Taste Test: World's First Lab-Grown Burger Is 'Close to Meat'

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By Fran Berkman2013-08-05 21:34:30 UTC

After years of work, a scientist at a Dutch university cooked and served the world's first lab-grown "beef" burger.

Mark Post, a professor at Maastricht University, presented his "Cultured Beef" creation at press event in London on Monday. The two taste-testers — food scientist Hanni Rutzler and author Josh Schonwald — said it tasted "close to meat" and "like a conventional hamburger."

Some have called the Cultured Beef burger the world's most expensive hamburger. Google co-founder Sergey Brin bankrolled the project at a cost of more than $300,000.

See also: Why You Should Want This $330,000 Burger

Why invest so much money in a hamburger? Cultured Beef's website states that "livestock contributes to global warming" and calls the lab-grown meat the "crucial first step in finding a sustainable alternative to meat production."

The process for creating the burger involved harvesting muscle stem cells from a cow and nurturing them so they multiplied into strands of muscle tissue. About 20,000 strands of the meat combined to make one burger.

The lab-grown burger was fat-free, which seemed to be the samplers' only beef with the meal.

"It's not that juicy," Rutzler says in the video. "I miss salt and pepper."

Watch the video above, and then let us know what you think of the project in the comments.

Homepage Image: Flickr, Hannes E.

Topics: Science, Sergey Brin, US & World, Video, World