Synthetic egg mayo on your human burger? The future of food.

Such meat has been described as 'clean meat' since it doesn't come with the same welfare and ethical implications that meat from farmed animals does. Those that promote it see it not just as answering an ethical issue, but as providing a solution to the environmental impact of our meat consumption. It has been estimated that by 2030, globally, the average human will be consuming just under 45 kg per year (that's the size of a child) - 10 percent more than today - and that the impact on the planet will be simply too great.

In a recent survey it was found that 60% of vegans would be happy to eat lab grown meat. However, the rest of the public are not quite so enthusiastic. Only 18% of UK respondents said they would be up for eating it. This hi-tech food is also a major disruptor of traditional agriculture. Just like the death of the CD thanks to streaming music, or the chaos on the high street thanks to online retailers, we need to ask what will happen to farmers - and the downstream companies like distributors who rely on them - if these Frankenfoods become commonplace. And, as you will discover as you read on, not everyone sees this new technology as ethical, or the real answer to our environmental problems.

Whether you’re ready for them or not, here are some of the hi-tech foods coming to a plate near you, either now, or sometime in the near future.

Lab-grown meat

The technology to produce lab grown meat has been with us for a while. The first lab-grown hamburger, was cooked and eaten in London, in 2013, the creation of Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University. It was assembled from 100,000 small strips of muscle that were individually grown at his lab.

There was a problem, though. That single burger actually cost £220,000 to make. Since then, Post has managed to tweak the process to bring it down to a cost around £4,400 per patty. But there is a significant barrier to reducing the costs further. The source of protein for the production of the meat is a serum made from animal foetal blood, which is both enormously expensive, and also, not entirely cruelty free - and hardly a sales pitch for vegetarians.

Since then, others, in the United States, have developed their own cultured meat. Memphis Meats, for instance, who have created the first lab-grown meatball, say they hope to have clean duck or chicken meat on the market by 2021. The company JUST, formerly called Hampton Creek, has made a chicken using cells from a feather. They describe, on their website, being able to eat meat that comes from a bird that is still running around alive. But all these meat industry disruptors face the same problem – the issue of finding a replacement for the animal-based 'starter' serum. That’s the big technology they are all trying to develop – a growth medium that is serum-free and won't frighten the vegetarians.

Plant Meat

The race has been on for some years now to create a plant-substitute for meat that mimics the real thing. At the heart of this, has been the faux meat burger, pioneered, in the US, by two companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. But there are such patties in development in the UK too. Last year, Moving Mountains, said it had created the “closest replica yet” to animal meat in the UK from a recipe that includes coconut oil, wheat and soy, potatoes, mushrooms, and beetroot juice to make it “bleed”. Company founder Simeon Van Der Molen observed that their patty “requires less land, less water and produces less greenhouse emissions” than real meat.

Not everyone, however, is convinced this is the future. Investigative food journalist and Sunday Herald restaurant reviewer, Joanna Blythman is a critic. Analysing the ingredients in the Impossible Burger, she said: “It’s the very antithesis of local food with a transparent provenance and back story. I’d have absolutely no chance of tracing the origins or uncovering any substantive detail on the assiduously guarded production methods behind its utterly anonymous components.”

Synthetic wines

Last year global wine production fell to its lowest level since the 1960s because of extreme weather conditions – and experts have said this is a trend that is only likely to continue due to climate change. The answer, some scientists believe, could lie in synthetic grape-free wine. Ava Winery, a San Francisco start-up, has already made such “wines without vines” - they literally turn water into wine, by adding ethanol, acids, amino acids, sugars and organic compounds. Its first was a sweet, sparkling replica Moscato d’Asti.

Non-diary milk, cheese and eggs

You don’t have to look to the future for a vegan milk that has been manufactured to taste just like the real thing – it is already in shops in the United States now, produced by a company called Perfect Day. The process involves putting cow DNA into yeast so that it produces the milk proteins, then fermenting them with corn syrup. Replica cheese is also already on the market, as well as synthetic eggs products.

The human steak

In the future we could eat ourselves. That, say some, is a possibility that lab grown meat brings – that we could use our own cells, or those of a friend or a family member, to create a culture of meat. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted last month: "I've long been looking forward to this. What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?" Owen Schaefer, a professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Singapore, has even predicted that we may soon read trend pieces, saying “Kids are eating their friends now!”. It's just a shame we couldn't take this technology and use it to make chocolate. If we could it would take the expression 'if you were chocolate you'd eat yourself' to a whole different level.