An Australian food company has made a meatball out of mammoth meat. The company also wants to draw attention to a serious problem.
The Stone Age or Paleo diet has been trending for a number of years. But in the time before livestock farming, there was neither beef nor pork – instead our ancestors ate mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. And how that might have tasted, an Australian food company has now found out.
The Vow company unveiled a giant meatball made from the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth at the Nemo science museum in the Netherlands on Tuesday. The piece of meat consists of sheep genes into which mammoth genes have been introduced.
“It’s like the movie ‘Jurassic Park'”
Because the mammoth DNA sequence obtained by the food company had some gaps, it was completed with African elephant DNA. James Ryall, Vow’s chief scientific officer, told Archyde.com: “It’s like the movie ‘Jurassic Park'” except the company doesn’t create real animals.
With the project, the food company wants to draw attention to farmed meat as a more sustainable alternative to real meat. “We wanted to create something different than anything you can buy today,” Vow founder Tim Noakesmith told Archyde.com. The mammoth was also chosen because scientists believe the animal’s extinction is due to climate change.
Will we be eating mammoth meat soon?
The mammoth meatball, which is said to taste like crocodile meat, can currently only be seen in the museum – it is not offered for consumption. “The protein is literally 4,000 years old,” said Vow founder Noakesmith. Before you can put the meat on the market, you first have to subject it to numerous tests.
The Australian company hopes to be able to bring farmed meat to the European market soon. However, there are currently no regulations for meat from the laboratory in the EU.
