I am excited to see start-ups tackle new forms of food production. However, I am worried that it is going to be similar to how the diamond industry has been able to defend themselves from manufactured/synthetic diamonds.

You can see the arguments being very similar here with animal cruelty, purity of the food and pathogens, etc. Synthetic diamonds don't have the flaws of regular diamonds, much less expensive, don't have the same toll on humans and our planet. Yet, the diamond industry has positioned them as not real and most people will gladly pay more for the "real deal".

I am optimistic that there is an inevitability to this market, but the first generation of start-ups are going to bear the additional cost of being the educators. It may be decades until the "educator tax" has been paid. From a product perspective this makes for a very unattractive market. The opposite dynamics of network effects. Where the early entrant has significantly higher barriers to entry than later entrants.