The world's first test-tube burger will be served in London next week. It is made from meat grown in a laboratory, rather than raised cattle. The burger cost $380,000 to make.

"Current livestock meat production is just not sustainable, from an ecological point view, or in terms of volume," said Mark Post, the head of physiology burger at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Post developed the burger from bovine stem cells.

"We have to come up with alternatives," he said. "If we don't do anything, meat will become a luxury food and be very, very expensive."

According to the Daily Mail, a four-step technique was used to turn stem cells from animal flesh into a burger. 

The stem cells are first stripped from the cow's muscle. They're hatched in a nutrient broth until they multiply which will create a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg. The 3,000 strips of the lab-grown meat are minced along with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat and formed into a burger. 

The cell-grown burger is produced with materials, including fetal calf serum, which is used to grow the cells and will eventually be replaced by materials not originated from animals, the New York Times reported. 

The developers hope it will show how the soaring global demand for protein can be met without the need for vast herds of cattle. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, we will be eating twice as much meat as we do now by 2050.  

PETA spokesmen Ben Williamson said the company supports lab-gown meat if it means fewer animals are eaten. 

In the United States, researchers are working in several test tubes products. In San Francisco, a company is working on test tube products for pet food.