A mammoth meatball created by a cultivated meat company and which resurrected the flesh of long-extinct animals – was unveiled on Tuesday at NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The project initiated by Australia’s Vow takes a different approach to cultured meat. They aim to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis.
There are scores of companies working on replacements for conventional meat, such as beef, chicken and pork. But Vow aim to mix and match cells from unconventional species to create new kinds of meat.
In fact, Vow have already investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.
The first cultivated meat to be sold to diners will be Japanese quail, which can be expected to be in restaurants in Singapore this year.
“The goal is to transition a few billion meat eaters away from eating [conventional] animal protein to eating things that can be produced in electrified systems. And we believe the best way to do that is to invent meat. We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat”.
Tim Noakesmith, who co-founded Vow with Peppou, said: “We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change”.
The beast (Scientific name: Mammuthus primigenius) is thought to have been driven to extinction by hunting by humans and the warming of the world after the last Ice Age.
The initial idea was from Bas Korsten at creative agency Wunderman Thompson: “Our aim is to start a conversation about how we eat, and what the future alternatives can look and taste like. Cultured meat is meat, but not as we know it”.
Plant-based alternatives to meat are now common but cultured meat replicates the taste of conventional meat.
Vow worked with Professor Ernst Wolvetang (left), at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to create the mammoth muscle protein. His team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavor, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA.
The idea is not really new. In 2018, another company used DNA from an extinct animal to create gummy bears made from gelatine from a mastodon, another elephant-like animal.
This sequence was placed in myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow to the 20 billion cells subsequently used by the company to grow the mammoth meat.
No one has yet tasted the mammoth meatball. “We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years”, said Wolvetang. “So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies”.
Wolvetang admitted he could understand people initially being wary of such meat: “It’s a little bit strange and new – it’s always like that at first. But from an environmental and ethical point of view, I personally think [cultivated meat] makes a lot of sense”.
Seren Kell, at the Good Food Institute Europe, said: “I hope this fascinating project will open up new conversations about cultivated meat’s extraordinary potential to produce more sustainable food. However, as the most common sources of meat are farm animals such as cattle, pigs, and poultry, most of the sustainable protein sector is focused on realistically replicating meat from these species”.
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