£250,000 Stem Cell Beef Burger To Be Eaten This Week

Normally when you want a burger you cut some meat from the animal of choice, well ok maybe you don’t do that part yourself, but we all know where the meat comes from and the first part usually involves obtaining the meat from an animal. Yet a burger that will be eaten next week came from a different part of the Cow, its cells. Using stem cells from a cow, this meat was grown in a laboratory, synthetic meat that will create a 5oz burger worth £250,000.

At an exclusive West London venue the burger will be cooked and served before an invited audience where they will then tuck into the worlds first “in vitro” burger. While a £250,000 burger that took a lot of effort to make hardly sounds like something that could save the world, that is exactly why it was created. At the moment it might sound like the fancy burger of choice for an excentric millionaire, but the idea is that one day this budget could save the world from growing consumer demand of beef, lamb, pork and chicken. This is more a proof of concept and like anything else in this world, cost can be reduced with a little investment and time.

Made from 3,000 strips of artificial beef, with each strip the size of grain of rice, each of which was grown from bovine stem cells in the laboratory. Just to put this into scale for you, if this technique was fully implemented using the stem sells from a single beef carcass, you could grow a million times more mean that you would if you simply butchered the carcass. Just think about that for a moment, a million!

The upcoming demonstration is the result of years of work by Mark Post, a medical physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and it’s said that next week could reveal who his financial backer has been for the project by stepping up to take the first bite.

“Eventually, my vision is that you have a limited herd of donor animals which you keep in stock in the world. You basically kill animals and take all the stem cells from them, so you would still need animals for this technology,” Professor Post said.

“Right now, we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock. You are going to need alternatives. If we don’t do anything, meat will become a luxury food and will become very expensive,” he said.

Would you eat a test tube burger? I don’t think I’m sold on the idea just yet myself, but who knows what the future will hold for us all, and our dinner plates.

Thank you Independent for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Guardian.