Test Tube Burger Served Up For First Time

By Alex Watts, Sky News Online

The world's first test tube burger, costing a whopping £250,000, 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 for "animal welfare reasons".

The burger was cooked with oil and butter

Few details of the slice of culinary and scientific history were released ahead of the tasting.

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."

Professor Post reckons commercial production could begin within 20 years

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.

After trying his own creation for the first time, he said: "I think it's a very good start, it proved that we can do this, that we can make it and to provide a start to build upon - I am very pleased with it."

He said he was not worried about the verdict on the taste and added that in a couple of months they should be able to add fat into the product.

The burger could help save the planet by cutting the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases currently released by livestock, and may also be deemed ethically acceptable by vegetarians because it would dramatically reduce the need to slaughter animals.

Synthetic beef (centre) with hamburger meat (left) and minced beef (right)

But its success or failure will ultimately depend on how much it resembles the taste, texture and price of real meat.

The demonstration was originally planned for October last year, with celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal cooking the burger for a mystery guest.

Up until now, the only outsider known to have eaten the synthetic meat was a Russian reporter who snatched a piece of cultured pork and stuffed it in his mouth during a visit to Prof Post's lab - before it had been passed as safe to eat.

He was reportedly unimpressed by the pork, describing it as "chewy and tasteless".

Prof Post's team at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands conducted experiments which progressed from mouse meat to pork and finally beef - the most environmentally destructive meat.

"What we are going to attempt is important because I hope it will show cultured beef has the answers to major problems that the world faces," he said.

The in-vitro burger is cultured from cattle stem cells

"Our burger is made from muscle cells taken from a cow. We haven't altered them in any way. For it to succeed it has to look, feel and hopefully taste like the real thing."

The ingredients don't sound like something a chef would boast about on a menu - half-millimetre thick strips of pinkish yellow lab-grown tissue, each the size of a rice grain.

But Prof Post is confident he can produce a burger that is almost indistinguishable from one made from prime beef.

He points out that livestock farming is becoming unsustainable, with demand for meat rocketing around the world.

The industry accounts for nearly 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions - even greater than transport - with 228 million tonnes of meat produced each year.

And the environmental problems are only likely to get worse, with the UN forecasting that world demand for meat will double by 2050, largely driven by an increased demand from a growing middle class in China and other developing nations.

Added to this, around 70% of all farmland is devoted to meat production, and cattle consume around 10% of the world's freshwater supplies, making meat farming a very costly, planet-damaging business.

Experts say 1kg of meat requires up to 10kg of crops to produce, making it a highly inefficient method of turning plants into human food, whereas synthetic meat uses about 2kg of feed.

Research by Oxford University scientists in 2011 estimated that cultured meat needs 99% less land than livestock, between 82% and 96% less water, and produces between 78% and 95% less greenhouse gas.

The burger launched today has cost  £250,000 to produce, but the Dutch team are hoping to dramatically slash the cost by industrialising the laborious process.

The Food Standards Agency said that before going on sale, synthetic meat would need regulatory approval, with manufacturers needing to prove that all necessary safety tests had been carried out.

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