“A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals,” reported The Guardian:
The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals…The mammoth meatball was produced by Vow, an Australian company, which is taking a different approach to cultured meat.
There are scores of companies working on replacements for conventional meat, such as chicken, pork and beef. But Vow is aiming to mix and match cells from unconventional species to create new kinds of meat.
The company has already investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.
The first cultivated meat to be sold to diners will be Japanese quail, which the company expects will be in restaurants in Singapore this year….“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 cofounded Vow with Peppou, 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.
The initial idea was from Bas Korsten at creative agency Wunderman Thompson: “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.”
Plant-based alternatives to meat are now common but cultured meat replicates the taste of conventional meat. Cultivated meat – chicken from Good Meat – is currently only sold to consumers in Singapore, but two companies have now passed an approval process in the US.
In November, Italy banned lab-grown meat to protect jobs in farming, even as investment has poured into the development of lab-grown meat in other countries.
Researchers are also working on lab-grown meat that has less impact on the environment than raising livestock. Ten years ago, scientists came up with the world’s first lab-grown beef burger. In August, Bloomberg News reported that “a Dutch startup is luring a dwindling pool of investor funds with stem-cell technology that can rapidly grow slaughter-free sausages,” reports Bloomberg News:
Meatable is betting that its use of patented technology and so-called pluripotent stem cells, which can grow a pork sausage in only eight days, will give it an edge over other cultivated meat startups. The company has just raised $35 million to scale up the process and bring products like pork dumplings to the market.
The key for Meatable is the speed of cultivation, which should allow the company to expand output and cut costs, bringing prices closer to those of traditional meat. As investors get more selective after some initiatives fell short of expectations, Meatable plans to bring its products to restaurants and stores in Singapore next year, while also targeting the US, which recently approved the sale of cell-based chicken.
“We can make a lot of meat compared with other players,” Chief Executive Officer Krijn de Nood said in an interview. “That is what will drive the winner. It’s all about the speed of the process. It’s all about scale and cost reduction.”
Crunchbase reported that investors are pouring more than a billion dollars each year into startups “working on cell-cultured meat and other cell-cultured meat alternatives.”
Lab-grown beef might be better for the environment than naturally-raised beef. But that is probably not true for other meats that are more efficient to produce naturally, such as chicken. A study concluded that because of the energy consumption needed to scale up cultured meat, its carbon footprint could be several times that of conventional chicken.
Guinea pigs are a much more efficient source of protein, per acre, than cattle, generating four times as much meat per acre. Guinea pigs also generate less greenhouse gas emissions per pound of meat. Lab-grown guinea pig meat would not make sense even from an environmental perspective, because they can be raised naturally without having much impact on the environment.
