 Meat is an excellent source of protein and quite tasty, but at what cost? The resources required to feed nine billion people meat are vast, even if it's just the wealthy ones. Many people are rejecting the cruelty of factory farming and practices like live animal export, and though they haven't been surveyed, it's likely the billions of primary providers – cows, sheep, pigs, fish and the rest – are dead against it. Could synthetic meat be the solution? It is meat, not tofu-based meat substitutes, and despite the name not really synthetic, it's actual animal cells. Tissue engineers take a sample from a lot of adult animal, and ideally that's all they have to endure. Then they grow the adult stem cells in vats of nutrient-rich broth, convert them to muscle cells – because meat is muscle – and grow them on a biodegradable scaffold. The only hitch is muscle cells need exercise to survive, and you can't run these ones around the paddock. You can stimulate them with tiny electrical impulses, but on an industrial scale, it's prohibitively expensive. Research continues. Thus far, the biggest cut contains millions of cells, and is roughly the size of a contact lens. But when synthetic meat becomes a mainstream reality, will you eat lab-grown steak? And will knowing that no animals were harmed in the making of your burger change the way you relate to animals?