On Monday, I woke to news about a $331,000 hamburger. This was no ordinary hamburger mind you, but one that had been grown in a lab. Most Mondays, I suspect, I’d find the thought of beef from a petri dish less than appetizing, but the notion of lab grown meat didn’t sound too bad at that moment.

The previous day I happened to be reading about some of the meat that ends up in fast food restaurants, school cafeterias, and supermarkets. The industry uses the term “finely textured beef,” but the name that has stuck in the popular mind is “pink slime.” A U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist coined the term “pink slime” to describe a product consisting of a ground-up mixture of fatty trimmings, connective tissue, and scraps treated with ammonia hydroxide to kill pathogens. Controversy over the product has led many fast food restaurants to since abandon its use. So when I read on Monday about a lab-grown hamburger, it seemed downright antiseptic if nothing else.

The hamburger was made using “cultured beef,” along with salt, egg powder, and breadcrumbs. It also contained red beet juice and saffron to bring out its natural colors. The cultured beef burger was produced by Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Who could afford such a burger? Well, Google co-founder Sergey Brin for one. He funded the research, driven by concerns about the high environmental price of meat.

“There are basically three things that can happen going forward,” says Brin. “One is that we all become vegetarian. I don’t think that’s really likely. The second is we ignore the issues and that leads to continued environmental harm, and the third option is we do something new.”

Cultured beef starts with a sample of muscle cell from a cow and is cultured in a lab. Instead of ranchers, scientists rustle the cells in a nutrient solution to grow muscle tissue. Some 20,000 muscle tissue strands are needed to make a single five ounce burger, the scientists say. To grow the tissue, the cells are placed around a hub of gel in a ring like a donut. (Hmmmmm… doughnuts).

While the process doesn’t sound scalable now, the cultured beef burger could be ready for primetime in the next ten to 20 years at a price that’s competitive with meat, the Maastricht University says.

The patty’s promise falls short on tasting. A video of the tasting shows mixed results. The texture seemed to pass muster, but the burger seemed to come up a bit short on flavor. What appeared to be missing for the tasters was the presence of fat (and salt, and pepper, and ketchup).



But, there are plenty of people who are willing to sacrifice some of beef’s qualities to sidestep its issues. My son’s girlfriend, for one, doesn’t eat meat. I have grilled veggie patties from the grocer’s freezer sections. I can’t imagine lab grown meat, given time and development, would appear any drier or as colorless. Furthermore, it seems more promising than say Soylent Green as a solution to world’s burgeoning protein needs.

With the world population approaching 9 billion by 2050 and the demand for meat expected to increase by 73 percent during that time, the planet faces food shortages, as water, land, and climate change issues associated with cattle grow. Meat is resource-intensive to produce. The United Nations estimates that grazing and feed crops use 30 percent of the planet’s land mass, with 70 percent of grain produced in the United States going to feed farmed animals. It takes 2,400 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat. Then there are the greenhouse gases produced by cattle in the form of methane, fecal contamination of water supplies from cattle, and the relatively high amount of fossil food required to produce meat as opposed to other food.

When the promise of biotechnology is considered, people tend to think of potential treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and the ravages of old age. They consider the ability to manipulate genes to cure incurable diseases. They may even think of the promise it possesses to free us from our addiction to fossil fuels. In the end, though, biotechnology’s greatest triumph may be a hamburger.