Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
I find it very promising. As much as I love meat, its pretty undeniable that raising livestock is super inefficient. It takes so much food to raise livestock that, iirc, more farmland in the US is dedicated to growing food for our food than to growing food for us. Lab grown meat doesn’t completely solve this - there are still lost calories in the process to my knowledge - but its way more efficnient. Plus less land usage, less fossil fuel emissions, overall it would be more sustainable.
I see 2 big problems facing it right now:
The first is scale, which is the more significant. We’d need to figure out how to grow meat on a truly massive scale. Definitely doable though, just needs more research.
The second is “realism” or how close it seems to natural meat. Lab grown meat has the advantage over like plant based stuff because it is actually meat. However, ifnits too perfect or uniform, or maybe doesnr have enough fat or variety, it might be seen as unnatural by many (even just subconsciously) and push them away from it.
But yeah, could be awesome.
Many of the claims of improved efficiency over natural meat are based on projections and rely on technology that doesn’t exist yet, or they just ignore things like heating (most of the calories mammals eat go to keeping them warm, but incubators for lab meat need heating electrically, so if you leave out the electricity cost, it gives lab meat an unfair advantage.
It might be more efficient eventually - there’s more wiggle room to change things with a machine, but a cow is a cow - but it isn’t yet.