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Professor Mark Post with a burger made from Cultured Beef David Parry / PA Wire

The world’s first lab-grown burger was unveiled and eaten on Monday. A Netherlands researcher, Dr. Mark Post of Maastricht University, displayed the lab-grown patty in front of journalists and a select audience in London.

Cultured Beef Lab-Grown Burger
A burger made from Cultured Beef David Parry/PA Wire

The burger patty grown from stem cells costs more than $332,000 to make in the lab. According to the team’s website, the burger consisted of 20,000 muscle strands. “The burger was made with a little egg powder and breadcrumbs and a few other common burger ingredients,” says a description on the website.

At the event, the burger was cooked by Richard McGeown, chef of Couch’s Great House restaurant in Polperro, Cornwall. After the lab-grown meat patty was cooked, it was tasted and eaten by Hanni Ruetzler, an Austrian food researcher, and Josh Schonwald, a Chicago-based food writer.

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A cooked burger made from Cultured Beef David Parry/PA Wire

"I was expecting the texture to be more soft ... there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, but it's not that juicy,” said Ruetzler, according to a BBC report.

“The absence of fat is what makes it taste different,” Schonwald said according to NBC News.

He added, “The absence of fat makes a big difference. It has the texture, which I was not expecting. It was like an animal-protein cake.”

"It cooked like any other burger I've cooked before, it seems to give off a pleasant aroma," McGeown said.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin was revealed to be the mystery backer behind the research project, according to the Guardian.

While the burger’s introduction was only meant as a proof of concept, its potential has already been demonstrated.

“Research carried out at the University of Oxford suggests that producing Cultured Beef could use as much as 99 [percent] less space than what is needed for current livestock farming methods,” according to the Cultured Beef website.

Watch the introduction of the event in the video above. You can watch a video of the entire event on the website.

What do you think about lab-grown burgers? Let us know in the comments.