Despite the very large recent decreases in the price of lab-grown meat (I have just seen an announce about a company that claims that they "can now produce 100 percent cultivated chicken (85 percent muscle and 15 percent fat) at $11.79 per pound on a large scale"), it is not yet proven that lab-grown meat can be produced at a lower price and by consuming less resources than traditional meat.
On the other hand, it is pretty certain that it is possible to produce high-quality animal proteins, like whey protein or egg white protein, in a sustainable way and at a lower cost, by cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which can be fed with cheap carbohydrates from cereals and with minerals, unlike the animal cells which require a very complex food.
The company that has achieved the low price quoted above has done this by replacing the animal food that was given previously by everybody to the cultivated cells (e.g. serum and albumin) with some mixture of substances extracted from various vegetables.
It is unlikely that it will be ever possible for the food given to cell cultures to be cheaper than the food given to real chicken. The only chance for lab-grown meat to become cheaper than real chicken meat is given by the fact that only the edible part of a chicken is grown, i.e. the equivalent of a breast or thigh, instead of growing the entire chicken body with many parts that have a low value.
While fungal cultures would be much more efficient than any lab-grown meat, they could provide only protein powder, which could enrich in proteins any vegetable food, but from which it would not be easy to make something resembling a steak.
If it's grown in a lab and tastes like meat, it's lab-grown meat. It doesn't matter if it uses animal cells.
You may not even be able to call it "meat", it still makes no difference. Some people will be extremely offended by the difference, but if you don't force anything most people are always ok with anything that tastes good.
Lab grown meat is an economical dead end. Way too many large scale meat eaters in the US think it's fucking identity politics somehow, and will willingly pay more for "real" meat even if lab grown meat could magically become cheaper, which it has shown no ability to so far.
The people like me, willing to eat lab grown meat, already are willing to pay more for more carefully grown meat and just eat less meat in general. We are the minority.
The fake meat industry is currently failing. Probably because their products were hyper processed trash that was usually less palatable than a comparable meat replacement, not healthier in general, and somehow STILL more expensive than real meat.
> and will willingly pay more for "real" meat even if lab grown meat could magically become cheaper,
I agree with you and vouch that I am one such person. I am already in the middle of changing my lifestyle so that in some worst case scenarios I could raise my own hogs and cattle and slaughter them myself. Will be teaching my children and grandchildren to do this.
"Lab grown meat" disgusts me, and though it's hard to say exactly how I'd behave were my ribs visible, right now I think I'd prefer to starve than eat it. Those who say they would eat it seem bizarre to me, and when I'm generous I just assume they haven't given it much thought.
I do not feel as if this is tied to identity politics, I assume that there must be people like me both on the left and right, but also that there are people who would be enthusiastic about it on both sides as well. If I'm mistaken in that regard, then I must say that I have zero insight as to why that would be the case.
Could you pinpoint what exactly is not sustainable about eating meet though? In the UK (where I live) we eat meet produced mostly within the country, the livestock here are generally mostly fed a grass diet. Yes we should eat meet in moderation like anything, yes chopping down rainforests and building feeding lots is obvs horrific. But otherwise, the cattle eat the grass, they turn that into meet and farts, which fairly quickly come full circle back into the ground. No fossil fuels here. Hard to think of something more sustainable to me.
The UK climate is, currently, very good at growing grass. You can continuously graze cattle all year round in most of the country, as long as you rotate them between fields every few days. If you have enough space, by the time they get back round, the grass is back. The cow shit fertilizes the grass, and silage made on the farm does a lot of the winter feed top up.
As long as the density isn't too high, it can be pretty low input.
At the present time, the Haber-Bosch process sustains well over half of the world's animal population. This is what's not sustainable on a global basis, even if one country can do it.
I saw corn fields when I visited England recently. Don't know the extent.
They emit methane as a by product of eating the grass, it's like chucking the grass up in the air and having to wait approx 20 years for it to fully come back down to be eaten again, it's still circular, it's still fully sustainable. Digging up fossil oils from deep ground and shuving it into the atmosphere and never ever putting it back deep into the ground is the elephant in the room here.
Lab-grown meat is probably the quickest route forward that maintains normalcy whilst solving the sustainability issues.