Company claims to have included mammoth DNA in vegan burgers

To the amazement of customers on duty, the Belgian company Paleo, which specializes in the production of protein without the use of meat, announced that it has included mammoth DNA in one of its products.

It is an industrialized and plant-based hamburger. Paleo creates its products from a process of fermentation and synthesis of proteins so that they gain the taste of meat without actually having meat in the composition.

The protein behind this process is myoglobin, the substance responsible for giving meat its red hue. With that, it is enough to extract this protein from “real” meats and add it to the so-called “cultured meats” so that it gains a peculiar smell and taste.

Right from prehistory to modern kitchens

In order to be able to use mammoth DNA in one of its hamburgers, Paleo sent specialists to collect short DNA sequences taken from a 1.2-million-year-old fossil at the Center for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden.

The founder and CEO of Paleo, Hermes Sanctorum, explained how the procedure was, when asked by an insider who collected the information.

“Ancient DNA is fragmented, so it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” he began. "The myoglobin gene from Asian and African elephants was used to align these small DNA fragments with each other and reconstruct a complete sequence," he said.

Also according to the executive, the result of including ancestral DNA in the hamburger recipe was the best possible. According to him, the addition gave meat color, flavor and aroma to a food that does not contain meat.

“When mammoth myoglobin is added, the flavor is even more intense – meatier. And the chemical analysis confirmed that,” said Sanctorum.

Finally, Hermes Sanctorum said that despite the fears of the scientific community about whether it is safe whether or not to consume mammoth proteins, the new hamburger that is being developed has already been tested and is safe.

Paleo is a B2B company, that is, a supplier of other manufacturers. For this reason, the mammoth burger has yet to hit supermarket shelves.

It is worth mentioning that the companies that buy products from Paleo are usually companies that produce vegan or vegetarian foods with the tactile characteristics of meat, but not even a gram of animal protein.

Graduated in History and Human Resources Technology. Passionate about writing, today he lives the dream of acting professionally as a Content Writer for the Web, writing articles in different niches and different formats.