This week Mark Post cooked his cloned beef for a London audience. He tells Charlotte Edwardes that he can’t wait to serve her his lab-grown surf’n’turf
The name, he agrees, is offputting. “In vitro just means ‘grown out of the body’, and it’s a very accurate description for scientists, but it doesn’t fly very well in the minds of the general public. We could call it ‘cultured beef,’ but eventually I’d like it to be called meat. It is meat.”
Funnily enough, he says, the first piece of cultured “meat” wasn’t produced by a scientist but by the Australian bio-artist, Oron Catts. “He made a small bit of tissue which he called meat — but not on this scale. He actually tried to get people to eat it but they spat it out, so he kept the remains and used them in exhibitions too. I didn’t hear about him until later, and then we did an art cooking show together in the Netherlands. It was fun.
“We cooked a fantasy ‘one tissue’ combination with a lobster and a piece of steak — a surf and turf slurry, we called it — technically we could do this in the future, create mixtures of tissues.”
They even made a cocktail with vodka and foetal bovine serum. “I was glad of the vodka because to be honest the foetal bovine serum is pretty flat on its own,” he chuckles at this. It sounds very Heston Blumenthal. “Yes,” Post agrees. Indeed, he hopes chefs like Blumenthal will be on side in future.
So why do we need a “fake” burger?
This is the crux of it for Post — not the “fun” investigations with science, or the experimenting with food, but “providing a solution for meat production in the future. This is a serious problem. Nobody seems to realise this. Right now meat is so cheap and it’s readily available. That is really going to change.”
Post quotes World Health Organisation figures, that global consumption of meat is estimated to increase by 60 to 70 per cent over the next 40 years because of the demand from the emerging middle classes in China, India, Africa and Latin America. “It’s unsustainable. We need an alternative. This hamburger illustrates that.”
He says that the same science behind the burger can be applied to chicken, lamb, fish and pork. “Beef is the big problem, but where some fish are over-fished and face extinction you might preserve that species by producing the fish meat in a different way.”
He has discussed the stem cell burger with rabbis from the Jewish community — “and it could be kosher” — as well as with imams to ensure it’s halal.
Why doesn’t he convert people to vegetarianism? “I don’t see it as a viable option,” he says. “Anyway, I am not a vegetarian, so it would be hypocritical.” He continues: “Only two to three per cent of the world’s industrialised societies are vegetarians and that number hasn’t increased in the past 35 years.” He says, however, that he is a “flexitarian”, which means he cuts down on the meat that he eats.
I notice that his lace-ups have violent green soles — is that an environmental thing, symbolic of his green footprint? “Ach, no.” He laughs. “Just maybe that the designer was colour-blind.”
Dr Post first became involved in stem cell research in 2008, when he was recruited to a Dutch government project led by Willem van Eelen, now 90, an entrepreneur and former restaurateur who was “and still is” passionate about the idea.
Post took over the project and when government funding ended in 2010, he attracted the attention of Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google (although Post stresses: “It’s not Google money. Brin happens to have money to do fun stuff”).
To date Brin has invested 700,000 (£607,000) as well as paying for the press launch on Monday. As of this week, Post says they “are talking to a number of investors including Brin” to take the project forward to the next stage. “So far this is a university activity, not a business. When you get closer to real product development then it can become a business.”
Later, by coincidence, I bump into Dr Post having his supper alone in a restaurant. I’m amused to see he’s having a burger. Is it a good one?
He pulls his mouth down and inspects it. “Not really,” he says after a pause. “I can definitely do better.”
