Mammoth meatball. It sounds like a joke, science fiction or the latest occurrence of someone with a lot of free time at the controls of an AI, but what we see in the image is a royal meatball made with a very peculiar tangible meat. It’s lab-grown meat made, supposedly, from cells of mammoth. Of course, it is not edible.
This peculiar dish is the work of the Australian company wowand its objective is not so much to launch a line of foods from extinct animals, as from draw attention about the possibilities of this technology in the increasingly near future.
While Italy prefers to shut down before cultured meat begins its journey in Europe, there are several companies that are working on developing laboratory meats in order to provide a healthy and sustainable food that does not involve the sacrifice of animalsthus also reducing the climate impact.
The striking meatball has been cooked using meat that wow claims to have cultivated from one of the partial mammoth DNA sequences that are conserved, the gene that produces myoglobin. As they explain in xataka. those recovered genes can be combined with the DNA of living elephants, in a similar process – very roughly– which is described in Jurassic Park.
The intention of the Australian company It is not resurrecting extinct animalsas other companies have proposed, but to use the mammoth as a symbol of the message they want to launch, a whole marketing strategy to capture the attention of the media and spread the word about the possibilities that, in their opinion, the possibility of combine cells from different animals to obtain new products that are more nutritious, tasty, sustainable and respectful of living beings and the environment.
Thus, the gigantic mammoth meatball is real, but only an exceptional prototype that, according to those responsible, is inedible. They allege that, having been produced from meat that disappeared thousands of years ago, we cannot know How would the body react? human to their digestion, and could be dangerous.
The company wow states that it is already investigating the potential offered by beef more than 50 species different species, including fish and reptiles such as the crocodile, as well as mammals and birds of all kinds, such as the alpaca, the peacock or the kangaroo. “We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then we mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat,” he said. George PeppouCEO of the company.
Production and sale of cultured meat it’s only legal currently in Singapore, but the United States has already given its approval to two companies that also want to commercialize their products in the near future.
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Photos | Aico Lind from www.studioaico.nl
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