1. Optimising for the consumer means that we will be able to engineer meat to our preferred and individual tastes. Gamey or fatty, dry or falling off the bone etc.
2. Optimising for the producer means that we will get the slurry what was served as a meal in the movie Brazil.
The free-market optimist in me would like to see 1, but the realist in me knows that once corporations monopolise the fake-meat industry and eventually water it down to slurry, we'll get Brazil... and we'll be convinced this is how meat should taste.
Don't mess with food. We know what works, we've almost always made it worse: less nutritious (rolled oats instead of steel cut), less tasty (tomatoes, chicken), more vulnerable to die-out (bananas), or worse. Now you get Bill Gates and Monsanto advocating GMO / lab-grown foods for the masses. The market plan for the long-term on this is terrifying though.
Just... grow real food, eat real food.
The earth currently can produce enough food for everyone. The reason people go hungry in 2023 is because food rots on docks from government mismanagement, or goes into Dear Leader's kitchen and not those of his people, or a million other reasons that all boil down to selfishness, arrogance, or advanced forms of these same vices.
Apologies for the rant.
The solution is to eat more real food, which includes a higher proportion of vegetables and a much lower proportion of meat. But a lot of people are resistant to that, for a variety of reasons. If lab-grown meat can at least reduce the animal cruelty, it's an optimization I'd prefer.
obviously not, as in a everyday definition of cost, sticker price today. but the externalities, as in a formal definition of cost, are so much, and important enough to enough commercial stakeholders that yes, 100% makes sense to try to do this and hit under the actual cost, which has diverged from the short-term cost