A Lab-Grown Burger Gets a Taste Test

David Parry/Press Association, via European Pressphoto Agency

Mark Post, a Dutch researcher at the University of Maastricht, held a sample of in-vitro, or cultured meat. The project took two years to complete at a cost of $325,000. Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, paid for the project.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

A hamburger made from cow muscle grown in a laboratory was fried, served and eaten in London on Monday in an odd demonstration of one view of the future of food.

A chef preparing to cook the world's first lab-grown hamburger in London on Monday.

"Those who decry it as 'frankenfood' might consider that food animals are essentially treated as production units."

According to the three people who ate it, the burger was dry and a bit lacking in flavor. One taster, Josh Schonwald, a Chicago-based author of a book on the future of food, said “the bite feels like a conventional hamburger” but that the meat tasted “like an animal-protein cake.”

But taste and texture were largely beside the point: The event, arranged by a public relations firm and broadcast live on the Web, was meant to make a case that so-called in vitro, or cultured, meat deserves additional financing and research.
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