This blog has discussed the huge problem of meeting the growing world demand for beef. The global demand for meat is expected to increase by more than two-thirds in the next 40 years, with huge effects on the whole environment – everywhere.

It sounds disagreeable, but Mark J. Post, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, produced the world’s first lab-grown hamburger and fed it to food researcher Hanni Ruetzler and food writer Josh Schonwald. Ruetzler praised the burger’s flavour, but at $330,000 a burger, it wasn’t exactly considered competition for cattlemen. In 2015, however, Post, bankrolled by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, brought the price down to $80 per kilogram of meat, or a little over $11 per patty – much closer to commercial viability.

The main problem is that the burger is dry, because it has none of the fat that otherwise gives it flavour and keeps the meat “juicy”. The growth medium for the beef is also a problem: Post’s stem cells have thus far grown successfully into meat only when soaked in a serum made from foetal calf blood – an expensive option. Post and his colleagues at Maastricht are now working on solving those problems. Post estimates it will be 20 to 30 years before lab-grown beef goes commercial in a big way.

But if this idea is made to work it will, along with vertical farms (see yesterday’s post), it could theoretically free up some 20 billion square miles of land previously devoted to food production. Where once we used 40% of the Earth’s surface for meat production, in the future, ideally, we will need less than 5%. This will present an opportunity to “re-wild” huge stretches of the Earth’s surface. If every city could manufacture even 10% of what it ate, the subsequent re-wilding “would mean a huge addition to hardwood forests that would suck up enough carbon to set the clock back to about 1980 in terms of atmospheric carbon”. And that’s with only about 340,000 square miles of land reclaimed; imagine the climate gains brought by several billion square miles of land re-wilded – and all with food to spare. (Precis of an article in Newsweek, 2015).

As a non-beef eater I don’t see the attraction of burgers, however they are created. However, I do see the attraction of the vision of re-afforesting everything we so casually deforested. Epicurus would have approved.