LabMac: Coming to restaurant near you

NORTH Wales farmers will be looking on with interest when the World's first laboratory grown beefburger is unveiled to the public later this year. So will some vegetarians.

At present, the technology of manufacturing meat in a test tube rather than in a field is experimental; the burger in question is reckoned to have cost pounds 20,000 to manufacture.

The concept is pretty attractive, both to accountants and to those wondering how to feed the planet's rapidly expanding population. India and China are growing large middle classes and they are certainly showing a taste for the meat that their parents couldn't afford.

Animals are an inefficient way of turning plant calories and protein into meat: if science can crack the problems of engineering meat at an industrial scale, it would make a substantial contribution to feeding the world.

They will have a marketing dilemma. GM plant technology has never been able to shake off its "Frankenstein food" tag. Making a steak in a lab is also a much more complex task than fabricating burger mince.

I reckon it will be quite some time before a computer designed, factory engineered, succulent Welsh Black fillet steak hits the Friday night frying pan in the Pugh household.