It might sound a little crazy, but the first artificial burger made in a Dutch lab will be introduced and eaten at a press conference in London on Monday.

The artificial burger was developed by Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He has been researching for alternative solutions to raising livestock for meat.

Producing meat from animals was not a good idea, he said. "Later today we are going to present the world's first hamburger made in a lab from cells. We are doing that because livestock production is not good for the environment, it is not going to meet demand for the world and it is not good for animals," BBC News quoted Professor Post as saying.

The lab burger project is a first of its kind experiment and is funded by £215,000, where cow muscle cells are manipulated to form several layers of artificial meat, which is then packed together to make a burger patty.

There is an increasing demand for meat, particularly beef, as more countries are developing a taste for fast food, sometimes referred to as "Western food." Breaking away from traditional cuisines and adopting more modern cooking has is another reason for the skyrocketing demand for meat.

While researchers push for a move towards lab grown meat as an alternative to raising farm animals, critics say that curtailing consumption is a more practical solution than eating genetically engineered laboratory meat.

There is also something to be said about unequal distribution of food, as more and more people go to bed hungry and others indulge in prime cut steaks.

This nutrition gap needs to be fixed in order to achieve appropriate levels of nutrition in the world population.

Oxford University's chief of the Food Policy Research Network, Professor Tara Garnett says that technological solutions might not be the right answer for providing adequate levels of protein, "We have a situation where 1.4 billion people in the world are overweight and obese, and at the same time one billion people worldwide go to bed hungry," she said.

She was quoted as saying, "That's just weird and unacceptable. The solutions don't just lie with producing more food but changing the systems of supply and access and affordability so not just more food but better food gets to the people who need it," reports Louisvillehotbytes.com.