London - Meat lovers will soon have something unusual to sink their teeth into.
Scientists plan to make “test tube” steaks, created from cells stripped from cow’s muscle and grown in the lab. Artificial burgers are also on the way and could be available next year.
The researchers are using stem cells – “master cells” capable of turning into other cell types – to create meat in a four-step process.
First, the cells are stripped from the cow’s muscle. Then they are incubated in a vat of nutrient broth until they multiply, creating a sticky tissue.
This is bulked up using the laboratory equivalent of exercise – it is anchored to Velcro and stretched. Finally, thousands of strips of the lab-grown meat are minced and formed into a burger.
Researcher Professor Mark Post, from Maastricht University, told a conference in the Netherlands that the first artificial burgers could be on sale next year. If the technology is perfected, steaks could be grown five years from now.
Artificial burgers are expected to be expensive – around 30 times the price of a normal burger – although still much cheaper than the £250 000 prototype, which was unveiled in London in 2013. Other possibilities include steaks made from stem cells of exotic animals such as tigers and pandas.
While it may not sound appetising, lab-grown meat is meant to be kinder to the environment than the real thing, help reduce animal suffering and feed the world’s growing population.
However, around half of people questioned about the stem cell meat in a survey said they were put off by the fact the meat was “not natural”.
Despite this, Professor Post said he was confident that in future people could grow meat in their homes. Any new products would need to be given the green light by the EU, but he insisted the technology was “very different” to GM food – and claimed he was “pretty confident” of approval.
Daily Mail