Wired News: Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table
By Lakshmi Sandhana| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jun, 21, 2006
What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
You know, this kind of freaked me out at first, but when I think about it, this could go a long way to helping end starvation. As long as the food produced could be done more efficiently than raising an entire cow, this could actually be viable. When I think about how much land & feed a farmer needs to raise a cow, it doesn’t seem too far off. Let’s keep our fingers crossed :)