Henk Haagsman has a rather unusual title: He's a professor of meat science at Utrecht University. He and his Dutch colleagues are trying to grow pork from pig stem cells.

Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale.

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"Cultured meat isn't natural, but neither is yogurt," says Matheny. "And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn't natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?"

Given that the public will accept case-ready "modified atmosphere" meat, why not?

Of course, there's a hitch: In order to simulate the taste of muscle tissue that actually get used, even if only to shift about inside the confines of a slaughterhouse pen, lab meat will need to be exercised.

Perhaps some enterprising engineer will find a way to combine gyms and labs so that the scaffolds used to build sheets of meat can double as resistance training devices to build human muscle. Pulled pork, anyone?