Burgers Made From Lab-Grown Meat
Photo: dweekly (CC)
I know — yuk! — but chances are airlines and other purveyors of gross burgers like the one at right won’t have any qualms about using synthetic meat if the price is lower than real meat. Pallab Ghosh reports for BBC News:
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.
The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals.
At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.
“We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources,” he said.
Professor Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.
They are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in…
McDonald’s Discontinues Use Of ‘Pink Slime’ In Burgers
No more slimeburgers? Until recently, 70 percent of burgers in the United States contained “pink slime”, also known as ammoniated boneless lean beef trimmings, a cheap beef filling unfit for consumption until it is gassed with ammonia. Now McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King are dropping the magic additive following a campaign of withering criticism from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. Via the Argus Leader:
McDonald’s and two other fast-food chains have stopped using an ammonia-treated burger ingredient that meat industry critics deride as “pink slime.” The product remains widely used as beef filling in burger meat, including in school meals.
The beef is processed by Beef Products Inc. in Iowa and in three other states. One of the company’s chief innovations is to cleanse the beef of E. coli bacteria and other dangerous microbes by treating it with ammonium hydroxide.
“Basically, we’re taking a product that would be sold at the cheapest form…
A Happy Meal 137 Days Later
Artist Sally Davies runs the classic, terrifying “McDonald’s burger time-lapse” experiment. The goal of course is to see how long it takes food from McDonald’s to alter in appearance even the slightest bit. At 137 days and counting, this meal looks identical to how it did at the time of purchase. Via Refinery 29:
Wisconsin’s Answer To The Obesity Crisis: The Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger
They’re trying to persuade us that it’s low-calorie and healthy … come on Wisconsin, this is going to send you straight to the morgue, especially if you add the optional chocolate-covered bacon!
The $1200 Burger
Here in burger-mad New York City, seemingly every year there is an outcry over the latest celebrity chef’s outlandishly expensive creation billed as a burger but usually having little in common with the American classic (e.g. Daniel Boulud’s “Royale,” stuffed with red wine-braised short ribs (off the bone), foie gras, a mix of root vegetables and preserved black truffle, for $120). We’ve been trumped, though, by some Aussies, as reported by Reuters:
An Australian cafe is claiming a world record after cooking a giant hamburger with an 81 kg (178 lb) patty that took 12 hours to cook and four men to flip.
The monster burger cooked up by Sydney cafe owners, Joe and Iman El-Ajouz, weighed in at 90 kg in total, eclipsing the previous record of 84 kg, set in Michigan in the United States….
The giant burger contained the giant beef patty, 120 eggs, 150 slices of cheese, 1.5 kg of…
