The world's first lab-grown meat in a demonstration of "cultured beef" technology has been cooked and eaten at a news conference in London.

Maastricht University researchers took stem cells from a cow and turned them into strips of muscle tissue with the aim of developing a more efficient way of producing meat.

The laboratory produced burger was cooked by Chef Richard McGeown, from Cornwall, and tasted by food critics Hanni Ruetzler and Josh Schonwald.

“It looked like a burger. It smelled like a burger. It tasted, well, almost like a burger,” one food expert said.

Another expert described the meat such a something "close to meat, but not that juicy."

At the early stages of the research, the produced stripes were off-white and look like calamari strips that make the Dutch team to work more particularly on the flavor.

The plan for lab-grown burgers has won support from some animal welfare and vegetarian groups, who feel it addresses their concerns about animal suffering.

“Synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60% and we hope to gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources," said head of the research team Professor Mark Post.

Lab-grown meat could become more efficient than producing meat the old-fashioned way, considering that 100g

vegetable protein has to be fed to pigs or cows to produce

Post

efficiency of 15%,

an

with

protein

of animal

15g

explained.

Researchers believe food production need to be doubled within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population while climate change, water shortages and urbanization will make it more difficult to produce food.