The 'mammoth meatball' grown in a lab probably doesn't taste like woolly mammoth at all

• Nobody tasted the "mammoth meatball" that lab-grown meat startup Vow created.

• It probably doesn't taste like woolly mammoth, a meat specialist and mammoth DNA researcher said.

• The meatball might taste like sheep, and its mammoth gene is identical to an Asian elephant gene.

Woolly mammoth meat hasn't been on the menu for at least 5,000 years.

A lab-grown meat company called Vow recently appeared to put the option back on the table by creating a "mammoth meatball," but the true flavor of mammoth meat remains a mystery.

To make their Frankenstein-style meatball, Vow says it grabbed the myoglobin gene from mammoth DNA. Myoglobin is a protein that stores oxygen in the muscles, gives meat a red color, and makes that red juice that oozes out of a medium-rare steak.

Vow says it filled the gaps in the mammoth myoglobin gene with DNA from the African elephant, and injected the result into sheep muscle cells. They grew the meat from there.

You may be wondering: Does that really count as a mammoth meatball? And what the heck does that taste like?

Nobody tasted the meatball, according to Vow, because they were concerned that humans today might be allergic to the ancient protein.

Others have tasted a similar mammoth myoglobin creation, though. The Belgian startup Paleo says it added woolly mammoth myoglobin to a plant-based burger. The founder and CEO Hermes Sanctorum told Insider that it tasted "more intense — more meaty" than veggie burgers made with beef myoglobin.

But he wasn't really tasting the flavor of mammoth. Even the mammoth meatball isn't very mammoth-y.

"I would definitely never suggest that this is the same as eating a meatball made out of mammoth flesh," James Ryall, Vow's chief science officer, told Insider.

The 'mammoth meatball' may as well be an 'elephant meatball'

Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics who studies the mammoth genome, told Insider that the coding of the myoglobin gene in woolly mammoths is "identical" to that of Asian elephants. His latest paper, published in the journal Cell on Friday, compares the animals' DNA to determine what makes a mammoth a mammoth.

There are a few parts of the myoglobin DNA code that vary within each species, just like any DNA sequence in any species.

But on the whole, myoglobin in woolly mammoths and Asian elephants has the same DNA sequence, Dalén said.

"As far as we can see, no mammoth meatballs have been created. Rather, it's [Asian] elephant meatballs," he told Insider in an email.

Myoglobin isn't the main element of a meat's flavor

The flavor of a meat mainly comes from the aromas of the fat and the meatiness, or umami, of the muscle fibers. The mammoth meatball doesn't have either of those elements from woolly mammoth.

"Fat and caramelization of proteins is usually what I think about as affecting the flavor of meat," Gregg Rentfrow, a meat specialist and professor at the University of Kentucky Animal and Food Science Extension, told Insider.

Fat, dispersed throughout the muscle and built up in visible deposits, has different qualities and aromas depending on an animal's diet. That's what gives different meat different flavors — steak versus chicken, or pork versus lamb.

Ryall argues that lab-grown meat is different.

"We're not talking about a cut of meat from an animal, are we? We're talking about pure muscle cells, and the flavor from pure muscle cells doesn't come from the fat, it comes from the proteins," like myoglobin, he said.

Mammoth myoglobin doesn't necessarily bring mammoth flavor

Though he didn't taste it, Ryall said everyone could smell the meatball while it was cooking.

"The aroma was nothing like what you would expect for lamb," he said. "The best way that I can describe it, is that it was closer to something like crocodile," which is another type of meat Vow has grown in the lab.

Myoglobin is known to have an iron-y taste, regardless of which animal it comes from. Because of that, according to Rentfrow, the quantity of myoglobin can affect a meat's flavor. Beef has a lot more myoglobin than chicken, which is why it's a darker meat with a more metallic aroma.

So the use of mammoth (or elephant) myoglobin doesn't necessarily bring a mammoth flavor to the sheep muscle tissue that Vow used. One could argue that the company's creation is actually a sheep meatball.

So why make a mammoth meatball that doesn't taste like mammoth?

"The whole point of doing something with mammoth was to do something so outrageous that it would break through into mainstream media," Ryall said.

Food systems produce 37% of the greenhouse-gas emissions that are warming the planet and driving catastrophic climate change. Startups like Vow argue that growing animal cells in giant steel vats, like a brewery, would use less land, water, and energy.

That could allow consumers to continue eating meat without the ecological and animal-rights consequences.

The first lab-grown meat products — or cultured meat, as the industry calls it — could be hitting US shelves following regulatory approval this year. Mammoth won't be one of them.

Real mammoth meat still exists, but it's in bad shape

Unlike the people behind Vow and Paleo, Dalén has tasted the flesh of a real mammoth. In 2012, he tried a small piece of frozen meat from the preserved carcass of a baby mammoth in Siberia.

Of course that animal was frozen for thousands of years, so it probably had some freezer burn, to say the least.

"The mammoth meat tasted like what I would imagine putrified beef jerky, with no salt or spices, would taste like," Dalén said.

Suffice it to say, we're still waiting to learn what real mammoth meat tastes like.

Read the original article on Business Insider