10-4 IAT Stem Cell Burger
I roared a couple of weeks ago when I heard a national public radio spot that was describing a lab grown beef hamburger which was cooked and eaten in London. The 5 ounce burger Patty cost more than $330,000 to produce and was paid for by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. I had to call Wyatt Prescott, Executive Director of the Idaho Cattlemen’s Association. “Probably a decade or maybe even two decades ago there was a bounty that PETA put up, I believe it was a million-dollar reward for the first person to produce what they call a test tube chicken product. So we have a lot of anti-animal ag groups going after ways of making meat that is not from an animal. There has been research done on the in vitro burger where he essentially they have to go in and cut a chunk of muscle off of a live animal in order to make it and then they sort that out and pull the strands down of the muscle and grow it in a petri dish and they even attach Velcro and stretch it like it would be a muscle working out and they spend $350,000 to make a hamburger that they have to add eggs and flour and color and Artificial flavor to make it taste anything like a beef hamburger. We are not concerned in terms of it being a threat to our industry.”
