You could soon be eating meat grown in a lab.

Scientists have made great steps forward in learning how to achieve a long-time dream of growing pieces of meat in a lab.

This lab-grown, or cultured, meat offers several advantages over meat that comes directly from animals, though it's not without its drawbacks.

In the plainest terms, lab-grown meat is real meat that's created in a lab by culturing animal tissue to grow the same way it would when an animal was growing up. The meat produced is biologically and chemically identical to the original sample, as long as the right nutrients were provided during the growth process.

The original sample is fed using a growth medium containing the necessary nutrients, such as vitamins, sugar, and proteins.

It's then placed into a machine called a bioreactor.

Theoretically, cultured meat can be made healthier than ordinary meat because its exact nutritional content can be carefully controlled during the growth process. Part of the goal for lab-grown meat is to produce large amounts of meat without large-scale animal farming, which is bad for the environment.

Another benefit might be that people who are vegetarian because of animal welfare concerns would be more willing to eat cultured meat.

The process does not always require the death of the animal, and development is still ongoing on less violent ways to get and maintain tissue samples. One difficulty to overcome for large parts of the world is the religious aspect.

Cultured meat was not foreseen by the writers of Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist dietary laws, and it is a challenge to determine whether the faithful of these religions can eat it.

It may be that cultured meat is never universally accepted.

However, it seems likely that it will continue to advance in popularity.