A slice of history was served yesterday (05/08/13) when the world's first test-tube burger, made from lab-grown meat, was cooked and eaten in London.
The experiment was the brainchild of Mark Post, a medical physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He believes it could herald a food revolution, with artificial meat products appearing in supermarkets in as little as 10 years.
First the stem cells are cultivated in a nutrient broth, allowing them to proliferate 30-fold. Next they are combined with an elastic collagen and attached to Velcro "anchor points" in a culture dish. Between the anchor points, the cells self-organise into chunks of muscle.
Electrical stimulation is then used to make the muscle strips contract and "bulk up" - the laboratory equivalent of working out in a gym. Finally the thousands of beef strips grown from stem cells from a dead cow (each the size of a grain of rice), are minced up together with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat, and moulded into a cake. Around 20,000 meat strands are needed to make one 5 ounce burger.
Other non-meat ingredients include salt, egg powder, and breadcrumbs. Red beetroot juice and saffron are added to provide authentic beef colouring.
The 5 ounce burger, which cost £250,000 to produce, was dished up by its creator before an invited audience.
See Video explanation Below:
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