• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 6, 2013

There were a few things missing from a petri-dish burger served up in West London yesterday that might be the grand-bull of sustainable carnivorianism. Taste, for one thing. Fat, for another. A competitive price point for a third. And an ad jingle for a fourth. But, hey, the Big Mac wasn’t born overnight.

The event, organized by a PR firm and streamed live over the Web, had journalists in the audience clamoring for a bite of the experiment but there was not enough to go around, reports Henry Fountain in the New York Times. 

“According to the three people who ate it, the burger was dry and a bit lacking in flavor,” Fountain writes. “One taster, Josh Schonwald, a Chicago-based author of a book on the future of food, said that ‘the bite feels like a conventional hamburger’ but that the meat tasted ‘like an animal-protein cake.’”

Food scientist Hanni Ruetzler “said the surface was crunchy and the inside was ‘very close to meat,’ though lacking juiciness. Beet juice and saffron were added to the burger to enhance color,” reports Bloomberg’s Makiko Kitamura. Breadcrumbs and salt were also kneaded in.

The research that delivered yesterday’s “Frankenburger,” as some would have it, was sponsored by a $330,000 stake from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who opens a six-minute video put together by the Guardian by explaining the rationale for developing the cultured meat. “Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view the world,” he says.

Brin is followed by Richard Wrangham, the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard, who points out that “we are a species designed to love meat.” 

That being the case, and in addition to the compelling counter-arguments of vegetarians and animal rights activists, the Guardian points out that “cultured meat production uses as much as 60% less energy, resulting in up to 95% lower greenhouse gas emissions and 98% lower land use compared with conventional production in Europe.”

“There's no word yet if "Brin's Burger" will be offered in Google's free food staff cafeterias, or if it will come with cheese and bacon,” quips ZDNet’s Tom Foremski. But one would think that getting the alluring smell of frying bacon down will be even more difficult than equaling the taste of ground beef.

The burger is the result of years of research by Dutch scientist Mark Post, M.D., Ph.D., a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht, who is working to show how meat grown in petri dishes might one day be a true alternative to meat from livestock, reports Reuters Kate Kelland,
“The meat in the burger has been made by knitting together around 20,000 strands of protein that has been cultured from cattle stem cells,” writes Kelland. “The tissue is grown by placing the cells in a ring, like a donut, around a hub of nutrient gel,” he explained. “For it to succeed it has to look, feel and hopefully taste like the real thing,” Post said in a statement Friday.

Although “this first hamburger was incredibly expensive to make, as techniques are perfected and lab-grown stem-cell burgers can be mass-produced, the cost will go down; one day it could be lower than the price of traditionally raised meat, which is expected to rise,” Kate Lunau wrote for Maclean’s last week following an interview with Post.

The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin writes that he “first explored livestock-free approaches to keeping meat on menus in 2008 in a pieced titled “Can People Have Meat and a Planet, Too?” and links to several related stories and reports including a 2011 study titled  “Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production.” 

“Whether or not vegetarians could eat the produce is still open to debate,” writes the BBC’s Melissa Hogenboom, “but Prof. Post said that his team was catering to beef eaters and that ‘vegetarians should remain vegetarians; that's even better for the environment.’” 

She also reports that “for the burger to be approved to market, a ‘dossier of evidence’ would be needed to show that the product is safe, nutritionally equivalent to existing meat products and will not be at risk of misleading the consumer,” according to the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency.

The Big Mac, meanwhile, will be celebrating its 46^th birthday on August 24and has its own museum 40 miles up the road from Uniontown, Pa., where franchisee owner Jim Delligatti concocted it. Yearly sales are now about 550 million and it has become so engrained in the global mindset that The Economist compares the purchasing power in a given country to the rest of the world by dividing its cost by the price of a Big Mac in the U.S., as Investopedia reports.

Ah, to be here in 46 years to see what becomes of the bouncing baby stem-cells burger.