On Monday, just after lunchtime, Dr Mark Post will make culinary (and scientific) history by cooking a beefburger and eating it. Which sounds mundane except that this burger cost €250,000 to make and has been painstakingly assembled from meat grown in his laboratory at Maastricht University.

Post's burger will be constructed this weekend from tens of thousands of strands of protein grown, in petri dishes, from cattle stem cells. These cultured muscle fibres will be taken out of deep freeze and carefully knitted together to make Monday's culinary milestone.

The event will be the culmination of years of research to demonstrate that meat grown in culture dishes in the lab can one day be a viable alternative to meat from livestock. If it can be made to work, cultured meat holds the potential to feed the world's growing human population without the devastating environmental impacts of farming ever more animals.

Feeding the voracious human appetite for flesh of all kinds means that 30% of the Earth's usable surface is covered by pasture land for animals, compared to just 4% of the surface which is used to directly feed humans. The total biomass of our livestock is almost double that of the people on the planet and accounts for 5% of CO2 emissions and 40% of methane emissions – a much more potent greenhouse gas. By 2060, the human population is predicted to rise to 9.5 billion and, with 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 aeroplanes.

Post, who has chosen not to give any media interviews before the event on Monday, has previously discussed the environmental motivation for making his burger. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 in Vancouver, he said: "Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more. If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward."

Anthropologists have argued that learning how to cook and eat meat was one of the reasons the human brain was able to grow as big as it did. Meat, a dense source of nutrition and calories, powered our ancestors' brains in a way that their competitors could not match and has had a lasting impact on our species' taste for flesh today.

That ancient taste for meat would provide a willing market for cultured products, says the food writer and commentator, Jay Rayner, when the technology can be perfected. "What you'll [eventually] see is a separation. On the one side you'll have your prime cuts – these will be special occasion meats; if you want a steak or a joint or a whole chicken, you'll get those things but less regularly than you do now. But if you want animal protein to make, perhaps, a cheap burger or a lasagne or something like that then you'll go for alternatives, which may be in vitro meat or it may be insect protein."

Traditionally farmed meat is already very expensive, Rayner adds, and it will only get more so. It could be only a matter of time until members of the public would begin to embrace alternatives.

Steve Conisbee, whose family has run the Barracks Farm and bred cattle near Leatherhead for nine generations, says he cannot see his customers running to buy cultured meat. "We've got to look to science for future solutions, I'm not denying that," he said. "I'm just thinking, at the moment, is the time right? Probably not and I can't see the more affluent consumer going for it. Maybe there will always be a novelty value to it but I don't see it becoming a mainstream meat in the next decade."

But as the demand for meat around the world goes up, Conisbee concedes that lab-grown meat "might sit on the plate better than more intensively produced animals".

That lab-grown meat has the potential to reduce the suffering of animals is of interest to many animal welfare groups. The People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals have offered a $1m prize for the first organisation to produce artificial chicken meat.

But some aspects of meat grown from stem cells could nonetheless "leave a bad taste in the mouth" for those who see it as a panacea. "The meat is apparently cultured using a cell culture medium (serum) that is derived from animals," said a spokesperson for the RSPCA. "There are ethical and welfare issues associated with using animal serum to culture cells and animal tests to evaluate the safety of the 'meat' will cause pain, suffering and distress."

Post will face many hurdles in bringing his lab-grown meat to the market, not least scaling up his manufacturing process – cell culturing is not a cheap technology and his burger has taken a team of researchers many years to make. So far his work has been funded by a mystery backer, who will also be unveiled on Monday, but taking the cultured beef further will need considerable further investment.

Any cultured meat for sale to the public would also need to be proven safe. A Food Standards Agency spokesperson said: "Any novel food, or food produced using a novel production process, must undergo a stringent and independent safety assessment before it is placed on the market. Anyone seeking approval of an in vitro meat product would have to provide a dossier of evidence to show that the product is safe, nutritionally equivalent to existing meat products, and will not mislead the consumer. This would be evaluated under the EU regulation for novel foods, prior to a decision on authorisation. There have been no such applications to date."

Then there is the potential public unease associated with the technology. Like any new technology, it would give people pause for thought but, when compared to some modern farming and food processing, Rayner is confident that the unease would pass. "There is actually nothing beautiful about animal husbandry," he said. "In some ways, in vitro meat produced in a clean, pristine laboratory may have less of a yuck factor than what goes on in an abattoir."