this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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I think it'd be awesome if the taste would be good, and it can be done safe and energy efficient. Three big ifs though.
Safe: yes, the process is safe and can be guarded just as with any processed food.
Energy efficient: it needs to scale up to become more energy efficient. Right now production is small scale and therefore energy consuming.
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.
I mean any energy efficiency is probably better than actual animals. Most of the energy and water you feed animals is used to sustain their life until they're killed and will not be there for consumption.
Right now the biggest difficulty is how do you marble muscle that is never used?
Write the marbling into the CAD file.