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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

For me, it would have to be mass produced and about an order of magnitude cheaper.

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.

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there's nothing holy about eating real animals (unless you're religious)

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

Identical is the point here.

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.

What does that have to do with the price? If it's mass produced, widely available, thoroughly tested, and the same price as regular meat, why wouldn't you prefer it?

Everything in history that was mass produced was priced more than an order of magnitude lower than the 'original'.

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.

Are you implying that the meat industry as it is currently, producing nearly 400 million tonnes of meat annually, isn't mass production? Why would we assume that lab grown meat, even if it's mass produced, would be much cheaper than that well oiled machine?

Because it wouldn't involve handling live animals, could be significantly more automated, would not need as much real estate, would eliminate wastage of the parts we don't really consume, could be done at larger scales in a more centralized way where energy is cheaper, the stages could be pipelined with processing/packing/etc happening at the same place.

I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons I didn't immediately think of.

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