakesmith, said in the release.
“We are aiming to pioneer a new school of thought: that food as we know it doesn’t need to be the way we know it,” he said. “We are on a mission to break the status quo of food.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2023 at 12:57 PM with the headline "Woolly mammoth meatball? Australian food company reveals extinct meat grown in a lab."
