Cultured Beef Burger----not soon.

Jojy Cheriyan MD;MPH-August 11,2013

The first ever lab-grown beef hamburger was cooked and eaten last week in London. Though it looked and smelled like hamburger, it failed to taste like natural hamburger. It has a texture closer to cake than steak. World's first cultured beef hamburger, fried in a public unveiling in London on August 5th 2013, lacks the real taste and juiciness of natural hamburger. Beef juice and saffron were added to the burger to enhance color.

The 5 ounce burger, which was produced after 5 years of research , cost more than 250,000 euros ($332,000). This was developed by a professor named Mark Post of Maastricht University with funding from Google Co-founder Sergey Brin.

According to an Oxford University study, raising livestock contributes 18 percent of green house gas emissions and uses 30 percent of the world's ice-free land. The factors causing greenhouse gas emissions are deforestation, fertilizer production, methane emissions and equipment use. Livestock slurp up 8 percent of world's drinking water, according to United Nations. Animals eat grains that could be used to feed millions of poor people around the world. Animal care and housing use up 70 percent of agricultural land and their waste pollutes large reservoirs of potable water. All these negative impacts led to a group of scientists like Mark Post to start experimenting with ways to grow meat in labs as an alternative and to protect the environment.

The muscle stem cells, taken from cow muscle are fed and nurtured so they can multiply to create muscle tissue. The cells grow into a strand and 20,000 of such cells can be combined to create one burger. One sample of cells is enough to create as much as 20,000 tons of beef in the lab. In this research Prof.Post and colleagues used bovine serum taken from the blood of calf fetuses to multiply the cells. This is a very expensive process and the main obstacle for mass production. Fetal bovine serum cost $250 per liter and at least 3 fetuses are needed to make one liter of serum.

Scientists are still working on the twin challenges of improving taste and fattiness. Commercial production , might begin in a decade or two. It is too early to predict how the public are going to receive this fake beef. So far no resistance or protests from vegetarians or industrial producers. But we need to wait at least 10 years to see if this will work as an alternative to natural beef.

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