Burgerstein - Would you eat hamburger from the lab?

So what's for dinner in 2022? A new report released by Britain's Food Ethics Council last month identified some of the possibilities - more food grown in allotments, more functional foods - and in vitro meat, meaning meat that's been grown from animal stem cells as opposed to meat cut from a carcass.

When reports of meat grown experimentally in the lab by Dutch researchers first surfaced a few years ago it seemed a bit far fetched, but not any longer. Two years ago an international group of scientists formed the In Vitro Meat Consortium, and last year the Norwegian Food Research Institute hosted a conference to discuss the challenges of producing in vitro meat commercially. If it does reach supermarket shelves, say researchers, it could help solve a few problems, like lessening the impact of livestock production on the environment, helping to prevent foodborne diseases, and reducing the need for millions of animals to be factory farmed.

One organisation working to produce meat from cell cultures is New Harvest which makes it clear that the technology now being developed could create processed meats like hamburger or sausages, but that the know how to create an in vitro steak or a chop doesn't exist - at least, not yet.

The production method, according to New Harvest's website goes like this, 'the production of cultured meat begins by taking a number of cells from a farm animal and proliferating them in a nutrient-rich medium. Cells are capable of multiplying so many times in culture that, in theory, a single cell could be used to produce enough meat to feed the global population for a year. After the cells are multiplied, they are attached to a sponge-like "scaffold" and soaked with nutrients. They may also be mechanically stretched to increase their size and protein content. The resulting cells can then be harvested, seasoned, cooked, and consumed as a boneless, processed meat, such as sausage, hamburger, or chicken nuggets'.

Unnatural? Well, yes - but so is a lot of stuff that ends up in our shopping trolleys, including foods from animals that have often led very unnatural lives. And as Ondine Sherman, managing director of the animal advocacy organisation Voiceless points out, "A lot of people might find in vitro meat icky - but then keeping animals in captivity and slaughtering them ls is pretty icky too. For people who like meat - but not how it's produced - it could be a viable alternative."

Would you eat an in vitro burger?