A meatball made of lab-grown cultured meat utilizing the genetic sequence from a long-extinct pachyderm was unveiled on Tuesday by an Australian company, which claimed it was done to spark discussion about the high-tech treat.
Just days before April 1, the launch took place in an Amsterdam science museum, raising the question, “Is this for real?”
Tim Noakesmith, founder of Australian startup Vow said, “This is not an April Fools joke. This is a real innovation.”
Animal cells are used to create cultured meat, also known as cell-based meat or cultured meat. It can be produced without killing livestock, which proponents argue is better for both the environment and the animals.
Vow utilized genetic information from the mammoth that was available to the public, filling in any gaps with information from the mammoth’s closest living relative, the African elephant. It was then implanted it into a sheep cell, according to Noakesmith. The cells multiplied in a lab until there were sufficient numbers to form the meatball.
More than 100 businesses, many of them start-ups like Vow, are working on cultured meat products worldwide.
According to experts, if the technology is widely used, it might significantly lessen the future environmental effect of meat production worldwide. Worldwide, agriculture occupies billions of acres of land.
However, don’t count on this appearing on plates anytime soon. The only nation that has permitted the consumption of cell-based meat so far is tiny Singapore. Later this year, Vow hopes to start selling its first item there: meat from raised Japanese quail.
Even its designers have not tried the giant meatball, and it is not intended to be produced commercially. It is a one-off. Instead, it was positioned as a protein source that would spark discussion about the future of meat.
Noakesmith told The Associated Press, “We wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different to potentially what we had before. That there are things that are unique and better than the meats that we’re necessarily eating now, and we thought the mammoth would be a conversation starter and get people excited about this new future.”
“But also the woolly mammoth has been traditionally a symbol of loss. We know now that it died from climate change. And so what we wanted to do was see if we could create something that was a symbol of a more exciting future that’s not only better for us, but also better for the planet,” Noakesmith added.
The project “will open up new conversations about cultivated meat’s extraordinary potential to produce more sustainable foods, reduce the climate impact of our current food system, and free up land for less intensive farming practices,” according to Seren Kell, science and technology manager at Good Food Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products.
He claimed that the mammoth project, with its unusual gene supply, was an anomaly in the new meat cultivation industry, which typically concentrates on conventional animals, such as cattle, pigs, and chickens.
“By cultivating beef, pork, chicken, and seafood, we can have the most impact in terms of reducing emissions from conventional animal agriculture and satisfying growing global demand for meat while meeting our climate targets,” said Kell.
The enormous meatball, which was on display in Amsterdam and was about the size of a softball or a volleyball, was simply there for display. It had been glazed to prevent damage during transportation from Sydney.
However, it smelled fantastic as it was being prepared—slow baked first, then completed with a blow torch on the outside.
“The folks who were there, they said the aroma was something similar to another prototype that we produced before, which was a crocodile,” said Noakesmith. “So, super fascinating to think that adding the protein from an animal that went extinct 4,000 years ago gave it a totally unique and new aroma, something we haven’t smelled as a population for a very long time.”
