Shitburger anyone?

News from the continent that Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year.

A university in Maastricht - a place also famous for producing unpalettable treaties - has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about 1 mm thick. These are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in appearance. These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.

What I find most frightening about this is that having grown something that is pure protein, they can't sell it to the public without putting the shit stuff back in!

And to court publicity, they intend to get Heston to cook the very first artificial burger. Heston is, of course, world famous for rustling up a wholesome meal from stuff that some people wouldn't scrape of the bottom of their shoes. Who could forget his snail porridge and sardine on toast ice cream? Yum, yum...

So what is the synthetic burger likely to taste like?

"In the beginning it will taste bland," says MU's Prof Post. "I think we will need to work on the flavour separately by trying to figure out which components of the meat actually produce the taste and analyse what the composition of the strip is and whether we can change that."

Now it has been suggested that a well known hamburger fast food chain who I can't name for fear of being sued has been producing hamburgers from tasteless crap and selling them quite successfully for many years, but as Francis Urquhart might well have said "You might very well think that - I couldn't possibly comment!"

Prof Post also said that if the technology took off, it would reduce the number of animals that were factory farmed and slaughtered but David Steele, who is president of Earthsave Canada, said that the same benefits could be achieved if people ate less meat.

"While I do think that there are definite environmental and animal welfare advantages of this high-tech approach over factory farming, especially, it is pretty clear to me that plant-based alternatives... have substantial environmental and probably animal welfare advantages over synthetic meat," he said.

Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.

Delicious...