Synthetic burgers? That food's not fast

If the idea of synthetic meat creeps you out, don't worry: You won't be eating it anytime soon.

Synthetic meat is different from the plant-based substitutes available in grocery stores and on restaurant menus right now. Guests on The Daily Circuit explained that the more futuristic synthetics, such as meat grown in vitro, remain a distant prospect.

"In vitro meat is a long way from the market," said journalist Ariel Schwartz. "Right now, in vitro meat is incredibly expensive. The burger that was created in the lab a couple of months ago — that cost $325,000. To make one burger."

Eventually, however, "there might not be that much of a choice" but to switch to some form of alternative, she said. "Simply because the population is rising, and land prices are increasing, and everybody won't be able to eat as much meat and eggs as they want every single day. They won't be able to afford it."

Food ethnographer June Jo Lee agreed.

"People are thinking toward the future," she said, "and thinking, 'Is it really sustainable for us to eat so much animal protein?' But I think there are also other considerations. There are animal welfare considerations. I know a lot of especially millennials, they turn to vegetarianism and veganism because of the inhumane aspect of large-scale animal production. But in addition to that, there's also this health and wellness driver for it."

The world's first lab-grown hamburger was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

More from The Guardian:

Brin's money was used by a team led by physiologist Dr Mark Post at Maastricht University to grow 20,000 muscle fibres from cow stem cells over the course of three months. These fibres were extracted from individual culture wells and then painstakingly pressed together to form the hamburger that will be eaten in London on Monday. The objective is to create meat that is biologically identical to beef but grown in a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow.

"Cows are very inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein," Dr Post told the Guardian before the event. "So we need to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food that way. [With cultured meat] we can make it more efficient because we have all the variables under control. We don't need to kill the cow and it doesn't [produce] any methane."