To those who have eaten alternatives to beef or the patty used in making great tasting hamburgers can tell you straight up that nothing beats the real thing.
However tasty or "synthetically" enhanced it may be nothing beats the real thing. Now, Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger within the year (Ronald McDonald's sure to have a stroke!).
The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals. At a major science meeting in Canada, experts say that synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%. The group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.
They are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in appearance. These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.
The cost of producing the hamburger will be more than a years supply of Big Macs but once the principle has been demonstrated, production techniques will be improved and costs will come down.
Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal was even asked to cook it. In the beginning it will taste bland and the need to work on the flavor would surely follow. The reason for such a heinous crime (to burger lovers) is not to show a viable product but to show that in reality we can do this. After cloning a sheep they now want to “create” burgers so what’s next?
So why then should scientists / experts use such high tech methods to produce meat when livestock production methods have done the job effectively for thousands of years? It is because most food scientists believe that current methods of food production are unsustainable which brings on the doomsday mindset of food running out in the future. Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanization will make it more difficult to produce food.
Lab-grown meat could eventually become more efficient than producing meat the old fashioned way, 100g of vegetable protein has to be fed to pigs or cows to produce 15g of animal protein, an efficiency of 15%. Wherein synthetic meat could be produced with an equivalent energy efficiency of 50%.
If the technology took off, it would reduce the number of animals that were factory farmed and slaughtered but Earthsave Canada, said that the same benefits could be achieved if people ate less meat (spoil sport!). A molecular biologist did have concerns that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.
Still such a future of a burger made in a laboratory is a far fetched idea which we may not live to see and taste but if it did happen during our lifetime then we’d still be saved knowing that there will always be ketchup in hand to drown out the taste.
