the lab burger

The presentation and public eating of the world's first laboratory-grown meat patty came on 5th August, 9 months late and sans Jamie Oliver or Heston Blumenthal, who were the first choice chefs sought to flame grill the item. Rather, the patty was presented as a burger, complete with tomato, lettuce, and a bread bun - without condiments or relishes, but with Sergei Brin (in spirit and less €250,000). The event has been met with little but predictable initial response, and possibly less in total than that afforded to the new Dr Who.

Sergei Brin explains his support for project in a video produced by the rather mysterious Department of Expansion, "sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view the world," he says in his introduction. I may be pedantic, but I fail to understand how lab meat can change one's view of the world. In the long term, dependent on its success, it could change the eating habits of some people, at least by adding an alternative  - that is not a world view. While Sergei Brin's leviathan Google continues to change one's view of the world, something he emphasises by wearing Glass. His own über-geek product placement - see, I can change (augment) your world view!

The video is alive with piquant flaws. "We are a species designed to love meat," says Richard Wrangham, Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. This is an astonishing fallacy from a Harvard Professor. There's something necrophilic about an animal designed to have an irrational predilection for another dead animal. As geneticist, Steve Jones, said of Wrangham's book Catching Fire: how cooking made us human, "the problem with making grand theories about the past is that they often rest on too few facts. In spite of the tasty morsels scattered through this book, towards its end Wrangham sinks – like so many before him – into the swamp of sociobiological speculation." Wrangham seems to add salt to patty with an apocalyptic, "what climate change is going to do is to change resource distribution - in a modern world where we have Paleolithic minds and contemporary weapons, that's really dangerous..." A Harvard Professor should surely have been aware of this Epimenides paradox - "in a modern world we have Paleolithic minds," said the professor with the Paleolithic mind from the rarefied world of academe.

Ken Cook, Co-Founder of the pressure group Environmental Working Group, states, "we can't just continue doing what we've been doing - unless we make some changes in how we produce meat on this planet we're in for a terrible reckoning." 

Brin emphasises this polemic - "there are basically three things that can happen going forward; one is we'll all become vegetarian - I don't think that's really likely; the second is that we ignore the issues, and that leads to continued environmental harm; and the third option is that we do something new..." 

As in the rest of the film, these assumptions are based on an understanding that we will continue to be driven to eat meat to sate our Paleolithic cravings and design function. And that the ever growing number of people on the planet means an equiavaent meat consumption. But what if the Paleolithic Emperor has no clothes - what if meat consumption were actually to be reduced? Is that not a simpler solution? Should investment not be targeted towards cr/edible alternatives to meat in whatever form? Or, dare one consider it, eating less meat, or none at all.

What of the man who made the meat? Professor Mark Post explained the motivation for the project at Next Nature in 2011. And more detail of the process here. He also seems to have moved to Neverland when he tells us what will actually be on sale in supermarkets in 20 years time.

While on the other side of the world, the bucolic-sounding  Modern Meadow, is attempting to bioprint laboratory-produced meat. And as with Sergei Brin's funding Mark Post's research, Peter Thiel (Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor) has backed Modern Meadow with a similar $350,000. Modern Meadow also has the blessing of Mr Gates.