I'm very skeptical of the benefits of lab-grown meat. It might taste the same, but I don't see how it can have all the same nutrition as an actual animal breaking down good plants with a real digestive system.

We hardly know a thing about what's good for our bodies. I doubt scientists will be able to produce a food that won't hurt us somehow in the long run.

It's hard for me to understand the excitement for lab meat. Can you explain your interest?

Meat minus the guilt. A more moral meat, if you will.

I can get behind the idea. I can't morally justify eating one animal, loving another.

Not GP, but I'm excited about "clean meat" because I believe it has the best chance, over time, to have a huge impact on reducing animal suffering and reducing the environmental damage currently caused by animal agriculture. It'll probably be a lot better for human health too, since controlling what's in it will improve with a higher probability of success.

It is less resource intensive to produce. Hand-tuned assembly code burger vs transpiled javascript for the hot path (I eat cheeseburgers very often, as do many, many others in the countries I frequent).

You can feed more people with the same amount of resources. 80,000 humans a day die from lack of food. Everything we can do to meaningfully improve food production efficiency is a big win for the species.

I thought we technically make enough food for everyone on earth? It's the distribution that's the hard part.

That's true, however optimizations like this have wide-reaching effects.

Better control over the quality and consistency of the end product? I enjoy a wagyu steak a lot more than a tough cheap cut or minced up eyelids and connective tissue.

Reproducibility of particularly good strains of meat.