If we can replace the taste, appearance, and texture of a medium-rare rib eye with lab grown meat at a substantially cheaper price, we will.
I do not eat cheeseburgers to feel manly or dominant. I eat them because they are delicious. If I could have a plant-based or otherwise non-meat burger that tastes as good as the real thing, I’d eat it. Impossible burgers are getting close and I’ve had my fair share of them, but they’re not there yet. They’re near enough that I’m confident we’ll get there soon.
The intersection of 'vegan by all means', 'loves the taste of meat', 'does not care about ultra processed food', 'enough money to go for the expensive option'.
No wonder it did not work.
There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...
Impossible/Beyond barely exists in comparison
>That’s a weird comparaison between one or two brand and "an industry".
In other words, Impossible and Beyond are not the only companies in meat replacement space. They are probably the largest, but comparing them to the whole industry makes no sense.
Their combined market cap seems to be around 600M.
Hit me up with some citations please, mine are below.
https://notice.co/c/impossiblefoods https://robinhood.com/us/en/stocks/BYND/
A black bean patty or similar is a tasty bit of food that works well in a burger form.
I like meat but not every meal I eat needs to have meat in it. Give me tasty (and cheaper) alternatives to meat and I’ll eat them in place of meat sometimes.
These days all I can find in groceries stores is various “plant protein” meat-wannabes.
I do make tempeh from time to time, but the flavor just isn’t quite right for me. It’s good, but not my preferred option.
Fortunately a black bean burger is not hard to make at home.
Define "inferior" I guess? If the goal is "ingest as much usable protein as your body needs" plants can do it at levels beyond whatever you're going for. Is this a cost value analysis situation? Is it about taste/texture/enjoyment?
*Lazy source: https://www.greatveganathletes.com/
why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical.
I also think that replacing 'cheap' meat like ground beef would already be sufficient and would make a huge impact, there is really no need make it difficult for ourselves and try to replace rib-eye.
I'd rather not be testing/tasting experimental lab stuff. And mass production bringing down the price with economies of scale is the real proof that the technology is ready.
i'm no vegan, but if identical lab-grown alternatives are available at near same cost without the hormones, antibiotics, emissions, I'll take it
The test of 'identical' to me is going to be mass production with economies of scale. I surely don't have the equipment to test whether it's identical, nor would I trust the marketing.
I don't see artificial meat being the first exception to this. I'd see 'same price as meat' being an indication of something going wrong here.
I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons I didn't immediately think of.
In Europe they managed to get words like burger, nugget and sausage to only be legally applicable to meat. They'll definitely do the same for words for actual meat.
[1] Relax, I'm joking.
But burger, sausage and nugget are just about the shape. Restricting that only to meat is silly. Veggie burgers have been around for multiple decades. There's absolutely nothing misleading about that.
Also consider the many products that are something-flavoured (often fruit, but also other things) without containing the actual thing, yet clearly marketed with the thing they don't contain. Or fake chocolate. Pizza containing mostly fake cheese. Is that not far more misleading?
Perhaps you're anticipating this:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/sep/4/trump-allows...
There are farmers everywhere who will sell you a cow. There are small butcher shops that will process it.
This is a solution in search of a problem, in my opinion. It will only benefit already massive corporation farms.
I'm all for breaking the stranglehold of those big 4 meatpacking companies, but make it an actual law, not something that won't hold up in court.
Surprisingly enough, they hold most beef processing plants to higher standards than the rest of the industry (they're still buying cheap trimmings, don't get me wrong), because they do so much volume, basic probability tells us that most food poisoning outbreaks would hit them otherwise.
Sure, you could find a farmer that raises cows and butchers them on site, but that's rare, and the easiest way to actually achieve that is to buy a whole or half cow at a time.
Most small farms don't bother with that: they raise it from calf to adult on grazing land, then send it to a feed lot where the miracles of modern science significantly increase the cow's weight before slaughter. Cows that are still producing calves get retained to grow the herd next year.
If you want to pay extra for this, look for "grass-fed, grain-finished" beef. Most unlabeled stuff in the US goes through that funnel though.
So they developed standards and demanded that all their hamburgers be formed, frozen, and packaged by the processor and kept frozen until cooking. It's really the safest way to handle that volume of ground beef through the distribution chain.
Apparently their 1/4 lb burgers now use fresh beef, not frozen. Not sure how that's handled but it sounds more risky.
By which you mean US style grain finished short cycle beef I guess?
The world's bigger than that.
Look how big the industrial cow (bovoid according to international labeling standards) has become. Bow before it until your heart explodes!
By that definition, places like Europe and New Zealand don't produce modern beef.
I really miss the days of $2/lb grass-fed New Zealand ground beef.