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.
Other people have already mentioned how it feels like in your mouth, but I’m going to address a different angle: Ethics and environmental impact.
Modern industrial meat production is incredibly cruel. If you wanted to do the same thing in a more ethical way, the final product would end up being much more expensive, even if you had the economies of scale working in your favor. Meat alternatives would solve that issue.
Producing meat results in a lot of CO2 emissions, so a plant based alternative should be more environmentally friendly. Don’t know about lab meat though. Keeping everything sterile is not cheap or easy, so I guess the LCA of the resulting product should be very interesting to read.
For a price.
Can we all afford lab grown meat? The people making it are all trying to maximize profit by giving the least while charging the most. Keep in mind, that money has to come from somewhere.
As with any new business being built on “ethics,” they should be willing to put their money where their mouths are. If they care so much about stopping animal abuse, then they should be charging the lowest price they can tolerate, not the highest price for their customers.
I don’t expect most fake-meat companies to do this because they care more about maximizing profit than stopping animal abuse.
Fair enough. No doubt there’s some greed in it as well, but the immature production technology and small scale can easily explain most of the astronomical price. If they ever make it to large scale production, optimize every step along the way, you should be able to see the economies of scale reducing the price. Obviously, we’re nowhere near there just yet.
Also, the technology itself will always set a certain floor to the price nobody can change until you change the underlying production technology. For example, electricity, equipment, labor and materials will always cost something, but an optimized process will need less of each.