Ethical considerations won't take this far. Need it to become cheaper than real meat the day that happens it will take off on its own.
Meat or cattle raising plays a big role in the worlds methane production decreasing that would be huge achievement as with more people getting out of poverty every year meat production and consumption is increasing.
I could see another angle in the meantime, which is exotic lab grown meats. I'd be interested in trying bald eagle meat or polar bear or any number of animal meats where it's either illegal or impractical to culture full animals.
Presumably you can also make meats that scale disproportionately with the size of the animal, like sparrow burger or lobster steak.
I see another advantage: it may be safe to do things with lab-grown meat that aren't safe with farm-grown. Tuna without overfishing concerns. Swordfish without the mercury. Chicken that can be served medium rare. Or ground beef for that matter.
On top of that, this approach to meat offers extreme customizability. Imitating what comes out of a cow in terms of fat, protein, flavor, is where they've got to start. And the first cars had fake horse heads. Eventually they can optimize for health or taste in a way nature can't. Fois gras times ten.
If this approach becomes truly economical, I would expect it to destroy traditional meat the way cars destroyed horse-drawn carriages: through sheer superiority of performance options.
It's actually a fun question to ask people, whether they would eat a synthetic meat that was designed to taste like human meat. You will perhaps understandably get a lot of weird looks and squirms.
I'm not sure if you can call it "designed to taste like human meat" when it's actually human meat that just wasn't produced in a human, though that's another interesting breakdown.
Ethical considerations have all but removed cage eggs from supermarkets where I live, despite them now being around a third the price of free range eggs. If an issue gets enough visibility and there's a halfway viable alternative, don't discount slacktivism and squick factor as a significant economic force.
Solar was the ethical choice but it didn't really take off till it reached parity with other sources of electricity production.
Electricity cars are the more ethical choice and last few years people are paying more for it but it will only take off when it comes into parity with gasoline cars.
Solar panels and electric cars are a large up front cost for a very long range, abstract benefit. Buying more ethical groceries is a small up-front cost for an immediate warm-fuzzy.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, most people are tragics for sacrificing the long term to boost the short term - witness the ubiquity of credit card debt.
I'd guess vat-grown beef would fall more into the free-range egg scenario than the solar-panel scenario (although probably with less emotional baggage since beef cattle are generally pictured as happy cows eating grass in a field, whereas cage hens are pitiful to behold.)
you claim this but personally I am a big meat eater but I find the factory farming system disturbing. I would definitely only buy lab meat if it was available for even double the price of animal meat.
You are rich enough to pay more for healthy food. You probably come in the 1% of the richest people in the world this comment is for the other 7 billion people that cant afford to pay more for food.
