iStockphoto / Daniel Eskridge
A group of meat scientists out of Australia have created a wooly mammoth meatball made from resurrected flesh of a wooly mammoth.
This is an incredible achievement and a testament to the powers of our modern technology. But the scientists behind the world’s first wooly mammoth meatball are too afraid to eat it, citing potential immune system reactions.
Vow (Food) is an Australian company seeking to change the way the world thinks about lab-grown meat. They want to convert millions worldwide to “eating things that can be produced in electrified systems,” according to a recent article in the Guardian.
Vow’s website says they “make better meat directly from animal cells.” Saying they go from ‘a handful of cells’ to ‘an abundance of delicious, nutritious, and sustainable meat’ within a matter of a few short weeks.
They have recently created the world’s first wooly mammoth meatball. This came after they sought to create a meatball out of Dodo Bird meat but “the DNA sequences needed do not exist” to create.
So they pivoted to using resurrected flesh from a wooly mammoth and making a meatball out of it, a meatball that everyone is afraid to eat.
It only took them a few weeks to produce wooly mammoth meat. In order to do so, they “took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving the meat its flavor, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA.”
Prof Ernst Wolvetang at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland told the Guardian “it was ridiculously easy and fast. We did this in a couple of weeks.”
Why hasn’t anyone eaten the wooly mammoth meatball yet?
Firstly, I’d like to volunteer as a tribute. If they need a human lab rat to test out rare meat then I’m their guy. I’ll try any food at least once.
But their explanation for why nobody’s eaten the lab-grown wooly mammoth meat is interesting.
Wolvetang told the Guardian “We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years. 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.”
Interestingly, it sounds like wooly mammoth meat is both the solution and the cause of the company’s biggest hurdle to success. They told the Guardian that people are wary of ‘new meat’ and food grown in a lab.
Conversely, I’m only interested because it’s new. If wooly mammoth meatballs were readily available in the grocery I probably wouldn’t care at all about seeking the meat out.
I’ve eaten minke whales and fermented sharks in Iceland. I have tasted brains, eaten all sorts of bugs, rattlesnake tacos, and more exotic that I could mention if we had more time. But I’ve never tasted wooly mammoth and I’d sure like to one day…