The biologists who created the first hamburger on Earth from artificially grown meat reported on the improvement of its taste and appearance, and also promised to reduce the cost of production of this dish, which now costs 300 thousand US dollars, at a conference of the Chicago Institute of Food Technology.
“We are quite capable of solving this problem. We will even create a company for this. Of course, the prices for such products will initially be very high, but given that there are restaurants where a hamburger costs $ 450, our development will find its consumer and market,”says Mark Post from the University of Maastricht (Netherlands), one from the creators of the first "artificial" hamburger.
Mark Post and several other biologists from the United States and other countries of the world launched an ambitious project two years ago - they grew full-fledged cow muscle tissue from stem cells, trying to find an alternative to pet farms for producing meat. The bold idea of scientists was supported by the founder of Google Sergey Brin and a number of other celebrities.
It took a team of scientists led by Post 3 months to grow about 20,000 individual muscle fibers. When the fibers were ready, the researchers manually made micro cuts in them, and then pressed them. The cost of the project to make a 140 gram burger was 250 thousand euros.
Experts in the field of gastronomy who tried this "fast food" noted that it tasted good enough, but the hamburger turned out to be too dry and fat-free. Post and his colleagues took these remarks seriously and began work to improve the taste by creating special stem cells that would produce the fat found in the meat of real cows.
According to him, this task has almost been solved. In addition, Post's team is working to reduce the cost of synthetic meat, and the scientist promises that in the near future the price of a kilogram of such a "product" will be reduced from $ 300,000 to $ 65.
More distant, but no less interesting, are Fast's plans to grow meat for full-fledged steaks. As the scientist notes, this is a very difficult, but realizable task, and his laboratory has already begun work on the transformation of stem cells into full-fledged muscle tissue.