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Cleaner, healthier, cheaper and kinder. There is, however, one fundamental problem with lab-grown meat. Most people would refuse to eat it.

While we may be prepared to eat processed food, artificial confections such as Quorn and any number of burgers containing who knows what animal parts, the notion of man-made meat seems uniquely repellent.

That, says Mr Matheny, is simply a matter of educating consumer tastes. “There is also something counterintuitive about eating yoghurt — a cultured food containing live organisms — but we do it.”

There is nothing “natural”, he adds, about eating chicken that has been crammed into a shed with thousands of others, raised in its own waste, and fed growth-enhancing chemicals.

In April 2005, a state-funded research project into cultured meat was launched in the Netherlands under Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Sciences at the University of Utrecht, and backed by the sausage manufacturer Stegeman.

Three Dutch universities are working together: scientists in Amsterdam are studying the “broth” needed to grow cells; at Utrecht they are analysing the way muscle cells proliferate; and Eindhoven University is working on a bioreactor.

In 2002 scientists at Touro College in the US removed some muscle from the abdomen of an anaesthetised goldfish and placed it in a saline solution enriched with foetal calf serum. The muscle reportedly grew by 15 per cent in a few weeks. It was then coated in breadcrumbs and lightly sautéed in olive oil: scientists said that the resulting dish “smelled good”. However, they did not eat it.

Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the University of South Carolina, believes that mass production of cultured meat represents the next step in food production. “I believe it is inescapable,” he told The Los Angeles Times recently.

Others are sceptical. No one has yet worked out a system to bring artificial blood vessels into artificial tissue, so a juicy steak à la laboratoire is not yet on the menu. Then there is the issue of taste: does the unique flavour of fresh lamb come from the tissue itself or a combination of factors, including grazing, feeding and breeding? Supporters of cultured meat respond that roughly half the meat consumed in the West is ground meat, and that the taste and appearance of many meat products is introduced by artificial flavouring and colouring.

It has even been suggested that laboratory meat could expand the gastronomic possibilities for carnivores, since scientists could harvest myoblasts from rare animals without killing anything. Leopard sausages? Coelacanth kedgeree? The issue of cultured meat may, finally, be more philosophical than scientific (or culinary). Would lab-meat represent a step away from the cruelties of much animal production, or yet more disastrous tinkering with the food chain? Would humans be prepared to eat a meat that had never breathed?

Even though he had the idea, Winston Churchill would never have replaced old-fashioned meat with high-protein, health-giving, artificial substitute. When an adviser wanted to reduce the wartime meat ration, Churchill refused to countenance it, declaring: “Almost all food faddists I have ever known — nut-eaters and the like — have died young after a long period of senile decay.”

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