Blog : Soylent Green and the $330,000 Hamburger

by Ed Zwirn on August 7th, 2013

Usually the introduction of a new food product is the kind of news item that makes me hungry. This was not the case with Monday's unveiling of the first hamburger created in a laboratory.

Reaction to the advent of this new food source has been largely positive, with animal groups like PETA pointing to the lack of cruelty involved in harvesting cattle stem cells and environmentalists pointing to the technology as a way to feed the world with meat while not stressing out the land with animal husbandry.

On the other hand, at least one prominent segment of the meat-eating public is so far not buying in. The latest rabbinical opinion has it that the new "meat" is not kosher because it was biopsied from a live animal and had therefore not been ritually slaughtered.

Serhey Brin, one of Google's billionaire founders, and someone who can certainly spare the money, said he shelled out the $330,000 to make the burger because of a desire to be involved in the cutting edge of technology.

"Some people think this is science fiction -- it's not real. It's somewhere out there," Brin said. "I actually think that's a good thing. If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough."

Brin said he was motivated by projections suggesting that the current method of producing meat -- by raising billions of animals, and then killing and butchering them -- would become environmentally and economically unworkable over the next few decades. He also voiced personal qualms about the ethics of livestock farming. "When you see how these cows are treated, that's certainly not something I'm comfortable with," he said.

And I suppose penny stock investors should be grateful. This type of "science fiction"-level innovation ethic has made far more people than Brin into wealthy individuals and has propelled much small-cap innovation. You see this every time a new penny stock is unveiled to finance company efforts to cure diseases, enhance engine performance or sexual performance or cure baldness.

On the other hand, this latest development strikes me as more representative of the dystopian side of sci-fi. The prognosis offered by Brin and his researchers of a world too stressed out environmentally to feed its own people has been a popular one for centuries and penny stocks purporting to "solve world hunger" are nothing new to the stock market.

Spoiler alert for those who may not have seen the 1973 film: "Soylent Green is People." Or bovine stem cells. Yum.