Frankenfood made from mammoth

Emmanuelle Ducros 08:46, March 30, 2023

A journey between food and science fiction... Sacred publicity stunt at Jurassic Park that was offered two days ago in the Netherlands the young Australian company Vow, specialized in artificial meat

Which will whet your appetite for the day. This three-and-a-half-year-old start-up that defines itself "as an experimental food brand at the intersection of food, science and culture" presented the innovation that kills everything (or rather kills nothing at all) when it comes to cellular meat.

A ball of woolly mammoth meat, an animal extinct just over 4,000 years ago.

It's a joke?

Not at all. It is difficult to define the thing, Presented under a bell as in top chef. A ball the size of a small ball of hand, the color and texture of a well-cooked ground steak. Not very appetizing, and moreover not intended for consumption, even if the creators of the thing find it a taste of crocodile.

The whole (intellectual) interest of this big dumpling is that it was grown in a laboratory, in what really looks like a science fiction scenario. Jurassic Park revisited by the Tricatel of the wing or the thigh. Genetic material recovered from a mammoth, a muscle-specific protein called myoglobin, supplemented with elephant DNA sequences, inserted into sheep cells and simmered, was used. "Ridiculously easy and fast," comments the team, two weeks to grow the 20 billion cells of the meat ball.

Can we find the mammoth steak in the restaurant?

There would be quite a few regulatory obstacles to have the health authorities approve meat from the depths of time, I am not even sure that such a thing is planned. Not sure that we are able to digest it. Europe should certainly not be a pioneer. But Vow, which has significant production capacities, a lot of money, has another product up its sleeve, a product based on artificial quail that should be quickly marketed in Japan.

What is the point of such a cuisine? It's still a sorcerer's apprentice...

First, test the technologies. All this serves to demonstrate that one of the critical points of cellular meat production, i.e. the need for a dead animal, usually a calf, as a source, can be bypassed.

The great dream of the flourishing artificial meat industry is also to make meat more real than life, without the disadvantages of breeding any and saving the planet.

To ease our conscience. Marketing question, choosing the vain mammoth, animal dead of a climate change, it is well seen. Vow's first idea was to reconstitute the meat of dodo, a large Australian bird that also disappeared, but the DNA was missing. I still believe that not everything is as simple as replacing one form of meat with another. Food is not just nutrients, it is also symbolic, culture that we ingest.

But still, it's uncomfortable, this thought, of extinct animal meat. We are in a strange zone, between food, the fantasy that is eaten, repulsion, curiosity. If eating real meat raises ethical questions, what about eating meat from an extinct animal of which a living specimen has never been seen. It is to break the direct link that has never been broken between the living, animal or vegetable, and what we ingest. Very personal questions. Intimate. Emmanuel Ducros has no problem with GMOs. But here, she finds it philosophically abysmal.