Steak of the Art: The Fatal Flaws of In Vitro Meat

Given the environmental toll of factory farming it’s easy to see why people get excited about the idea of meat grown in a lab, without fertilizer, feed corn, or burps.

In this vision of the future, our steaks are grown in vats rather than in cows, with layers of cow cells nurtured on complex machinery to create a cruelty-free, sustainable meat alternative. The technology involved is today used mainly to grow cells for pharmaceutical development, but that hasn’t stopped several groups from experimenting with “in vitro meat,” as it’s called, over the last decade. In fact, a team of tissue engineers led by professor Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands recently announced their goal to make the world’s first in vitro hamburger by October 2012. The price tag is expected to be €250,000 (over $330,000), but we’re assured that as the technology scales up to industrial levels over the next ten years, the cost will scale down to mass-market prices.

Read on here.