With more people turning vegan and vegetarian, the food industry has had to adapt to an increasing demand for food that looks and tastes like meat, but is 100% plant based.
Often people will have moral reasons for not eating meat, and that means it's not because they don't like the taste.
An Australian cultivated meat company is taking a completely different approach to meat alternatives – by resurrecting the flesh of long-extinct animals.
Vow is one of many companies attempting to remove the need for animal slaughter in meat production, creating new kinds of meats in the process too.
They do this by creating a lab-grown, edible 'meat' from cells – including a meatball made from the long-extinct mammoths.
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Tim Noakesmith, who cofounded Vow, told The Guardian: "We chose the woolly mammoth because it's a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change."
The mammoth is thought to have been driven to extinction by human development and hunting.
Vow's team worked with Prof Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland. They took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, which is a key muscle protein for flavour.
Any gaps were filled in by elephant DNA to create the meat, which Wolvetang said was "ridiculously easy and fast".
Nobody has tried the mammoth meatball yet, as there is no telling how our immune system would respond to it, since we've not eaten the animal for thousands of years.
While Vow's meatball isn't ready for public consumption yet, over 50 species have been trialled and tested - including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.
The company is expecting to unveil Japanese quail to diners in Singapore later this year.
"We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption," said George Peppou, CEO of Vow.
"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."
Bas Korsten from Wunderman Thompson presented the initial idea and 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."
While plant based meat alternatives are common, cultivated meat that tastes like the real deal is only sold in Singapore. There are two companies that have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as safe to eat.
Upside Food, based in California, are permitted to take living cells from chickens for the purpose of growing them in a controlled laboratory environment to create meat without the killing of animals.
Lab cultivated meat takes up less land and water as well as removing methane gas, with climate reports often pointing to the reduction of meat consumption to help end the climate change crisis.
The mammoth meatball is set to be unveiled at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands.
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