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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Of course it makes sense. People like to eat meat. Meat is expensive to produce, particularly including externalities like CO2, animal suffering, etc. Making meat less expensive to produce across some or all of those dimensions seems like a no brainer.

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Exactly. And yes, starting with new technologies, but if we try to optimize our existing process for obtaining meat we will likely not get far before hitting a local maximum. So it makes sense to try to make dramatic leaps to other areas of the solution space to see if we can fine a new maximum. It will take a lot of resources until the new technologies are better (by various metrics) than the old ones, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. With the scale of meat consumption the potential payoff for better methods is huge.

In terms of optimising, I can see it going two ways:

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.

Yeeah. Given enough time it's always 2.

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