First hamburger made from lab-grown meat to be served at press conference

Over the weekend, scientists at Dr Mark Post's laboratory in Maastricht University made their final preparations for an event they hope will change the way we see food. On Monday, Dr Post will cook the world's most expensive hamburger, made from meat grown in Petri dishes in his lab.

Starting with stem cells extracted from a biopsy of a cow, Post's team grew 20,000 muscle fibres over the course of three months. Each tiny, hoop-like fibre grew in an individual culture well, suspended in a gel-like growth medium.

When they were ready, the fibres were removed individually by hand, cut open and straightened out. All the fibres were pressed together to form the hamburger – biologically identical to beef but grown in a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow. The total cost so far of the project has been €250,000.

In London on Monday afternoon Post plans to eat the hamburger in front of reporters and anyone else in the world who wants to take a look, via a livestream of the event on the internet. His aim is simple: to show the world that growing real, edible meat in laboratories is no longer a fantasy and that this could be a potential solution to the worsening impact of meat production on our environment.

"Cows are very inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein," Post told the Guardian. "So we need to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food that way. [With cultured meat] we can make it more efficient because we have all the variables under control. We don't need to kill the cow and it doesn't [produce] any methane."

The human appetite for meat means that 30% of the Earth's useable surface is covered by pasture land for animals, compared with just 4% of the surface used directly to feed humans. The total biomass of our livestock is almost double that of the people on the planet and accounts for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions and 40% of methane emissions – a much more potent greenhouse gas.

By 2060, human population is predicted to have risen to 9.5 billion and, with a rising demand for meat from rapidly developing populations in, for example, China and India, the market in meat is expected to double by the middle of the century. If the amount of meat we produce doubles, livestock could be responsible for half as much climate impact as all the world's cars, lorries and airplanes. In 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, urged people to have one meat-free day a week to help curb the rate of global climate change.

Dr Post said that his cultured beef was still undergoing a lifecycle analysis to work out its overall environmental impacts, but early indications were that his lab meat reduced the need for land and water by 90% and overall energy use was cut by 70%.

Though Post's work is at its earliest stages – there are many hurdles before he can scale up the process for large-scale manufacture – he has high hopes for his product. "Twenty years from now if you have a choice in the supermarket between two products that are identical and they taste and feel the same and have the same price – and one is made in an environmentally friendly way with much less resources and provides food security for the population and doesn't have any animal welfare connotations to it – the choice will be relatively easy," he said. "People will start to prefer this type of product and then it will gradually transform meat production."

The hamburger he has made so far is relatively simple, just pure protein. It might be good enough as a proof of concept but it is far from being a seamless replacement for meat. For a start, it has no fat or blood, which is where much of the distinctive flavour of meat comes from.

Next on the agenda, therefore, for Post's team is to add lab-grown fat cells to the protein, perhaps even bone cells for those who want a fully lab-cultured T-bone steak. "The technology now is confined to small pieces because you have to get oxygen and nutrients into the tissue to keep it alive," he said. "For larger pieces we need to develop different technologies that have been described in the medical field but have not been applied to meat production yet." That means building something a bit like blood vessels into the meat, which could provide fluid, oxygen and nutrients to the centre of the tissue as it grows.

Post acknowledges that it will be essential to produce a product that looks and tastes exactly the same as real meat. And if they find there is a market for cultured beef, the same methods could be used to grow other proteins such as chicken, lamb, fish or pork in the lab.

The research (and the carefully arranged public tasting) has been funded by a backer who has chosen to remain anonymous until the press conference, to avoid overshadowing the hamburger itself. Critics might argue that holding a public event to showcase the work instead of presenting results in a peer-reviewed journal could alienate scientific colleagues, who might be sceptical about the work.

Dr Post's response is that most of the methods he is using – involving engineering and growing large numbers of cow stem cells – have already been published in journals. His hamburger, he said, was more a result of brute force in growing more material than anyone else has so far. "From the technological point of view there are very few secrets here," he said.

Monday's event is "a big responsibility", he said. "This is going to make or break the future of cultured beef. This is a good cause to fight for and if in any way this type of approach through the media affects that in a negative way then I would feel bad."

He added: "I'm pretty confident that the product, as we present it on Monday, that people will like it and will say 'this is the way we should go, this is a good direction.'"