By Tove Danovich / Source: npr

Flowering meat that unfolds when plopped into hot broth, beef “yarn” that can be knitted directly onto your plate and fried nuggets made from the extinct dodo bird are just a few of the menu options at the Bistro In Vitro.

But don’t expect to leave this place with a full belly. As the project’s director, Dutch artist Koert van Mensvoort, tells The Salt, “It’s a virtual restaurant so we strictly serve food for thought.”

The central issue van Mensvoort wants to get diners chewing on is how to reconcile eating meat in an age when it’s near impossible to ignore the environmental and animal welfare consequences of its production. It’s time, he says, to think hard about a technology that may offer us some exciting new options: in vitro meat.

As The Salt reported, a Dutch scientist debuted the very first burger composed almost entirely of cells grown in a lab in London in 2013. With a price tag of $330,000, the burger was quite a ways off from being market ready.

But the technology, which could theoretically allow humans to be far less reliant on animals for meat, has inspired everyone from environmentalists to entrepreneurs to artists like van Mensvoort to think about how we could produce meat differently in the future.

van Mensvoort’s first foray into in-vitro meat art was The In Vitro Cookbook, a 2014 collection of 45 hypothetical recipes, many of which were reproduced for the Bistro.

But there were a few things he felt were missing from the cookbook. One was the voices of chefs who might ostensibly cook with in vitro meat someday. The other was a sense of interactivity. Though readers could flip through recipes, the virtual bistro forces them to actually choose which one they’d like to eat. So he included both in the Bistro site.

Read more @ npr