"Fifty years hence ... we shall escape the absurdity
of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing,
by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."
When Winston Churchill wrote those words in 1932, in vitro
meat was science fiction. Now a team of Dutch scientists is
closing in on culturing stem cells from pigs and growing muscle
in a petri dish. The in vitro meat project is the brainchild
of Willem van Eelen, a Dutch businessman who nearly starved
to death in a Japanese prison camp and became convinced that
artificial meat would solve world hunger.