Does a stem cell burger sound like something you might like?

Next Monday, the first burger grown in a laboratory that cost a crazy R3,7 million will be cooked and eaten. The meal is made up of 3,000 strips of artificial beef, and this could represent the start of future artificial meat supermarkets.

According to the Telegraph, scientists are hoping that their experimentation will lead to a world demand for beef, lamb, pork and chicken constructed in the same manner. Something that doesn’t sound too out of the ordinary after the Food and Agriculture Organisation has reported we will be eating twice as much meat consumed today by 2050.

Mark Post, a medical physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands said:

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. 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