Today, The Times did a bang-up job of reporting on the ‘in vitro’ meat contest, in which PETA US are offering $1 million to the first scientist to come up with a marketable lab-grown meat product. The paper version even lovingly printed the ‘Newkirk Nuggets’ box image that you can see below, harking back to a little prank we played on April 1st. Read more about why ‘in vitro’ is the future at Times Online.

I’m not sure what you’re all going to think about this, but it should create some debate… Ok, PETA US is offering $1 million (over £500,000) to the first person to come up with a method of producing commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat. I can see a rift already beginning to develop here – you have your hardcore vegans on one side trying to stop themselves throwing up at the thought of eating meat again, and then your meat-eaters who wish there was a kinder way to eat animals. My thoughts? Well, if there’s a way of stopping the slaughter of billions and billions of animals every year for their flesh and this is the way to do it…

To qualify for the prize, the quantity of meat produced by the scientist must be sufficient to market in at least ten US states at a price that is competitive with chicken prices. Switching to lab-grown meat would be a boon to the environment, as a recent UN study concluded that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined and is a top contributor to land degradation and water pollution. In vitro meat, or a vegetarian diet, would help solve these worldwide problems.

In the Guardian today, Ed Pilkington talked about cloned meat but this really is not going to help either the environment, the starving poor or, of course, animals destined for the slaughterhouse. Cloned meat is no different from ‘regular’ meat, so that plan can be dropped right away.

Oh, and this isn’t an April Fools prank – I promise. If you’re a scientist and think you have the answer, go ahead and enter the contest. There’s $1 million in it for you. So, would you eat in vitro meat?

As some of you may have figured out by now, sadly Newkirk Nuggets will not be hitting our shops any time soon as it was in fact an April Fools prank. Pretty convincing stuff though, eh? Sounds like other blogs were impressed anyway, but how many people took the bait? Some of you commented on how you might give it a try, and others were less enthusiastic about the ‘cannibalistic’ nature of the human(e) meat. This may have been a joke, but I bet it’s something that’s not too far off in the future. Hey, whatever saves the billions of animals dying for the world’s dinner-plates, right?

I have some exciting and astonishing news: PETA US have developed the world’s first human ‘in vitro’ meat, produced from a biopsy of Ingrid Newkirk, our managing director. Dubbed as a “human(e)” alternative to eating the flesh of animals, who are slaughtered in their millions every day, the first batch of Newkirk Nuggets will go on display and be available be taste tested at our London office by an invitation-only panel of bioscientists and commercial meat-industry representatives.

The breakthrough has been in the making for 11 years in laboratories spread across three countries, but finally it’s here and we are all on tenterhooks waiting to see the meat for the first time. The aim has been to grow animal tissue with the taste, texture and, most difficult of all, the “skin depth” or muscle mass of fish and chicken. According to the experts: “The tissue was taken from Ingrid’s upper arm and cultured in a “nutrient soup” of mushrooms, human collagen and soy broth to form myoblasts. The myoblasts reproduce rapidly to form ¾-inch-thick sheets of what PETA calls “100 per cent victimless meat.”

Ingrid says: “If you know something is dirty, bad for your body and cruel, but you still do it, you can only be addicted. Victimless meat is none of those things, and it satisfies meat cravings in the only ethical way that I know of, other than eating road kill. They say, ‘Everything tastes like chicken’ – and now, so do I.”

So, the question is –will meat eaters, eat it?