Rock Doc: Beef moving off the range, into the laboratory

It sounds like science fiction when you first hear about it, but some people see it as a way of addressing both animal welfare issues and environmental concerns.

I’m talking about growing meat cells for human consumption from stem cells harvested from a cow. This so-called “cultured beef” recently was unveiled in London by a group led by Mark Post, a physiologist at the Netherland’s Maastricht University.

It’s been known for a while that an anonymous donor contributed money toward an effort to grow a hamburger patty in a laboratory. That donor is now unmasked as Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.

“Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view the world,” Brin said, according to National Public Radio.

Industrial meat production in feedlots puts demands on the environment. Creating meat in a lab could, at least in theory, decrease the environmental cost of creating protein for the world’s increasing population.

“Our current meat production is at a maximum and it’s not going to be sustainable,” Post told reporters. “We need to come up with an alternative.”

After three months of work, he and his colleagues had a patty to unveil to two tasters and invited guests – mostly journalists.

The hamburger started life as stem cells in a cow’s shoulder. As time unfolded, the cells grew and divided. Using some “scaffolding” provided to them, the cells organized themselves into muscle fibers. All told, about 20,000 muscle fibers went into the hamburger patty.

Because it has no blood cells in it, the burger would naturally be quite light-colored. As reported by Business Insider, to compensate for the color the burger’s makers added saffron and beet juice to make the hamburger more red.

Hanni Rutzler and Josh Schonwald, both people with food credentials, were chosen to be the tasters at the public unveiling of the burger. Rutzler and Schonwald reportedly thought the patty had the basic texture of meat. It lacked fat because it was grown entirely from muscle cells. Fat lends flavor to beef, so perhaps it’s no surprise the tasters thought the flavor of the patty fell a bit short.

You and I won’t get a chance to taste-test a lab-made burger anytime soon. Post needs to bring down the price and to decrease the time it takes to grow the meat.

“We need to show that we can make it more efficient,” Post told NPR. “But we think we can have a more affordable price and have this in supermarkets in 10 to 20 years.”

There are challenges. Adding fat to the muscle protein would improve texture and flavor. And the economics of the project may only move forward if major food companies start to invest in it. Finally, to be successful in the marketplace, the lab-grown burger would have to overcome the idea that manufactured meat is “icky.”

But I’d be game to try the cultured beef. How about you?