This burger helps you lose weight — from your wallet.
A London eatery will next week cook up what is being called “the most expensive burger in history,” a five-ounce sandwich with beef grown in a laboratory from cow stem cells, and costing about $383,000, The Independent reported Sunday.
Scientists will cobble together the precious patty using 3,000 pieces of artificial beef, each the size of a grain of rice, that was grown in a lab from stem cells taken from a slaughtered cow, the paper reported.
The scientist behind the project believes that while expensive now, the process could in the future be used to cut down on the huge amount of resources that go into each pound of beef and help feed the world’s growing demand.
Nearly seven pounds of grain and 74.5 gallons of water to produce each pound of beef, NPR recently reported last year, citing statistics from the Journal of Animal Science. The Food and Agriculture of the United Nations reported in 2006 that the livestock industry generates more greenhouse gas than cars, and that 30 percent of all arable land on earth are used to grow animals for consumption.
“Right now, we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock. You are going to need alternatives. If we don’t do anything, meat will become a luxury food and will become very expensive,” Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who is heading the synthetic beef project, told the paper last year.
“Eventually, my vision is that you have a limited herd of donor animals which you keep in stock in the world. You basically kill animals and take all the stem cells from them, so you would still need animals for this technology,” Post said.
The meat is grown using myosatellite stem cells, which normally are used to repair damaged muscles, the paper reported.The Independent didn’t say where next week’s cooking demonstration would take place, but called it “at an exclusive west London venue.”