A hi-tech treat to spark public debate
Australian startup Vow has unveiled a meatball made from lab-grown cultured meat, using the genetic sequence from the extinct woolly mammoth. The mammoth meatball is a one-off and has not been tasted by its creators nor planned for commercial production. Vow presented the meatball as a source of protein to get people talking about the future of food.
The company aims to produce new types of meat by mixing and matching cells from unconventional species. Cultivated meat is made from animal cells and doesn’t require killing livestock, making it more environmentally friendly. More than 100 companies worldwide are working on cultivated meat products.
The link between large-scale livestock production and environmental destruction
Vow’s goal is to use technology to produce lab-grown meat that replaces livestock farming and highlights the link between large-scale livestock production and environmental destruction. The woolly mammoth was chosen as a candidate because it is a symbol of diversity loss and climate change.
“A lot of people have spoken about extinction as a clear-cut thing, but when we talk about diversity loss or climate change, it’s that you are losing a version of biodiversity that we’ve never seen before,” said Vow co-founder George Peppou.
Creating mammoth myoglobin using elephant DNA
The company used the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavor, and filled in the gaps using elephant DNA. The synthesized mammoth DNA sequence was inserted into a sheep muscle cell, which was then cultured in the lab, producing about 400 grams of meat. The process still requires scaling up before it’s commercially viable.
“We were interested in doing something that would capture people’s attention and make them think differently about food,” said Peppou.
A mammoth project in the new meat cultivation sector
The mammoth project was an outlier in the new meat cultivation sector, which commonly focuses on traditional livestock such as cattle, pigs, and poultry. The meatball produced an aroma similar to crocodile due to the addition of protein from an animal that went extinct 4,000 years ago.
Nobody has actually tasted the woolly mammoth meatball, and caution is necessary since we have no idea how our immune system would react to it. However, another woolly mammoth meatball could be made in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.
Lab-grown meat to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Advocates hope that lab-grown meat will reduce the need for animal agriculture and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Singapore is the only country to have approved cell-based meat for consumption. Vow is hoping to sell its first product, a cultivated Japanese quail meat, in Singapore later this year.
The carcasses of mammoths, which went extinct about 5,000 years ago, have been found well-preserved in permafrost, allowing scientists to sequence the mammoth genome and learn about their lives. Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University, has tried a small piece of frozen mammoth meat and said he would love to try mammoth meatballs if they were ever to go on sale.
Experts suggest that if the technology is widely adopted, it could reduce the environmental impact of global meat production in the future. While still in its infancy, lab-grown cultured meat products hold great promise as a solution for feeding an ever-growing world population while reducing harm from excess consumption of industrially raised livestock.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
