Australia’s Vow grows mammoth meatballs that no one has tasted 

In Australia, cultivated meat startup Vow has produced a meatball made of mammoth meat. Vow recently told CNN it hopes the peculiar dish will raise awareness of the potential for lab-grown meat.

“We need to start rethinking how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is … that a lot more people across the world begin to hear about cultured meat,” said James Ryall, Vow’s chief scientific officer.

Unfortunately, the prehistoric balls of meat will not be consumed, but will instead be donated to Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, a Dutch museum dedicated to science and medicine.  The Vow team also admitted they did not sample their product.

“Normally, we would taste our products and play around with them. But we were hesitant to immediately try and taste because we’re talking about a protein that hasn’t existed for 5,000 years. I’ve got no idea what the potential allergenicity might be of this particular protein,” Ryall said.

CNN reports that at least one man—Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University’s Centre for Paleogenetics—has tasted mammoth. In 2021, he sampled a piece of frozen meat from a mammoth preserved in Siberian ice. When reached by CNN for comment on Vow’s announcement, Dalén  said he would “without a doubt” love to try the meatballs. “It cannot possibly taste worse than real mammoth meat,” he added.