The 5oz burger will be made of synthetic meat, grown in a laboratory The world\'s first burger with beef grown in a test tube will be served in London this week - at a whopping price of 250,000 pounds, a media report said Sunday. The 5oz burger will be made of synthetic meat, grown in a laboratory from the stem cells of a slaughtered cow instead of traditional meat from cows raised in pastures.
Mark Post, thre creator of the in-vitro beef and a scientist from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, believes this could help solve problems in the meat industry.
\"Right now, we are using 70 percent 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 told British news paper the Independent On Sunday.
According to the Independent, the pricey patty will be made of some 3,000 strips of artificial beef, each the size of a rice grain, grown from bovine stem cells cultured in the laboratory. Scientists believe the public demonstration will be \"proof of principle\", possibly leading to mock meat being sold in supermarkets within the next five to 10 years.
Scientists have explained that there is a four-step technique used to turn stem cells from animal flesh into a burger.
First, the stem cells are stripped from the cow’s muscle.
Next, they are incubated in a nutrient broth until they multiply several times over, creating a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg.
This ‘wasted muscle’ is then bulked up through the laboratory equivalent of exercise - it is anchored to Velcro and stretched.
Finally, 3,000 strips of the lab-grown meat are minced, and, along with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat, formed into a burger.
The process is still lengthy, as well as expensive, but it could take just six weeks from stem cell to supermarket shelf.
In-vitro meat or cultured meat is an animal flesh product that has never been part of a complete, living animal, and is quite different from imitation meat or meat substitutes, which are vegetarian foods made from vegetable proteins like soy.
It also reduces the amount of feed, water and fuel needed to produce beef.
Every kilo of meat requires 10 kilos of plant feed and oil, but cultured meat would only need two
Animal-rights organisations have already approved of the idea and some vegetarians have said they would be happy to eat it given its semi-detached status from “real meat.”
For now though, Carnivorism remains a huge global industry, producing some 228 million tonnes of meat each year – the retail value of beef in the United States alone is $74 billion. By 2050, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world will be eating twice as much meat as we do now, primarily driven by the increased demand from a growing middle class in China and other developing nations.