Future Food, Challenges of Stem Cells for the Birth of New Foods

This article was published in 2013.

 

Have a taste of the world’s first stem cell burger

By Stephanie Ott, CNN
updated 1:49 PM EDT, Mon August 5, 2013

(CNN) — The world’s first stem cell burger was cooked and eaten in London today.

The brainchild of Maastricht University’s Mark Post, the burger was made of 20,000 small strands of meat grown from a cow’s muscle cells and took three months to create.(20,000 strips of the meat)

Breadcrumbs and some egg powder were added to the cultured beef to make it taste like a normal beef burger. To give it a beefy color, red beet juice and saffron were added. Chef Richard McGeown fried the stem cell burger with sunflower oil and butter and remarked that it looked slightly paler than a traditional burger.

Two volunteers got to taste the five ounce (142g) burger, which was presented on a plate with a bun, salad and some tomato slices.

After having the first bite and chewing thoughtfully many times, Hanni Rutzler, an Austrian food trends researcher, said: “I expected the texture to be more soft — it’s not that juicy. It’s close to meat but it misses salt and pepper.”

The second volunteer to taste it agreed that the burger was missing something. Josh Schonwald, a Chicago-based author who writes about the future of food, said: “It has a familiar mouth-feel to real meat. The flavor is different though. It misses fat.”

Post presented the burger at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, in front of more than 200 journalists and guests. “Today’s presentation is only a proof of concept that it’s not science fiction,” he said. “However, there is still an efficiency issue and it remains expensive to develop.”

Post spent four years researching and developing the cultured beef burger. He said he tasted it a couple of times during his research. “I’d be perfectly comfortable with letting my kids eat it.” His kids might have to wait a while to get a bite of his burger. The cultured beef burger cost around $330,000 to develop, mostly funded through an anonymous donation.

[Synthetic meat, here being grown at Maastricht University, could also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address animal welfare problems.]

[Post, from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, spent two years researching the initiative. “There’s no doubt it would be revolutionary in the way we produce staple food,” he said.]

company to make stem cell meat an affordable reality

  • Lab-grown burger from bovine stem cells could be on sale within 5 years 
  • In 2013, the team cooked and ate a burger that cost £215,000 to produce
  • The 142g ‘cultured beef’ patty, developed at Maastricht University, was lightly fried in a butter and oil and took three months to grow 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3275913/Lab-grown-burgers-menu-2020-Scientists-set-company-make-stem-cell-meat-affordable-reality.html#ixzz4q4ydyvEb

I am wondering to what extent it has been developed and expanded.

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