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Actually it’s not for sale at $317,000, but scientists in the Netherlands are trying to create what you might call a cruelty-free hamburger from bovine stem cells. As in, “here’s a hamburger that didn’t come from a slaughtered cow.” PETA-friendly.
It’s a market waiting to be tapped; perhaps for the anonymous person who put up the money for this study.
The Dutch scientists plan to have this order ready in a few months.
According to a report in The Guardian, the project is funded by an anonymous individual with the goal of drastically cutting the number of animals raised for food. Dr. Mark Post, the researcher leading the venture at University Maastricht, told The Guardian he plans to unveil a completely lab-grown burger for taste-testing this October.
“Everybody loves meat and meat consumption is going to double in the next 40 years,” Post told ABC News last year. “In my mind, meat consumption is here to stay, and if you want to do that at a higher efficiency than what is currently done by cows and pigs, you have to explore the possibility of doing that in the lab.”
They take the stem cells and grow sheets of muscle and sheets of fat from stem cells, then when they get enough, they mince them up and make a patty.
The Associated Press reported in 2010 that Dr. Post has tried this with pork, also:
Post describes the texture of the meat as sort of like scallop, firm but a little squishy and moist. That’s because the lab meat has less protein content than conventional meat.
Several other groups in the U.S., Scandinavia and Japan are also researching ways to make meat in the laboratory, but the Dutch project is the most advanced, said Jason Matheny, who has studied alternatives to conventional meat at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and is not involved in the Dutch research.
