Mammoth meatballs: a crazy but real creation from an Australian company

It may seem like science fiction, but an Australian company called Vow has produced meat in a lab. There are many companies already doing this, but none of them have yet created it from an extinct animal such as the mammoth.

In fact, the company didn't just produce farm-raised mammoth meat. They have also made meatballs out of it. This was just a trial at this point, but in the future they hope to do this with more animals, both existing and extinct. It would be an interesting way to eat exotic animals without having to harm them.

Cultivated meat from extinct animals, weird but not far-fetched

Cultured meat is meat obtained in the laboratory from muscle cells taken from a particular animal. Therefore, there is no need to kill the animal, a biopsy is sufficient.

As for extinct animals, some of them were preserved well enough that the cells can be extracted by biopsy. In particular, scientists extracted a DNA sequence from a mammoth muscle protein. It was not completely preserved, so there were some gaps in the sequence, which were supplemented with elephant DNA. Eventually, it was injected into muscle progenitor stem cells taken from sheep embryos. From that point on, the procedure was the same as with any other raised meat.

Fine dining with exotic animals

As the executives of this company explained to Food Dive, their goal is to get meat raised from exotic animals, not necessarily extinct. For example, zebra, yak or Galapagos tortoise.

They think the general population probably won't want to try it. Nevertheless, it may be of interest to fine dining restaurants. Such establishments are more likely to find people willing to try something new and pay for it.