Andras and Gabor Forgacs are the father-son team behind Modern Meadow, a company that wants to save the world with synthetic meat.

Len Rizzi/National Cancer Institute

Samples of in-vitro meat, or cultured meat grown in a laboratory, at the University of Maastricht.

Gabor Forgacs thinks he can convince Hindus to eat steak and vegetarians to eat meat.

The University of Missouri bioengineering professor introduced this idea at the October 2011 TEDMED conference in San Diego--an event featuring presentations from the worlds greatest minds in health and medicine. During his presentation, Gabor Forgacs ate a pork chop that some think can change the world.The thin, nearly translucent slab of meat was not cut from a slaughtered pig. Rather, it was created in a petri dish using a 3D printer.

This is not synthetic meat, Gabor said in the presentation. This is real meat because it is made of the same cells that meat is composed [of]. I think that the best word is in vitro meat.

Regardless of its classification, what Gabor ate that day has the potential to help solve several of the worlds most pressing economic and environmental challenges; deforestation, world hunger, fossil fuel dependency, animal cruelty, and climate change all stand to benefit from cultured meat production.

Now, Gabors son Andras Forgacs is trying to turn it into big business. In September 2011, Andras co-founded and became CEO of Modern Meadow, a company that plans to use Gabors bioprinting research to create leather goods and cultured meat for the consumer market.Im not a vegetarian, Andras said. I love beef. But I realize the resource intensity of animal farming ... We have a way of developing biomaterials like leather and meat where we just create the materials we use.

Using traditional methods, producing just one quarter pound hamburger requires 6.7 pounds of feed, 52.8 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land, and 1,036 Btus of fossil fuel energy (enough energy to power a microwave for 18 minutes), according to the December 2011 edition of Journal of Animal Science.

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A Pork Chop to Change the World (Yes, Really)