Not some too distant dystopia: due to climate change, growing cattle became impossible. Lab meat, once seen as only a curiosity, sees rapid and explosive growth, as people struggle to maintain a nutritious diet. In a fierce competitive market, many labs compete on price by sacrificing quality, often by replacing protein with recycled plastic and clay. Periodically, news mentions creeps and billionaires who raise cows in illegal farmfields
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.
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.
Honestly as sad as this sounds... I think long term when lab produced meat becomes more affordable than mass-produced meat that will be the start of the time of people moving away from killing animals for nutrition in horrendous conditions bit by bit. If this perseveres some countries might even start banning the worse forms of how animals are kept
the alternative is harvesting bugs as protein/fat source instead, which is more efficient and doesnt require too much space or resources.
What about this sounds sad?
That people aren't willing to even question how animal suffering has been normalized to the extent it has. I'm not fully vegetarian or vegan even if I'm trying to reduce meat consumption. But I've had this conversation with people and some don't even want to discuss this while eating arguing it ruins their appetite. I think its a great thing that Lab-grown meat could end the suffering of animals in many ways in the future. And people will look back and ask how we could ever do something so awful to animals.
What I think is sad is that for the short foreseeable future animal suffering will still be treated as normality and nothing will change until there is no reason or way it will inconvenience humans in any way to shift away. I find that morally appalling to some regard
I think A LOT of people are completely unaware.
There’s an entire subset of people who essentially create their own reality and anything that contradicts it is immediately rejected, completely at a subconscious level, so the idea of questioning doesn’t even cross their minds.
There’s an entire subset of people who essentially create their own reality and anything that contradicts it is immediately rejected, completely at a subconscious level, so the idea of questioning doesn’t even cross their minds.
These people are all over lemmy!
It's not because they want to change, but because droughts, diseases, cost of fertilizer and the like will force them to look for other cheaper ways to produce meat or they'll have to go vegan.
The cyberpunk name is scop: single celled organing protein. Real meat is there only for the rich.
For now, lab grown meat is super expensive, and I honestly can't see a way it will ever catch up to faciry farmed animals. Factory farmed animal meat is very close to optimal in terms of cost efficiency.
And massive subsidies, don't forget those
Honestly aside from the nutrients the infrastructure around them is crazy. For now lab-grown meat still is very expensive but I think if optimized and produced at mass scale the cost could definitely go below what meat from animal facotries costs
unfortunately I feel this is going to be like cell phones. Like I super want it but its likely going to be done in some trumped up manner that makes it undesirable.
If only there was some sort of Impossible plant-based solution that went Beyond expectations in terms of taste and lower resource use than meat...
I don't think they go beyone expecations (yes I know the names of the prodcuts) but I will say this. Both white castle and burger king had the options at the same price at times and in those cases the plant based on option was as good or better than the meat option.
Not to be rude, but imho that particular bar isn’t very high.
I’m not vegan because I’m not super strict but I’m a very plant based person and sorry but most Beyond products are gross with a gross texture and taste, a few of the products are ok. Most people I know who live like I do don’t really eat many meat substitutes. I treat meat like a rare treat and would always choose to rarely eat meat (no red meat for me ever though) than to eat Beyond products on a more regular basis.
Yeah, I'm not fully vegan either because it is hard to go 100% in our society and I grew up in a very meat heavy household, takes time to change. I tend to stick more with Impossible for the plant based meat alternatives, especially the ground beef substitute. I find finishing it in the air fryer/convection oven improves the texture a lot. But chickpeas have become a larger part of my diet, they're pretty versatile.
industrialized farming is killing the planet just as much as industrialized meat.
about 80% of agricultural land globally is used for raising live stock or growing food to feed livestock, but animal-based products provide less than 20% of calories consumed by humans. Meat is the main cause of industrial farming
That infographic doesn't make the distinction between arable land and pastoral land. I.e. there are areas we can't grow crops but can feed ruminates. That breakdown is like 30/70 from the agricultural section of the infographic. FAO Source
Meaning even if every cow was dead, the crop number doesn't increase
your argument is disingenuous.
you're blurring the lines between livestock and crop farming when I made it perfectly clear they are independent of each other.
You saying they're independent doesn't make them independent.
Yes! Support your local regenerative farmer! Directly if you can.
It’s really really not, even from a resources perspective.
so the millions of gallons of water used to grow the plants, the millions of tons of fertilizer washed away in that water, the millions of acres of forest land cut down to grow the crops don't matter.
huh, learn something new every day. industrialized crops are good for the planet!
And who are the millions of acres of crops used for? To feed livestock and then get a small fraction of the calories out of it