The one person who raised their hand when Dopp asked who had thought about fake meat 18 months ago was from WLJ.
We have been covering the issue since early 2012 when Professor Mark Post of the Maastricht University in the Netherlands was the first person to successfully grow lab-grown beef tissue in the lab intended for human consumption. That story ran in the Feb. 27, 2012 issue of WLJ.
That almost 7-year-old story described the birth of this technology. It was time-consuming and expensive. The then-anonymously funded project cost an estimated $330,000 (2012 U.S. dollars). Since then, many funding sources have been identified, including the Dutch government, one of the cofounders of Google, several nonprofit research institutions, and several groups that have since become cell-based product companies.
It took about 3,000 strips of cultured beef muscle tissue and about 200 strips of cultured beef fat tissue to eventually make enough product to create a burger. The strips were grown in a “broth containing vital nutrients and serum from a cow fetus.” Each strip of cultured tissue was about half the size of a stick of gum and took six weeks to grow.
The complete burger patty took over a year to grow and create. It was cooked and eaten live on TV in London, England in August 2013. The Guardian covered the story on Aug. 6, 2013, reporting that Hanni Rьtzler of the Future Food Studio taste-tested the cooked burger. She said that the lack of fat, and thereby juiciness, was noticeable, but that the texture was otherwise recognizable as meat rather than a plant-based substitute.
Expectations are that this technology, which has changed radically over the short five-and-a-half years since that burger was first eaten, will be commercially available as early as later this year. WLJ will keep covering it and its potential impacts to the traditional beef industry. — WLJ
