Lab Bred McDonald's Hamburgers?

A scientist by the name of Jason Matheny hopes to culture meat in a culture dish as a way to keep animals from having to meet their fate at the slaughterhouse. The agricultural scientist at the University of Virginia has a goal to create a nice thick and juicy slab of steak in the lab. Matheny founded the New Harvest, a not for profit organization that is funding the research that is needed to create the cultured meat. As of 2005, the researchers that are funded by New Harvest have taken muscle cells from turkeys and grown bits of tissue which, Matheny believes, could form squishy little meatballs.

So, are lab bred steaks going to be on the market anytime soon? Probably not. It turns out that creating a big piece of steak is going to take a lot more work. A steak gets its texture from muscle, fat, cartilage, and blood vessels, each of which are hard to grow outside of the body. Even so, engineers at MIT have succeeded in taking human and mouse stem cells and integrating them into blood vessels. This breakthrough will help lead to a way to vascularize muscle. Even after this breakthrough, there is still a lot that needs to be done before edible lab bred steaks are put on the market. The scientists now have to make the muscle three dimensional.

So what would a lab bred steak really taste like? Would it be bland or would it taste exactly the same as a regular steak? Would it be healthier? It would seem to make sense that the scientists could determine how much fat the cultured steak would contain. If they wanted to, they could probably even add vitamins to it. This may mean that we could eat McDonald's hamburgers every night and not feel guilty about it. Still, the American public may not be ready to accept the idea of eating steaks that are created in the lab. Also, the meat would have to get the approval of the FDA. I am sure people would have a lot of questions. First, would there be safety concerns? Will labs be secure and sanitary enough to keep the meat from getting contaminated? Will there be proper oversight when the meat is sent from the lab to the supermarket? Perhaps the biggest question is whether or not genetically modified foods are safe to consume. GM foods have been scrutinized for the last several years. Critics have questioned whether or not they pose a health risk to certain individuals. Even with the health concerns, it is very probable that lab bred steaks will be on the market sometime in the future.

Wendy Wolfson, "One Steak, Medium Rare, Hold the Cow." Popular Science.