The idea of finding ways to make animal food products without the moral issues and environmental impact is pretty interesting.<p>But there’s a much simpler way to avoid the moral issues and environmental impact of eating animals and animal products... eat vegetarian foods. Or simply, make a larger proportion of your diet vegetarian.<p>And don’t waste time trying to simulate animal products (veggie burgers, faux-turkey, etc.) It’ll never measure up in the end and distract from the really good and tasty vegetarian (or mostly vegetarian) stuff.
This seems like a classic case of what a good coder would call "premature optimization."<p>Nutritional science, is far, <i>far</i> from settled. It's not even clear that <i>is</i> such a thing as a baseline, universally-applicable nutritional paradigm. For instance, there could be potentially large deviations based based on genetic and epigenetic factors.
It's amazing there isn't more disruption here:<p>- Everyone has to eat, but it takes a good amount of time to prep, cook, set a table, eat, clear the take and wash dishes<p>- There seems to be broad awareness of what makes a healthy diet, yet lots of difficulty adhering to one<p>- People have different tastes and given the choice will rarely choose the same food as those eating with them<p>Eating out satisfies the variety problem, but not always the time or health one.<p>A meal in a box somewhat helps the time problem (little prep) and maybe the health one, but not the variety.<p>There is no 10x solution yet, but it's not hard to think of one like meals in Star Trek that are custom and ready at the press of a button.
Lab grown meat would be a real game changer I think. I would gladly be as early of an adopter of it as possible - and I very rarely adopt anything early on.
Some crystal balling: A lot of these alt-proteins are going to encounter distribution issues.<p>Why? People aren't going to just go out and say "hey, give me some tofurkey, I watched a PETA documentary last night" and becoming hooked regular alt-protein consumers.<p>Also, given that in many other parts of the world (South America, Africa, India, China, Middle East) people just eat vegetables and don't need to pretend it's meat to enjoy them - lentils, chickpeas, soybeans/tofu, nuts, seeds, etc. - in terms of health, production cost, familiarity, appearance and overall consumer acceptance, alt-protein faces an uphill battle outside of the new, growing, and high margin western meat replacement market ... but that market is capped, and the real profits for this industry lie in mass consumer acceptance, which will basically be defined by solid inroads in to megacities (most of which are in Asia). These markets could be exceptionally hard to win.
Hopefully they will be careful not to accidentally make the obesity or cancer epidemics worse in a push to rid us of the problems of global warming sometime farther down the road.
I hope this doesn't go anywhere, to be honest. People need more human connection, not less, and the rituals of preparing food, eating together, cleaning etc are one of THE fundamental things that makes us human.<p>Replacing fast food with healthy food is good, but we should all be trying to cook more, and be with our loved ones (or hell, even roommates) _more_, not less.