Test Tube Burger To Face First Tasting

By Alex Watts, Sky News Online

The world's first test tube burger, costing a whopping £220,000, is to be unveiled today in London.

The 5oz patty - made from lab-grown "cultured beef" - will be dished up by its creator, Professor Mark Post, before journalists at a secret location 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.

Few details of today's slice of culinary and scientific history have been released.

All that is known is the burger will be fried in a pan, possibly by a celebrity chef, and tasted by two volunteers, one of whom may be the anonymous philanthropist who paid for the research.

Professor Post reckons commercial production could begin within 20 years

The mystery benefactor was described by Professor Post last year as a household name with a track record of "turning everything into gold".

Professor 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.

It could also 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.

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

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

Up until now, the only outsider known to have eaten the synthetic meat is a Russian reporter who snatched a piece of cultured pork and stuffed it in his mouth during a visit to Professor 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".

Professor 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.

"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 in-vitro burger is cultured from cattle stem cells

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 Professor 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.

The hashtag for the event will be #culturedbeef

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 euros (£220,000) 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.

:: The event will be streamed live on the Sky News website from 1pm today.

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