This is very interesting from a society/technology perspective. I support your efforts! I do have one or two fundamental questions about this industry/space, not necessarily related to this company, but this might be a good place to ask.
I am a vegan of about 10 years now, and as (potentially) a constituent of the addressable market, here's why I'm not going to buy lab-grown "meat": my primary motivations for dietary veganism are to do with non-renewable resource consumption: potable water, land use, oil/energy, emissions, etc. Traditional industrial meat consumption uses around 10x land/energy/ghg emissions as plant crops per calorie, and about 100x the water (or more). It's not clear to me how the lab-grown meat addresses these resource consumption considerations.
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> Cultivating meat is similar to brewing beer
As a dietary vegan I don't know the first thing about meat, but I do know a little about home-brewing. In the case of home-brewing wine or beer, at least for me, it's about ~5x volume in water consumption (~5L of water makes 1L wine), including cleaning, mixing, etc. This is on a tiny scale; I'm sure if water consumption was optimized for you could do even less. Is cultivating lab meat closer in water use to brewing beer, or traditional meat farming? I'm also curious about the energy input; how many calories of energy in -> calories out?
If there are order-of-magnitude gains to be made in non-renewable resource consumption, I can get behind this even if I personally find it a little gross (sorry). At a small scale, I don't doubt the resource consumption is non-optimal, but how much can be gained by scale/optimization?
I think of lab-grown meat as harm reduction. It will almost certainly be more resource-intensive than a vegan diet, but less so than raising an entire animal for the fraction that becomes edible.
It will also produce less waste, or at least better-controlled waste, than raising an entire animal. But again, more than a purely plant-based diet.
I can't give you numbers, but really, I can't see any reason for you to switch away from a vegan diet if you're satisfied with it. However, a lot of other people will switch from an animal-based diet to one that is somewhat more responsible and causes considerably less pain and suffering.
All meat eaters live with a certain cognitive dissonance on that, which most simply ignore because they consider plant-based diets insufficient. And as a vegan you know that a healthy plant-based diet isn't always easy -- though made a little easier recently by some highly processed products that aren't really all that much better for health or the environment.
I am a vegan of about 10 years now, and as (potentially) a constituent of the addressable market, here's why I'm not going to buy lab-grown "meat": my primary motivations for dietary veganism are to do with non-renewable resource consumption: potable water, land use, oil/energy, emissions, etc. Traditional industrial meat consumption uses around 10x land/energy/ghg emissions as plant crops per calorie, and about 100x the water (or more). It's not clear to me how the lab-grown meat addresses these resource consumption considerations.
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> Cultivating meat is similar to brewing beer
As a dietary vegan I don't know the first thing about meat, but I do know a little about home-brewing. In the case of home-brewing wine or beer, at least for me, it's about ~5x volume in water consumption (~5L of water makes 1L wine), including cleaning, mixing, etc. This is on a tiny scale; I'm sure if water consumption was optimized for you could do even less. Is cultivating lab meat closer in water use to brewing beer, or traditional meat farming? I'm also curious about the energy input; how many calories of energy in -> calories out?
If there are order-of-magnitude gains to be made in non-renewable resource consumption, I can get behind this even if I personally find it a little gross (sorry). At a small scale, I don't doubt the resource consumption is non-optimal, but how much can be gained by scale/optimization?