A tad dry, according to the two food experts sitting behind a table alongside Mark Post. But it tastes unmistakably of meat, they add. In front of the cameras of hundreds of journalists, from the BBC to CNN to Chinese state media, they have just cut into an incredibly expensive lab-grown hamburger that a chef just has cooked for them on stage. “Grown in three months, faster than any cow,” assures Post. Millions of people bulletins around the world watch the scenes in news later that day.
A true media spectacle, putting Maastricht in the spotlight. Although not because the concept of lab-grown meat was developed here. At the end of the last century, Dutch doctor and researcher Willem van Eelen was already working on the idea of growing meat in a lab from stem cells, without any animals actually ending up on the chopping block. Not only would it prevent animal suffering, it’s also more eco-friendly: it takes less energy and farmland, and causes less CO2 emissions. In a future where meat consumption is set to continue increasing, that can only be a good thing. At the turn of the 21st century, researchers at the universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Eindhoven prove that, in principle, Van Eelen’s idea is feasible.
Publicity stunt
But then the money dries up: the government wants businesses to invest in the research, but nobody seems interested. UM professor of Vascular Physiology, Mark Post, thinks a publicity stunt might raise some interest. Initially, he suggests to cook the first sausage made of lab-grown meat on television, “on Pauw & Witteman [a Dutch talk show], next to the still-living pig [which donated the stem cells]”, he told de Volkskrant in 2011. That does not happen, but an anonymous donor reaches out and offers to invest several hundred thousand euros. An American, so the sausage becomes a hamburger. It turns out later that the anonymous donor is Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.
The money is enough for Post and his lab technicians to grow enough muscle tissue to form three hamburger patties. At a price of about 250,000 euros each. Incidentally, the very first hamburger isn’t eaten in front of the world press in London at all, but months earlier, as a test, by Post and one of his colleagues in Maastricht.
Bottle of champagne
After ‘London’, the physiologist is heaped with praise, although there is also criticism: some people say he’s a researcher with a flair for the dramatic, raising expectations he can’t possibly meet, and who is taking all the credit. Yet, Post’s overwhelming feeling is of “incredible satisfaction”, he tells Observant a month later. His fears that it would be “mocked so badly as to sink the entire enterprise” were unfounded. Other than the occasional accusation of ‘Frankenburger’, there is no real negativity, and even the backlash Post had been expecting from the meat industry is minimal. The Maastricht Executive Board – which even just the week before the presentation had voiced concerns of possible reputation damage to the university – sent a bottle of champagne to the professor’s house.
And possibly most importantly, the media spectacle does lead to more interest and funding. The founder of Google, Brin donates more money to the project, and his example is echoed in the following years by a number of other big names, including Leonardo DiCaprio. In 2015, Post becomes co-founder of the company Mosa Meat, which aims to scale up the production of so-called cultivated meat, including a pilot plant.
Ten years later, cultivated meat is still not yet available for purchase on the European market, and Mosa Meat is certainly not the only company seeking to make that happen. So when will we be able to take our own bite of a ‘Maastricht’ burger? Nobody really knows. “Ten years, twenty years, two years (...), it’s all just nonsense. There’s nothing to say about it yet,” Post told Observant back in 2013. The only thing we know for sure is that since 5 August 2013, Maastricht has been indelibly linked to the history of cultivated meat.