London: The most expensive hamburger in the world began, about three months ago, with cows raised on organic farms.

There was, however, very little traditionally pastoral about the way it was made: the process started with the extraction of stem cells from a biopsy of two cows, a blanc blue belge and a blond acquitaine.

Dr Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University used these cells to grow 20,000 muscle fibres in individual culture wells, each one a tiny hoop of greyish-white protein suspended in a gel-like growth medium that contained antibiotics and a serum extracted from cow foetuses.

After a few weeks of growth, each hoop of fibre was removed by hand, cut open and straightened out. The fibres were then pressed together, coloured with beetroot juice and mixed with saffron, breadcrumbs and some binding ingredients to form the burger — biologically identical to beef, but grown in a lab. The total cost of the project was €250,000 (Dh1.2 million), funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Brin said he had been moved to invest in the technology for animal welfare reasons. People had an erroneous image of modern meat production, he said, in terms of “pristine farms” with just a few animals in them. “When you see how these cows are treated, it’s certainly something I’m not comfortable with.”

Monday’s event in London, in which a chef cooked and served the synthetic burger in public, was the culmination of years of research aimed at demonstrating that this method of growing protein could one day be a viable alternative for meat from livestock.

“Cows are very inefficient they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein,” Post said. “So we need to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food that way.” With cultured meat, scientists can make meat production more efficient because they can keep all the variables under control. They also do not need to slaughter any cows.

The human appetite for meat means that 30 per cent of the Earth’s usable surface is covered by pasture land for animals, compared with just 4 per cent used directly to feed humans. The total biomass of our livestock is almost double that of the people on the planet and accounts for 5 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions and 40 per cent of methane emissions — a much more potent greenhouse gas.

By 2060, the human population is predicted to rise to 9.5 billion and, with a rising demand for meat from rapidly developing populations in, for example, China and India, the market in meat is expected to double by the middle of the century. If the amount of meat we produce doubles, livestock could be responsible for half as much climate impact as all the world’s cars, lorries and aircraft. In 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change, urged people to have one meat-free day a week to help curb climate change.

Different methods of growing meat in labs will have different impacts on the environment, and Post said early indications were that his lab meat reduced the need for land and water by 90 per cent and cut overall energy use by 70 per cent.

The best way to prevent this environmental damage, of course, would be if everyone could be persuaded to eat less meat. But no one thinks that will happen — the desire to eat meat is ingrained deep in our evolution, according to Harvard University primatologist Prof Richard Wrangham.

There are many hurdles before Post can scale up his process for large-scale manufacture — cell culture is not cheap — but he has high hopes. “Twenty years from now, if you have a choice in the supermarket between two products that are identical and they taste and feel the same and have the same price and one is made in an environmentally friendly way, with far fewer resources and provides food security for the population and doesn’t have any animal welfare connotations to it the choice will be relatively easy,” he said.

“People will start to prefer this type of product and then it will gradually transform meat production.”