Have you ever wanted to eat like a caveman? Thanks to genetic engineering, a woolly mammoth meatball is now a possibility. 🤔
“Rather than simply replicating existing products, this technology offers us the opportunity to create something truly unique and better,” said James Ryall, the chief scientific officer at Vow.
To make the meatball, researchers isolated DNA in mammoths that gives flavor to red meat. Gaps were filled in with genetic material from an African elephant, the woolly mammoth’s closest living relative. The cultured meat was then grown in a lab from animal cells and shaped into the meatball form that we all know and love.
The Mammoth Meatball was gifted by the company to the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in the Netherlands, after being revealed at the NemoMuseum in Amsterdam. At the unveiling, Forged said it hopes the meatball will make people think about the climate damage caused by cows and other livestock, as beef is currently the most climate-intensive food. “The mammoth is a gigantic symbol of loss,” the company says on its website. “We hope our meatball will resurrect conversations about meat and climate change.
Lab-grown meat is becoming more common, although it’s rare that we see it using material from extinct animals. Yet the Mammoth Meatball isn’t completely unique in that regard. In 2018, the start-up Geltor used DNA from the extinct mastodon to create a gelatin used in gummy bears, Bloomberg noted. And while the woolly mammoth meatball might be a one-off, at least for now, Vow is testing products using cells from untraditional living animals like crocodiles.
While we can’t vouch for the flavor of the Mammoth Meatball, it’s at least a change of pace from what you’d find at your standard red-sauce joint. At the same time, we all saw what noodling around with prehistoric DNA did in the movie
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