Don’t have a cow, man — just have a steak.
The world’s first lab-grown, slaughter-free steak has been unveiled in Israel — although its makers say the taste needs some work before it can be served up to the public, according to new reports.
“It’s close and it tastes good, but we have a bit more work to make sure the taste is 100 percent similar to conventional meat,” Didier Toubia, the co-founder and chief executive of the start-up Aleph Farms, told The Guardian.
“But when you cook it, you really can smell the same smell of meat cooking.”
The steak is grown from a few cells extracted painlessly from a living cow — and then nourished and grown to replicate muscle tissue, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The prototype costs $50 for a small strip — but Toubia told the Guardian that price is “not insane.”
It’s a bargain compared to the first lab-grown beefburger, which cost more than $280,000 when it was released in 2013 — and Toubia said the cost should eventually come down as production is moved from the lab to a commercial facility.
The company is also working to increase the thickness of the steak — with the help of Professor Shulamit Levenberg, an expert in tissue engineering at the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology.
Several recent studies have found that large reductions in meat-eating are needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and stave off climate change, the Guardian reported.
Still, Aleph Farms isn’t aiming to replace traditionally raised, grass-fed cattle — just factory farms, Toubia told the paper.
“We are not against traditional agriculture,” he said. “The main issue today is with intensive, factory farming facilities, which are very inefficient and very polluting and have lost the relationship to the animal.”
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