Test-Tube Burger Served Up For First Time

The world's first test-tube burger, costing a whopping £250,000 to produce, has been unveiled in London. The 5oz patty - made from lab-grown "cultured beef" - was dished up by its creator, Professor Mark Post, before journalists in Hammersmith, in the west of the capital.

The scientist-turned-chef made the most expensive beefburger in history from 20,000 tiny strips of meat grown from cow stem cells over a three-month period.

The billionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, put £215,000 of his own money towards the research, saying he was doing it because it could be "transformative for the world". Chef Richard McGeown fried the burger in sunflower oil and a knob of butter before it was sampled by Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow, and food scientist Hanni Rutzler. Ms Rutzler said it was "close to meat" but she was expecting the texture to be softer and it wasn't very juicy.

Mr Schonwald said the "absence is the fat ... it's a leanness to it but the bite feels like a conventional hamburger". "This is kind of an unnatural experience in that I can't tell you over the past 20 years how many times I have had a burger without ketchup or onions or jalapenos or bacon." Prof Post believes his artificial meat - known by the rather unappetising title "in-vitro meat" - could herald a food revolution and appear in supermarkets within the next 10 to 20 years.

Source

I'm not even sure where I stand with this. I guess it's more humane because no animal was killed and it surely has to be better than GMO's

Think this has been covered in an earlier thread.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Note the suggestion to change the title to erm....."Test Tube Burger Served Up For First Time" as being a better title. Think it makes no difference, nobody is that interested in just what this could mean.

If this method of production became the norm, the end of traditional cattle farming? Introduction of whatever medications you fancied? Total control of price by the industry itself? Dietary control?

The reports of the trial make interesting reading. "Cornwall chef Richard McGeown fried the 5oz burger in sunflower oil and butter in front of an audience in London.

It was then sampled by US author Josh Schonwald and Austrian food scientist Hanni Rutzler.

Hanni said it was “close to meat” but it “lacked juiciness” and she expected a softer texture.

Josh also noted its dryness and added: “The absence is the fat, it has a leanness but the bite feels like a conventional hamburger.”

www.mirror.co.uk...

Note it was cooked in BUTTER, where does butter come from? Cows, the very animal that this synthetic meat is to replace!

What does surprise me, is the lack of UK coverage as against that from the US. Maybe my search engine is a little bias.

Anyway a couple more links.

www.nbcnews.com... (Taste hits the spot?)
www.nytimes.com... (Grown from cow muscle? Really?)
www.expressnews.com... (No animals killed, erm where did the initial muscle/stem cells come from?)
bigstory.ap.org...

Of course this stuff could be put through a 3D printer, to make fancy shaped meat, or even to produce meat looking like meat. (Assuming fat can similarly be grown, which at the moment has not happened.)

I am off to enjoy a home made steak and kidney pie. Haha.

reply to post by sarahlm


You should have put this Thread into Current News or something....

reply to post by TruthxIsxInxThexMist


Do not worry Truth, somebody will take your advise and start a new thread.

Rather wish you had made a slightly more apposite comment though.

I wonder what will be the "If only we had known" cries of distress in the future. Scientists discover, industrialist develop, bankers make money, the populous reaps the rewards or not.

reply to post by sarahlm


I know exactly where I stand with this. I wouldnt feed this pap to a dog. From all reports, this meat has all the flavour of a cardboard box, and is missing several of the key components of good meat. But there is something deeper in my estimation, of what is wrong with this idea.

No cows died in the making of this burger. The stem cells of which it was made do not contain the chemical traces of the diet of a cow, unlike genuine cow flesh, which contains the molecular echo of every blade of grass, every drop of water, every drop of its mothers milk, every nourishing morsel to pass its lips since the day it was born, until the day it got a bolt round to the head and cut into bits to be made into steaks, burgers, sausages and so on.

Science will never replace good old fashioned dead animal meat, because of this very fact. And you know, there is no reason why we shouldnt eat meat. There are reasons why we shouldnt eat it in massive, heartbusting quantities, giving ourselves increased risk of colon cancer and so on, but no reason why we should stop eating it all together. If we didnt kill cows for food, we would have to kill them anyway!

Not many people realise this, but in much of the Western world, there are no top predators save mankind. Cows in Britain do not routinely get carried off by big cats, bears, wolf packs, and the like. This means that if we stopped eating them, cow populations would sky rocket if we didnt cull them, which would dramatically increase the amount of cow farts released into the air, and they contain greenhouse chemicals. Now, say what you will about the existence of the green house effect, the law is the law. An over abundance of cows would cause various emissions treaties to become totally invalid. So we would end up with dead cows, for no purpose what so ever.

The whole idea is utterly stupid, as is an a diet constructed around ethics.

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This thread will be discussed tonight at 10pm Est tonight on Reality Remix.


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