«We have no idea how our immune system will react when we eat this»
Meatballs from a long-extinct mammoth created by a food company: an Australian company «resurrects» the flesh of extinct species, to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells.
< p>A meat farming company has created meatballs made from mammoth meat, recreating the meat of a long-extinct animal, writes The Guardian. Mammoth meatballs to be unveiled Tuesday night at the Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands.
The aim of the – 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 types of fish.
The first farmed meat to be sold to visitors will be Japanese quail, which the company expects will will hit restaurants in Singapore this year.
“We have a behavior change problem when it comes to eating meat,– said George Peppa, 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 believe that the best way to do this – invent meat. We look 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 Noaksmith, 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 – start a conversation about how we eat and what future alternatives might look and taste like. Cultured meat – it is meat, but not as we know it”.
Plant-based meat alternatives are now widespread, but cultured meat mimics the flavor of regular meat. Farmed meat – chicken from Good Meat – currently only sold to consumers in Singapore, but two companies have already been approved in the US.
In 2018, another company used DNA from 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.
The sequence was put into sheep myoblast stem cells, which replicated to grow to 20 billion cells subsequently used by the company to grow mammoth meat.
“It was ridiculously easy and quick, – said Professor Volvetang. – 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 protein for thousands of years,– Volvetang said. – Thus, 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 acceptable to the 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 meat production, especially beef, causes enormous damage to the environment, and many studies show that for To end the climate crisis in rich countries, meat consumption must be significantly reduced, 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 raised $56 million in investments.
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 evolve in response to their immediate environment, which means that it is possible to grow cuts of meat containing muscle, fat and connective tissue.
Soren Kell of the European Good Food Institute comments: “I hope this exciting project will open up new conversations about the exceptional potential 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”.