What the hell is the matter with people? Of course I am referring to This Article that describes how scientists in the Netherlands have used bovine stem cells to create artificial hamburger in a lab. An anonymous celebrity donor has paid 250,000 Euro (roughly $330,000) to be the first to eat a lab grown hamburger. Now, I enjoy meat just like all Americans (vegans don’t count as people), but is it really asking too much to get my meat from an actual animal? It’s bad enough that I can’t get meat at McDonald’s or Taco Bell, but someone is actually spending money to do this crap. My wife and I buy a Black Angus cow every year from my  father-in-law, and the whole cow comes in at about $3,000 for a 1500 pound cow with the current beef prices. So get out your trusty iPhone, bring up the calculator, and do the math with me. Assuming quarter pound patties, you could make approximately 6,000 hamburgers from the average cow if you ground all of the meat. If you figure in the special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickle, onion, all on a sesame seed bun, you get to about $1.25 per burger. Cost of the produce may even get cheaper if Scientists Build A Better Leaf. I probably don’t need to point this out but $1.25 < $330,000. It would be cheaper to clone a really big cow to get a higher yield of meat. Well, either way I doubt that this will become the sole choice of beef anytime in the near future, and if it does, I’m switching to pork.

-Thorngage