Researchers can now dish up meat grown in a laboratory dish rather than on the hoof.

While it may be years before you savor laboratory-raised meat from your backyard barbeque, the researchers say, the technology exists to produce processed meats such as burgers and sausages, starting with cells taken from cow, chicken, pig, fish or other animal.

Growing meat without the animal would not only reduce the need for the animals - which often are kept in less than ideal conditions - meat production is also blamed for a variety of environmental ills. Cultured meat could also be tailored to be healthier than farm-raised meat, while satisfying the increasing demand for protein by the world's growing population, proponents say.

Brian Ford, a British biologist and the author of The Future of Food, said the widespread acceptance of meat substitutes such as ``quorn,'' a cultured fungus, ``shows that the time for cultured tissue is near.''

Techniques for engineering muscle cells and other tissues were first developed for medical use, and now a small handful of researchers are looking into growing edible muscle cells, said Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student who co-authored a paper on in-vitro meat techniques.

Industrializing the process could involve growing muscle cells on large sheets or beads suspended in a growth medium.

Once the cells have grown enough, they could be scraped off and packaged. If edible sheets or beads are used, all of it could be eaten.

``The technology is there to produce something like a processed meat,'' Matheny said. ``You could produce a heavily processed chicken meat just like, perhaps, a nugget,'' Matheny said. But ``the technology to produce something like a steak or chicken breast is still quite a ways off. There's a lot of technological challenge to producing something that has a structure to it.''

Growing a steak, for example, requires more than just muscle cells. Blood vessels, fat and connective tissue would also have to be grown. If too many muscle cells grow on top of each other, for example, the cells on the inside of the muscle mass will no longer be exposed to the nutrients in the growth medium and will die.

The director of the Shared Tissue Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, envisions a countertop device like a bread machine could one day produce sausage or hamburger. Instead of flour, water and yeast, it would need muscle stem cells, a growth medium, and an edible structure for the cells to grow on.

Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson said fish muscle cells cultured at his laboratory for NASA passed a ``sniff panel,'' and he believes seafood might be the first to be laboratory cultured.

``We actually did cook the fish meat we grew,'' Benjaminson said.

But panel members did not eat the cultured meat, he added.

While growing meat in a dish is currently too expensive for anything but space travel, Benjaminson says, fish is another story. ``With a little bit of money and time we could produce probably something that resembles a fish fillet,'' he said. ``There's no reason to think it would be just as flaky as any other fish filet.'' Crab, shrimp or other shellfish also could be cultured, he said.

While Benjaminson's research required fish to be killed to get the muscle cells needed to start the process, eventually the process could be refined to allow the use of a cultured cell line or a biopsy so the donor fish could live.

While many growth mediums are animal-based, Benjaminson said he has also developed a mushroom-based growth medium. Researchers at South Dakota State University have also developed an animal-free medium.

If a product is brought to market, Matheny admits he is not sure how consumers would react.

``In some ways this is a product of biotechnology in the same way bread and wine and cheese are products of biotechnology,'' Matheny said. ``You take something that's found in nature and reproduce it in a controlled environment.'' ASSOCIATED PRESS