World's dearest hamburger at €250,000 will come from a lab

DICK AHLSTROM, Science Editor in Vancouver

SCIENTISTS ARE soon to unveil the dearest hamburger in the world – a €250,000 special not bought from a butcher but grown in a test tube.

A Dutch researcher has developed a bovine cell culturing process and hopes to have celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal fry up the first burger when it arrives this October.

The process involves taking stem cells from cattle muscle and then bulking them up in the lab before turning them into muscle cells. These are grown in sheets and then squashed together to make an environmentally friendly burger that even a vegetarian could love.

“Using stem cells we can make a product that looks and tastes like meat,” said Prof Mark Post of Eindhoven University of Technology.

“That first hamburger is going to cost €250,000,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Vancouver.

Even so, the unorthodox method of production has won the approval of at least some members of the Dutch Society of Vegetarians, 50 per cent of whom indicated they would be willing to eat one, Prof Post said. That is because the lab-grown meat will require the slaughtering of far fewer animals.

“We would still need animals for this,” he said. The stem cells are recovered from skeletal muscle after the animal is killed. But the bulking up process increases this a million times so if 100 burgers are recoverable from a single animal, the process would turn this into meat for 100 million burgers.

Prof Post believes the lab-grown beef patty is the way to go for the future. Meat production gobbles up about 30 per cent of the Earth’s arable land, and global meat consumption is expected to double by 2050. And the more cattle you have the worse the greenhouse gas release, with methane arising from belching cattle. “Eventually you will have to have an eco-tax for meat.”

At the moment the raw meat produced is a pinky-yellow hue, he said. “Eventually I think we can make it a meat colour.”

It also means any type of meat can be produced if the stem cells are there. He started experimenting with “mouse burgers” but quickly moved to pork and beef. This means a few cells from a living animal could deliver elephant, tiger or panda burgers if you were so inclined.

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