We’ve replaced our cow’s milk with soy, our chicken with tofu, and our ice cream with almond milk, but are we set to replace our meat with a lab-grown, self-styled “franken-meat”?
A new wave of lab-grown meat could hit the shelves soon, with scientists claiming that its arrival will herald the “end of farming” – and the beginning of growing our meat in labs (just like the sci-fi movies predicted).
A synthetically grown substitute and scientist Mark Post’s brain child, the “Google Burger” is the very first meat grown from stem cells.
Taken from a dead cow, the stem cells were grown in a petri dish, and are developed in a “warm fridge” for three months.
The meat, which cost €250,000 to ‘grow’, was given its first taste test and was met with varying opinions.
Austrian food researcher, Hanni Rutzler, was the first to bite into the burger alternative and proclaimed it to be “delicious”.
“It’s not that juicy but the texture is perfect,” Another taste tester agreed, “The texture, the mouthfeel – it feels like meat.”
But according to its creator, Professor Post, it’s not perfect just yet.
“It was good enough. I mean, I wouldn’t spend a quarter of a million euros on a burger with this sort of taste,” he said, “We’re not quite there yet but it will not take long now.”
Their next step is to create stem-cell grown ‘fat’ for the meat, to enhance its flavour.
After that, another big hurdle is getting rid of what Post calls the “yuck factor”, that disgust consumers feel when they think about the reality of what they’re about to bite into – stem cells taken from a dead cow, and grown in the embryonic fluid of an unborn calf.
But luckily, with a change up in the petri dish solution (minus the unborn calf juice, add in a more ‘normal sounding’ growth solution), and another boost of interest from recent media attention, Post’s mechanical meat might be on its way into your nearest burger joint in “five to ten years”.
Will you be taking a bite?
