Chips Go With Most Things,

but mammoth meat balls and chips?

photograph Aico Lind/Studio Aico, just somehow does not seem to sound right, but they might soon be coming to a restaurant near you, Australian start-up Vow took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavour, and filled the few gaps in the strand with elephant DNA. They then put this sequence in myoblast stem cells from a sheep and grew the tens of billions of cells necessary to create the lab-grown meat, “It was ridiculously easy and fast, we did this in a couple of weeks,” Prof Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, told The Guardian newspaper. “It’s a little bit strange and new – it’s always like that at first. But from an environmental and ethical point of view, I personally think [cultivated meat] makes a lot of sense.” Vow has already been experimenting with dozens of species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, and peacocks, mixing lab-grown meats to create unique tastes,

“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,” Vow CEO, George Peppou, said. “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.” as it happens mammoth meat balls will not be on the menu for some time as Prof. Wolvetang explains: “We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years, so we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.” so maybe one day you really will be able to order mammoth balls and chips!