Meatballs made from mammoth

You might have heard of the paleo diet, but how about food literally from the palaeolithic era, as but a cultivated meat company from Australia has created meatballs made of mammoth. What was involved, and what was the point? Will Tingle has more…

We’ve been producing alternatives to farm-produced meat, be it soy or pea protein, as far back as 1877. But this latest farm-free meat alternative goes back further than 150 years - indeed it goes back over 10,000 years: the Australian ‘cultivated meat’ company Vow have just unveiled a mammoth meatball - and they aren’t talking about the size. It really does contain meat from a woolly mammoth. Well, sort of: the meat in question isn’t actually a hunk taken from a preserved body but instead lab-grown, with the help of some modern day animals.

So how did they manage to pull this off? Well believe it or not, despite the mammoth going extinct over 10,000 years ago, scientists have sequences the DNA of the animals from mummified samples preserved in Siberian permafrost.

This means we have the genetic recipe for every part of the mammoth body. And Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, used this mammoth sequence - and a bit of modern day elephant to fill in one or two missing gaps in the genome - to grow mammoth muscle cells; muscle, of course, is the key part of the meat we eat.

The sequence of genes that make up mammoth muscle are only the instructions, they cannot make muscle on their own. So this gene sequence was added to sheep muscle stem cells that made the mammoth muscle protein to create the Vow meatball.

The big question is, of course, what might mammoth taste like? Well, currently nobody knows. In Professor Wolvetang’s own words: “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.”

Nevertheless, our close caveman ancestors were happily dining on mammoths until relatively recently, so it seems unlikely our own digestive tracts would have a problem with this menu option.

Indeed, there was also the case of the “Blue babe”, a 36,000 year old bison preserved in the Alaskan permafrost consumed by two of the people involved in its discovery who goaded each other into stewing a sample of the bison with vegetables. They described it as “bland, but anything is edible with enough onions.”

It is a bit of a stretch from this lone case to sanctioning chowing down on a mammoth, but implies anyone wishing to sate their prehistoric palate might be safe in doing so. After all, domestic cows have been around and relatively unchanged for 10,000 years too.

But why resort to in vitro meat at all when we have ready access to the real thing? In the fight to save the planet against the worst effects of climate change, invariably the emissions discussion turns towards the food industry. The process of using farming machinery, spraying fertilisers and transporting the food, as well as the methane that cows and rice produce, accounts for around 26% of worldwide emissions.

Farming large mammals, like cows or pigs, generates significant amounts of greenhouse gases, with one estimate stating that 1 kilo of beef accounts for 70 kg of greenhouse gas emissions. So looking at our diets, and reducing meat consumption even by a small amount, can make a big difference to our individual carbon footprints.

So what drove Vow to such a stunt? Well the CEO, George Peppou was quoted as saying “We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption. 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.”

So, would you put down your beef burger for a mammoth meatball?

The idea of ‘cultivated meat’, lab grown meat without the need for a farm, is starting to gain traction too. The main obstacle between now and widespread production is governing bodies.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) regulates this industry, and there are strict criteria for a new product to be approved for sale in the bloc. However, two companies that make cultivated chicken meat have just passed approval to be sold in the US.

So could there be a wave of cultivated meat appearing on our shop shelves, spurred on by the appearance of this mammoth meatball?

And, by the way, the irony is not lost on Vow that they chose an animal that died out due to climate change and human hunting.