Some science this morning… The New York Times posted an article “Building a $325,000 Burger” – intriguing no? The Telegraph also wrote about the new test tube burgers expected to change the way we eat this morning…
It seems that pretty soon, people will get to try a burger that’s completely made at a lab. Summarized: After years of work – and hundreds of thousands of dollars – one group of researchers have made one of the world’s first in vitro burgers. It may take some time before in vitro burgers replace old fashioned farmed burgers, but the feat is a delicious victory for environmentalists and scientists alike in search for alternate ways to feed the world’s addiction to meat.
The culinary breakthrough is the creation of Mark Post, a Vascular Physiology professor at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. To make the burger, he and his team of researchers began with a kind of stem cell called a myosatellite cell that is taken from a cow’s neck. The myosatellite cells are placed in growth medium that the researchers have formulated to allow them to grow and divide. The cells are grown into 20,000 strips of muscle tissue which are finally assembled into a burger. In all, the in vitro burger is comprised of tens of billions of cells.
Burger lovers know that fat provides much of a burger’s juicy goodness. But Post, who has sampled his lab-grown recipe, says although it has zero fat, his burger “tastes reasonably good.”
What do you think? Would you try it?
