A single 3D-printed burger currently costs over $300,000 to make

3D printing might be the wave of the future, or it might just end up a niche hobby that’s pretty cool but ultimately too expensive and complicated to ever take off. Whatever that fate may be, startup Modern Meadow is throwing its hat into the 3D printing ring, but rather than printing plastic trinkets or gun parts, it plans to print edible meat.

We’ve mentioned Modern Meadow – a company that is practicing a variant of 3D printing, called 3D bioprinting — before. Instead of using resin like standard 3D printing, or a material more easily sent through a printer for food-printing like melted chocolate that then hardens, Modern Meadow uses material somewhat creepily called “bioink”.

In order to print live cells, the engineers perform biopsies on animals and collect stem cells, or other special cells. Because stem cells are basically magical (this not a technical term), they can not only turn into other cells, but replicate themselves. Once they replicate enough times, the engineers load them into a bioprinter cartridge, which creates something of a bioink — a material made of many live cells. When the bioink is printed, the living cells link together and form living tissue.

When using 3D bioprinting a hamburger as an example, Professor Gabor Forgacs — part of the father and son founders of Modern Meadow — notes that the actual shape of the food isn’t too much of a hurdle, as it’s simply a round, relatively 2D patty. Another benefit to producing edible meat is that the live tissue can die afterward, as consumable meat normally isn’t living tissue, so a method of preserving the tissue’s life isn’t really required.

Though it might be easier to print edible, dead-tissue meat, Modern Meadow is facing a couple fairly large hurdles. For one, convincing the world to eat lab-grown meat might not be so easy. Another significant hurdle is that though Modern Meadow hasn’t grown something like a burger or steak as of yet, the price of one would be astronomically high. Another team of researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has been growing animal cells to produce strips of lean muscle, with the goal of creating an artificial hamburger. Though the team doesn’t use bioprinting, they do use a somewhat related process of having stem cells replicate and create live tissue in a mold. Unfortunately, creating an entire burger would currently cost over $300,000.

If this all seems a little nutty, Modern Meadow has managed to raise some backing from prominent figures, such as Peter Thiel, who was one of Facebook’s early investors. There’s no word yet on when the company will be able to print a burger (or even a slider!), but if it can, it will be interesting to see how much it’ll cost, and if people can be convinced that “synthetic” meat is truly edible.