Lab-grown hamburgers need no cows

The next time you bite into a juicy beef patty, here is some food for thought (pun not intended) – it could not be real beef as in, from a humanely slain cow, but rather, “meat” that has been grown in a petri dish somewhere. A research team is currently working on the idea of growing beef, with the project having Mark Post at the helm. Mark is a physiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, and his project has been funded anonymously by an investor who figured out that lab-grown meat might be the future answer to the world’s hunger problems. After all, the amount of energy required to raise livestock to produce enough meat to feed the world did pick up its fair share of negative attention concerning the kind of pollution it makes, but with this lab-grown beef, it will not involve any pastures, corn feed, or accumulation of methane gas.

How is this done? Scientists will grow stem cells in a vat at first, waiting for them to turn into thin layers of beef muscle cells, followed by mince them together using similarly lab-grown pieces of beef fat cells – just like how a standard hamburger is created, sans stem cells, of course. No idea on how the meat will taste, but it is said that a trial should begin sometime from October onwards. How do you find the idea of lab-grown meat?