The first lab-grown burger took two years and cost over $325,000
In 2013 a hamburger grown from cow cells outside any animal was cooked and tasted on live television in London. It had taken 2 years to make and cost more than $325,000, and it turned into reality an idea Winston Churchill had floated back in 1931.
Cultured meat is grown from animal cells in vitro, using tissue-engineering methods first developed for regenerative medicine. Churchill imagined raising chicken breasts and wings separately in a suitable medium rather than rearing whole birds. In the 1950s the Dutch researcher Willem van Eelen reached the same idea on his own; starvation as a prisoner of war had left him passionate about food security. In 2001 he joined dermatologist Wiete Westerhof and businessman Willem van Kooten in filing for a worldwide patent, and that year NASA began experiments so astronauts might grow meat rather than carry it.
After touring a factory chicken farm in India, the American public health student Jason Matheny founded New Harvest in 2004, the first non-profit devoted to the research, and co-wrote the first peer-reviewed paper on the subject in 2005. In May 2008 PETA offered $1 million to the first company that could sell cultured chicken indistinguishable from the real thing in at least 10 states by 2012, a deadline later pushed to March 2014. Time listed cultured meat among the 50 breakthrough ideas of 2009.
Mark Post's burger at Maastricht University was built from more than 20,000 thin strands of muscle, and chef Richard McGeown cooked it for the London tasting on 5 August 2013. Start-ups multiplied between 2011 and 2017: Memphis Meats, now Upside Foods, showed a cultured beef meatball in 2016 and the first public cultured poultry, chicken tenders and duck a l'orange, in March 2017. Avant Meats brought cultured grouper to market in 2021, and from 2021 through 2023 the sector drew over $2.5 billion in investment.
Even the name is contested. The Good Food Institute coined clean meat in 2016, then reported in 2019 that cultivated meat sounded neutral and appealing, and in a 2021 poll 75 percent of 44 companies preferred that term. Lab-grown draws criticism because commercial production would not happen in laboratories. Expensive growth additives are one obstacle, though a January 2024 study found cow cells can make their own growth factors. The product is still not widely sold.
Source: Cultured meat
