Maybe The Flintstones were on to something.
The plant-based food market seems to be stalling, as companies like Beyond Meat (BYND) and Impossible Foods have run into some significant headwinds following a surge in the early days of the pandemic.
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So perhaps it's time to take a step back....way back.
Vow, an Australian start-up specializing in cultured meat--which is grown in a lab from a few animal cells--have gone all the way back to Bedrock and cooked up a meatball made from flesh cultivated using the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth.
Just like mother used to make -- if mother were a Neanderthal.
Starting a Conversation
Tim Noakesmith, Vow's founder told the Associated Press that “we wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different to potentially what we had before."
"That there are things that are unique and better than the meats that we’re necessarily eating now, and we thought the mammoth would be a conversation starter and get people excited about this new future," he said.
Vow, which claims to "make ridiculously good meat", used publicly available genetic information from the mammoth, filled missing parts with genetic data from its closest living relative, the African elephant, and inserted it into a sheep cell.
Cultured meat advocates say that livestock doesn’t need to be killed to produce it, which is not only really good news for the animals, but it also gives the environment a much-needed break in the form of reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
There are about 100 companies worldwide developing cultured meat components, services, and end-products, compared with only four in 2016.
It's What Not for Dinner
Good Meat, Inc, said it received a “no questions” letter from the FDA earlier this month, as part of the agency’s initial review of the process. Upside Foods won a similar preliminary clearance last fall.
The California startup and other lab-meat outfits are developing “a new kind of meat, poultry and seafood made from cells instead of raised and slaughtered animals,” the company said in a statement.
The mammoth meatball created a bit of buzz on social media, which one commenter tweeting "now this is what the Paleo diet is all about."
"& so it begins, they’ll be growing meat from a T’rex & any other extinct species next !" another person said.
"Tastes like dodo," one tweet read.
But don't plan on ordering for that mammoth meatball hero from your local drive-thru any time soon.
This woolly wonder is not for human consumption. Vow said its brand of protein hasn't been around for thousands of years and nobody knows how the human immune system will react to it.
Instead, the meatball will join the collection at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave — a museum of science and medicine in the Netherlands
So for now, you'll just have to watch the Flintstones wrestle with those brontosaurus ribs.
