Baltimore - Researchers are dishing up the perfect conundrum for vegetarians - meat grown in a laboratory dish, not on the hoof.
While it may be years before you savour laboratory-raised meat from your backyard barbecue (braai), researchers say the technology exists now to produce processed meats such as burgers and sausages, starting with cells taken from cow, chicken, pig, fish or other animal.
Growing meat without the animal would not only reduce the need for the animals - which often are kept in less than ideal conditions - meat production is also blamed for a variety of environmental ills.
Cultured meat could also be tailored to be healthier than farm-raised meat, while satisfying the increasing demand for protein by the world's growing population, proponents say.
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'It would be like pink-coloured Jello' Brian J Ford, a British biologist and the author of The Future Of Food, said the widespread acceptance of meat substitutes such as 'quorn', a cultured fungus, "shows that the time for cultured tissue is near".
Techniques for engineering muscle cells and other tissues were first developed for medical use, and now a small handful of researchers are looking into growing edible muscle cells, said Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student who co-authored a paper on in vitro meat techniques.
Industrialising the process could involve growing muscle cells on large sheets or beads suspended in a growth medium.
The sheet would have to be stretched, or the beads would have to be expandable, to stretch the cells and provide the exercise, if you will, needed for the cells to develop, he said.
"If you didn't stretch them, you would be eating mush. It would be like pink-coloured Jello," Matheny said.
'We actually did cook the fish meat we grew' Once the cells have grown enough, they could be scraped off and packaged. If edible sheets or beads are used, all of it could be eaten.
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