$350,000 Burger Made from Lab-Grown Meat

Vegetarians, do you want to eat yummy burgers but don't want to harm a living being? Soon, you'll be able to have your cow and eat it too. Here comes the $350,000 vatburger:

Down the hall, in a lab with incubators filled with clear plastic containers holding a pinkish liquid, a technician was tending to the delicate task of growing the tens of billions of cells needed to make the burger, starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse. [...]

His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” [...]

But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.

Henry Fountain of The New York Times has the story: Link (Image: Francois Lenoir)