You see that whitish stuff in the petri dish? That, my dears, is lab-grown meat. Meat made without all the physical, environmental, and ethical mess that goes along with raising actual animals for food.
The little tabs on either end of each piece of meat are Velcro, used to stretch and “exercise” the muscle cells that make up this lab meat. (Some earlier attempts at growing meat in the lab failed because, without exercise, muscle tissue isn’t something that’s particularly palatable.) It’s white because there’s no blood running through it. And, to create food, you’d have to combine this single layer of muscle tissue with thousands of other layers of muscle and lab-grown fat.
Dutch biologist Mark Post, the man behind the meat, thinks that he can build the world’s first lab-grown burger within a year for a cost of $345,000.
You can read the full story in an article by Reuters’ Kate Kelland
Image: Francois Lenoir / Reuters