Now Serving: Burgers from a Test Tube

Remember this? "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun." How about this one? "Hold the pickles. Hold the lettuce. Special orders don't upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way!" Those iconic jingles for McDonald's (the former) and Burger King (the latter)--created more than 30 years ago--became part of the American lexicon and only intensified the magnitude of the legendary burger chains' popularity.  Now, let's see 'em try to rewrite the legendary jingles and incorporate "test tube."

Yep, I said "test tube." Scientists in the Netherlands (where, it seems, there isn't anything better to do with free time) have devised a way to create ground beef in a test tube via the use of stem cells. Now, I'm no genius; far from it. But...what?!? It seems it all stems (no pun intended) from a fear that in the future there won't be enough livestock to feed everyone, so these lab rats have decided to make their own meat. Mmmmm. Give me a menu, quick. And maybe ON that menu I'll find fries that were concocted in an Erlenmeyer flask. Oh, I know! How about one of those milk shakes they whip up in a centrifuge? I can just see the Fourth of July cookouts now--anybody hungry? I'm about to fire up the Bunsen burner! Hey, maybe we've even created a whole new course in high school science--kind of a hybrid of chemistry and home economics. Fusion education! My, oh my. Is the world ready? Will the world ever be ready? Are we really running out of cows? Is there nothing else that these Dutch scientists can be working on? Burgers from a test tube. Unbelievable.