Cultivated meat, precision fermentation, and GMO agriculture are expanding globally as regulators, researchers, and farming industries debate long-term impacts on health, food security, and traditional agriculture.
Cultivated meat, precision fermentation, and GMO agriculture are expanding globally as regulators, researchers, and farming industries debate long-term impacts on health, food security, and traditional agriculture.
Safe: yes, the process is safe and can be guarded just as with any processed food.
Energy efficient: it needs to scale up in a smart way to become more energy efficient. Right now production is small scale and therefore energy consuming. Investment is needed.
Taste: it’s actually really hard to taste just as good as normal meat, as meat is not only meat but also fat, tissue and blood. For simple meat it can work well, but it isn’t an alternative to a juicy steak. That doesn’t mean that it is without purpose. There’s a growing group of vegetarians/flexitarians and people that are generally fed up with the way humankind mistreats animals on a mass scale. For them it doesn’t have to be a 1:1 replacement.
Lab grown meat doesn’t have to compete with real meat, it has to compete with the meat alternatives.
Absolutely.
And people are going to eat animals one way or another because it’s so deeply ingrained in their personality and identity that they’ll never shake it, and they’ll pass it on to their kids.
But for the rest of us that enjoy meat, but hate the death and cruelty associated, I’d happily jump on the bandwagon if there was a healthy, death-free, cruelty-free chunk of chicken or beef muscle tissue. It’s all about perspective.
Depends on the goals. If you want people to stop eating real meat and switch to lab-grown, then it does need to be on or around the same level as real meat.
One thing I’d push back on is the idea that meat has one single flavor. It’s entirely possible that we’ll be able to replicate many different types of sausages and meatballs and ground meats, things like imitation crab or meatloaf or chicken nuggets, while still struggling to mimic whole muscle cuts. Or it may be easy to mimic certain types of flavors like meat-based soups and sauces, or poached/braised meats, while not quite getting there on grilled or roasted meats.
Meanwhile, I can also see a world where lab-grown meat is cost competitive with more expensive meats, like beef or lamb or lobster, while not being able to compete with cheaper meats like chicken.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing substitution. Sometimes imperfect substitutes can partially replace something and reduce overall demand while the original item still remains available in smaller volumes.