$325,000 Burger: 4 Things To Know About The In Vitro Burger

There's a new burger in town, and it's made in a petri dish and costs a whopping $325,000.

Slated to be unveiled next month in London, Dutch scientist Mark Post's in vitro burger tastes "reasonably good." Post created the burger, which is a little bit larger than a McDonald's Quarter Pounder, using funding from the Dutch government with the hopes to create meat that is better for the environment and requires less work than raising livestock.

Will people be up for eating the in vitro burger? The jury is still out on that part, but many are inclined to believe otherwise.

"That would be a really hard sell in this country; especially where people are schooled and educated about where their meat is coming from," Linda Smith, general manager of the Philadelphia-based meat purveyor Esposito's Meats, said to Fox News.com.

Here are four things to know about the in vitro burger:

1. Dr. Post's meat is produced with fetal calf serum, which helps grow the cells. The burger is made of tiny pieces of beef muscle tissue that has been growing in a lab.

2. His test burger cost 250,000 euros, or $325,000 USD. The money was donated by a private donor who will be the first to test this burger. If mass produced, a more cost efficient method has to be found.

3. The reported benefits of cultured meat is that it is more efficient, is more environmentally friendly, and can be made to be healthier than current burger meat. In fact, a 2011 study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that in vitro meat could reduce water, land and energy use, while simultaneously reduce emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases.

4. There's still a lot of work ahead of us before in vitro meat can come to the mainstream market.

"This is still an early-stage technology," said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales, to The New York Times. "There's still a huge number of things they need to learn."