A Dutch scientist has created the world’s first hamburger made with synthetic meat, but it won’t be rivaling McDonald’s as a cheap lunch. The meat, grown from bovine stem cells into strips of muscle, is the first made from a petri dish and costs around $393,000.

Grown in a lab in the Netherlands, the muscle is then mixed with layers of fat, also grown in the lab, to make the burger. Dr Mark Post, of the Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said his objective is to recreate meat but with a more resource-friendly approach.

“My eventual dream is to produce meat that tastes and looks exactly like [real meat] so that you wont be able to distinguish it from the livestock meat.

“But you know that it is produced in an environmentally friendly, animal friendly and resource friendly way.”

Researches say the method is more effective than farming, with one animal supplying meat for over billion burgers. [source]

Click here to watch the full video.

It’s amazing to me that environmental and animal welfare groups are welcoming to such developments. While in many respects I think it’s great that scientists are looking at ways that we can reduce our negative impact on animals through modern farming techniques I think that it misses part of the bigger picture.

As a society, we continue to develop new technologies which enable our unsustainable way of life. It is the way that we live our lives on this planet that is the problem. Like modern medicine, we treat the symptoms of the disease opposed to the root cause.

Instead of growing quantities of meat in a lab, we really need to turn back the clocks and look towards solutions that respect the world around us. By this I mean things like permaculture, and biodynamic farming techniques. They are proven to work and are much more effective than our current methods which harm the land. By mirroring the natural cycle of life on the planet, we can allow it to continue and thrive.

I know that a lot of people will disagree with me on this.  It’s just an immediate response to watching this on the news tonight. Let me know what your thoughts are.