Why You Should Want This $330,000 Burger

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By Chris Taylor2013-08-05 21:05:21 UTC

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Vegetarians, I'm truly sorry about this, but I love a good burger. One that's medium rare, with just enough juice in it to form a slightly soggy layer within the bun. Add a crisp layer of lettuce, slice of tomato and half an avocado, and I'm in heaven. Cheese, fries and a soda? I can quit those kinds of calories, or replace them with salad and water. But try as I might, I can't replace that beef patty.

Meat eaters like me are part of the problem. Livestock feed, livestock-related forest clearing and methane-filed livestock waste are responsible for 18% to 51% of greenhouse gas emissions, depending on which study you believe. The planet is getting hotter, the weather is getting wilder and the seas are rising, in large part because we just can't quit our steaks and burgers.

See also: Google Scientists Want Google to Stop Funding Climate Change Denial

That's not even considering the ethical problems of the way cattle is treated or the public health nightmare of all the antibiotics pumped into livestock that ends up in our water system.

We can know all this, and still have it vanish from our minds when we're hungry and staring at a menu, or hanging around a friend's barbecue at the weekend. It's in our programming. "People are designed to love meat," says Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard.

If we don't care too much about where the meat is coming from, that's part of the problem. But it can also be part of the solution.

The world saw its first lab-grown burger on Monday, thanks to a $330,000 investment from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and five years of effort by Mark Post at Maastricht University in Belgium. The basis for the burger: 20,000 protein strands grown from stem cells taken from a cow's shoulder.

That still means meat is the basis of the burger — no tasteless soyburgers here. But it also means you'd need to keep vastly fewer quantities of cows to sustain present levels of beef consumption; probably few enough that they could be free range and grass-fed. All that extra farmland could be turned over to fruits and vegetables. And we'd slash our output of climate-changing methane — all without having to give up beef.

We're in the early days of lab-grown beef, as shown by the price tag on this experiment. Post estimates we're a decade or two away from a mass market solution. We're also far from getting the consistency right; early tasters (seen in the video below) point out that the $330,000 burger is lacking in the kind of delicious fats that make beef so irresistible.

But they did at least recognize it as meat. And if we want to save the planet, that's what we can do too. It would be easy to dismiss Post's experiment as a "Frankenburger," or to worry that it wouldn't be as healthy as regular meat. In fact, it's just muscle tissue doing what muscle tissue does, with very little encouragement. And given that there's no need for antibiotics in lab-grown meat, this stuff is arguably healthier than what we're used to.

Public perception is key. It could kill this neat little idea in its crib and doom us to a dangerous explosion in livestock landscape over the next 40 years. Or, if we're enthusiastic about it, if we make it clear that this is what we want, then research dollars will follow.

Short of somehow converting a dozen friends to vegetarianism (and making sure they stay that way), showing your support for the lab-grown burger is one of the most important things you can do for the planet today.

Image: David Parry/PA

Topics: environment, Health & Fitness, opinion, Science, Sergey Brin, Social Good, US & World, World