Bob and Kate sit down in their favourite restaurant and examine the menu. Today is Kate's birthday, so they are treating themselves to something special. But what will it be? The pterodactyl p'te sounds tempting - but so does the brontosaurus burger. So hard to choose!

Food companies have been trying to find products that will appeal to meat-eaters but not hurt animals or the environment.

One approach is to come up with plant-based dishes that have the taste and texture of meat.

Another is meat created in a laboratory.

But one is more ambitious than all the others. The aim is not just to reproduce the experience of eating beef or chicken. It is to introduce people to new and tastier meats, including extinct creatures such as the dodo - and perhaps ones that never existed, like the unicorn.

In March, an Australian company called Vow unveiled a meatball made with the DNADeoxyribonucleic acid is the material in an organism that carries genetic information. of a woolly mammothIts closest living relative is the Asian elephant. The last population lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean.. The animal died out around 4,000 years ago.

Vow worked with an Australian expert, Professor Ernst Wolvetang, to recreate the cells for mammoth myoglobin. This is a muscle protein which gives meat much of its flavour.

They took the DNA from a mammoth fossil, plus DNA from an elephant. Then they added them to stem cellsUnspecialised cells that have the ability to develop into different types of cell. from a sheep.

Growing the cells needed for the meatball was "ridiculously easy and fast", says Professor Wolvetang.¹ "We did this in a couple of weeks."

He adds that no one has actually tasted the meatball: "We haven't seen this protein for thousands of years, so we have no idea how our immune system would react." But it is an amazing example of what could be done.

The company is planning to launch its first product, Japanese quail, later this year. It has also been looking into more than 50 other species, including peacocks, crocodiles and kangaroos.

Yes: It is boring just to eat the same things over and over again. If we can cut down our emissions from farming and discover new tastes as well, we will have the best of both worlds.

No: We need to get away from the whole idea of eating meat, which is both cruel to animals and hugely damaging to the planet. The sooner we confine ourselves to plant-based food the better.

Or... We should not just be thinking about what humans eat. To rebalance the environment we should use our scientific knowhow to produce healthier, more sustainable food for all our  fellow creatures.