People have been talking about lab-grown meat for years, but it wasn’t until last month that scientists actually managed to produce a lab-grown beef burger.
The stem cell burger was ordered by an American food writer Josh Schonwald and Hanni Rützler of the Future Food Studio. The price of the dish was a staggering $344,000 (Canadian).
And it didn’t even come with fries.
(Via The Guardian)
The burger’s critics said there was a noticeable lack of fat and juiciness, but it still definitely tasted like meat, and did not taste like a meat-substitute. The appearance of the burger looked perfectly ordinary from a distance. Which isn’t exactly a compliment if you think about it.
The burger took 3 months to grow, as scientists had to grow each individual strand of meat, then painstaking weave the strands to look like an actual burger. However, the burger comes with a host of possible benefits. Clean meat farms with no suffering animals, possibly much less waste production, reduction in the requirement for antibiotics, reduction in the requirement for land, alternative energy requirements for meat production (no more corn-fed cows), and the list goes on.
Conveniently pre-packaged in petri dishes.
(Via The Guardian)
We are still far away from grabbing a pack of science-burgers at the local grocery mart, but this is a major step towards a more sustainable future.
