Idk. I would love to taste real mammoth. But with the lab grown “mammoth” i feel there is just too many knobs they can tweak, and without a reference who knows how authentic it would be. Basically the company making it would be strongly incentivised to squeeze some strange yet acceptable flavour profile. You don’t want everyone to think it tastes too much like a cow, because how do you justify the price point then. But you also don’t want it to taste so gamey or weird that people refuse it. Both would be financial ruin for the company. So instead of getting how a real mammoth tasted you would get some taste balanced to feel exotic yet acceptable.

I bet the taste would depend more on the tastes of the team making it than the actual flavour profile of a mamoth.

You would win that bet. I can tell you that chicken meat coming out of a bioreactor tastes nothing like chicken meat from a chicken - and in fact it’s revolting. There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.

Makes sense and thank you for the confirmation.

The way I was thinking about it is that how meat tastes depends very much on the excretion system of the animal removing waste products from the tissues. And those functions (the lymphatic system, the circulation, the kidneys, the bowels, the lungs) are not present in the lab grown meat tissue. We are obviously providing those functions artificially but I wouldn't be surprised if these artificial attempts are "worse" than the real deal at their job. After all the real chickens spent millions of years co-evolving these support functions with their tissues.

Plus what the tissue is fed! Some say they can taste if the cow was fed corn vs grass. Whatever the lab grown meat is fed must be even bigger difference from the original.

> There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.

Makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about those, just the growing conditions. But of corse! And I bet while these were developed there was a ton of "prepare, taste, spit it out in disgust, adjust" cycles. With extant animals in theory at least you can do it scientifically by having blind taste tests comparing the real meat with the lab grown one. With mammoth, or anything else extinct, we would be guessing and making things up even more.

From that point of view, you could just have your flavor scientists whip up some MSG and garlic and make "Mammoth In A Biskit," zero actual mammoth required.

To think no one in history has ever tasted mammoth burger—milled flour bread buns wouldn't have coexisted with Neolithic mammoth hunters, that was an expensive specialization of the agriculture era.

(Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).

Maybe this is more of a philosophical question, but to me “lab-grown mammoth muscular tissue” is not “mammoth meat” if it hasn’t lived a mammoth’s life. I doubt it would taste the same as the real deal. Of course it’s as close is we’re going to get, most likely.

I don’t doubt your feelings here but this is one step away from saying “the suffering/tragedy is the point.”

Lab grown human flesh would remove the health risks around cannibalism but I assume the taboo would remain. Otherwise I'm imagining tasting menus of an extreme variety of creatures extinct, endangered or just previously hard to fit into the supply chain.

I’m now imagining the lab grown meat companies driving exotic animals to extinction so that they could corner the market on their meat and drive the prices up.

Arthur C Clarke got there some 60 years before you: https://bestreadables.com/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-...

Weird to think about, but maybe a sideline in medical applications can offset r+d. useful as grafts?

Depending on where tastes go, you could even have celebrity meats.

Swiftie Burgers. Kardashian hot dogs. Nixon ribs.

Eat the rich?