Back to Ice Age? Meat taste of extinct mammoth brought back without animal slaughter

An Australian cultured meat company named Vow has produced a giant meatball from DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth, bringing back the taste of the extinct species that roamed the Earth during the Ice Age.

Meat can be produced in different ways other than the conventional method of animal slaughtering. This is possible thanks to the science of cultivation. Now it has been proven that even the meat from extinct animals can be obtained.

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The animal cells are cultured to get meat, which is reportedly tastier than the conventional meat.The company Vow has already made a significant progress by figuring out that there is a potential of getting meat from 50 species, which includes alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.

For the meat, Vow joined hands with Professor Ernst Wolvetang of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland. The first step of the process was to create the mammoth muscle protein.

After that, to add flavour to the meat, the team at Vow took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin. This is a key muscle protein which makes the meat tasty before people can devour it. Elephant DNA is also used and thissequence was placed in myoblast stem cells from a sheep.

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These cells then got replicated to grow to 20 billion cells. These are then used to grow the mammoth meat. Vow

CEO George Peppou said,“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.

“And we believe the best way to do that is to invent meat. We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat.”

Tim Noakesmith, who co-founded Vow, said, “We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change.”

The creature is thought to have been driven to extinction by hunting by humans and the warming of the world after the last Ice Age.

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However, the idea of producing meat of the extinct animal was one of Bas Korsten at creative agency Wunderman Thompson.Korsten said, “Our aim is to start a conversation about how we eat, and what the future alternatives can look and taste like. Cultured meat is meat, but not as we know it.”

“It was ridiculously easy and fast,” said Wolvetang. “We did this in a couple of weeks.” Initially, the idea was to produce dodo meat, he said, but the DNA sequences needed do not exist.

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