How do you grow meat in a lab?

One of the first visionaries to predict test-tube meat, you'll be surprised to learn, was Winston Churchill. Back in 1931, before he became Prime Minister, Churchill wrote a magazine article about technological progress in which he predicted that by 1981, "we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium" [source: Churchill].

He was a little off on the time frame, obviously. It wasn't until 2001 that a bioengineer named Morris Benjaminson and colleagues at New York's Touro College took chunks of fresh muscle tissue from a goldfish and immersed them in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid of fetal bovine serum. By doing that, the researchers found they could cause the still-living muscle cells to divide and produce more muscle cells; they were able to add about 14 percent worth of additional flesh on the chunks. Benjaminson actually tried frying the fake fish in olive oil flavored with lemon, garlic and pepper and showed the result to colleagues, but nobody got up the nerve to actually try a bite [source: Sample].

Things grew from there. Benjaminson envisioned fake fish as a food for astronauts on long space trips. But animal rights activists soon latched onto imitation flesh as a way to curb cruelty, and even offered a $1 million reward to the first researcher who could develop test-tube meat and market it to consumers [source: PETA]. Other visionaries saw test-tube meat as a solution for feeding a growing population, without burning up as many resources -- land, water, grain, and so on -- as it takes to raise cattle. In 2008, Norway hosted the first-ever conference on making test-tube meat, at which scientists released a study predicting that edible synthetic animal flesh could be manufactured for $5,000 a ton, which would make it competitive economically with actual meat [source: In Vitro Meat Consortium]. By 2012, about 30 different research teams around the world were working on growing meat in laboratories [source: Gayle].

In the next section, we'll explain the challenges of actually creating edible fake meat.

The Dutch team headed by Post envisions using cow stem cells -- the building blocks of muscles and other organs -- to create synthetic meat. In the lab, they've cultured stem cells in petri dishes, and then put them together in a small container so that they produce muscle cells, which grow and form small pieces of muscle about 2 centimeters long, 1 centimeter wide and about a millimeter thick. The off-white strips of synthetic flesh look more like calamari than hamburger, and the taste is pretty bland. But researchers envision growing bigger patty-like hunks in round containers, and then mixing it with artificial blood and fat so that it gets a more meaty texture, smell and taste [source: Ghosh].

Modern Meadow, the outfit started by University of Missouri researcher Forgacs, plans to add an even stranger wrinkle to the synthetic meat concept. The company envisions using a 3-D printer to spray successive layers of "bio-ink" composed of muscle cells to build fake steak or hamburger. Modern Meadow says this process will enable it to manufacture meat faster and more efficiently than processes previously envisioned by scientists [source: U.S. Department of Agriculture].

A 2011 Wired magazine article points out that while fake burgers seem to be on the horizon, there are still some daunting technical hurdles to be overcome. It's not easy to trick stem cells to growing meat, and it requires a complex soup of fuels, salts, minerals, hormones and other stuff to grow muscle cells that are healthy enough to survive. And growing a piece of meat as complicated as say, a porterhouse steak, is going to be a real challenge. An actual slab of porterhouse isn't just a bunch of muscle cells that stick together. The cells are part of muscle fibers, which in turn integrated with one another into a complex piece of tissue that is capable of doing work in a living animal's body. The tissue also contains a network of blood vessels and deposits of fat, all of which contribute subtly to the appearance, texture and taste [source: Timmer].

Not right away, probably. For one thing, producing synthetic meat initially is going to be really expensive -- Post's fake hamburger, which he's hoping to get a celebrity chef to cook, will cost about £200,000 or U.S. $320,000 to produce. (You could buy 89,635 Big Macs -- which go for $3.57 apiece as of late 2012 -- for that much money.) Of course, as researchers refine the process, they're hoping to drive the cost down quite a bit [source: Ghosh].

Test-tube burgers would have a lot of advantages over the real stuff. For one thing, fake meat wouldn't eat up our resources the way that cows do. According to EarthSave, an environmental organization, growing a pound (about half a kilogram) of beef necessitates the use of 2,500 gallons (9,464 liters) of water, 12 pounds (5.4 kilograms) of grain, 35 pounds (15.8 kilograms) of topsoil and the energy equivalent of 1 gallon (4 liters) of gasoline. And with some experts estimating that food production will have to double within the next 40 years to keep up with expanding populations in developing countries, it's going to be tough to find enough pastureland, grain and water to feed the number of cows we would need for meat. "Anything that stops more wild land being converted to agricultural land is a good thing," University of British Columbia professor food ecologist Sean Smukler said in a 2012 BBC News interview. "We're already reaching a critical point in the availability of land" [source: Ghosh].

Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization that has been working since the mid-2000s to promote its development, said in a 2008 interview that synthetic meat would have health advantages as well. It would be easier to control and eliminate food-based pathogens in laboratory meat, and fat content could be systematically controlled, making it healthier to eat [source: Kiger].

That is, assuming that synthetic meat ranchers can get people to eat the stuff. Modern Meadow, the Missouri-based startup that hopes to become the first manufacturer of synthetic meat, concedes that convincing consumers that fake flesh is okay may be a bit of a challenge. "We expect it will first appeal to culinary early-adopted consumers, and the segment of the vegetarian community that rejects meat for ethical reasons," the company wrote in a 2012 proposal for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. "With reduction in price, it can reach the masses with religious restrictions on meat consumption (people restricted to Hindu, Kosher, Halal diets) and finally populations with limited access to safe meat production" [source: U.S. Department of Agriculture].