A lab-grown beef burger might not be your first choice off the menu if you're dining out for Restaurant Week. But to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, the dish is worth €250,000 (about $331,425) and more than makes up for its strangeness in environmental and animal friendliness.
Brin says he invested in the cultured burger because of his belief in animal rights. He feels that our idyllic, pastoral images of farm life are not akin to the experiences of animals. "When you see how these cows are treated, it's certainly something I'm not comfortable with," he told The Guardian in a video interview.
[seealso story=2013/07/16/first-lab-burger/]
Additionally, he sees the shift towards cultured meat as one that could ultimately reduce global use of valuable resources -- water, land and energy -- by a huge margin.
Brin's funding allowed Dr. Mark Post, professor of Vascular Physiology and head of the Physiology department at Maastricht University, to create the world's first cultured beef burger. Over a three-month period, Post and his team grew and compressed 20,000 muscle fibers from cows' stem cells and crafted a burger from those cells.
The burger was prepared and consumed in London on Monday afternoon. We bet it tasted like freedom -- eco-friendly freedom.