I think an interesting market for this product would be religiously observant vegetarians. If killing an animal is morally repugnant to you, perhaps eating the protein byproduct of a bacterial culture wouldn't rub you the wrong way?
As prices come down to near hamburger level, I would be willing to change to vat grown to spare cows the feedlot unpleasantness they are exposed to now. Of course this would reduce the worldwide population of cattle, so its a moral judgment whether a smaller number leading better lives is preferable--is welfare measured by the sum or average--I'd lean towards the smaller and better camp to the tune of about 15 cents a pound.
I think we're going to see more and more advances like this where the chief obstacle to adoption is social, not technical. (This came up a couple weeks ago during a discussion of self-driving motor vehicles).
"Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.
'Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, 'gimme that. You know what this costs?' She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up
and chewed."
What I think will be very interesting is when the technology get sophisticated enough that its cost effective to grow the in-vitro meat in various shapes and distributions of mak I mean, cubes are all well and good for storage, transport and generic consumption, but if you had the ability to specify the proportions and distribution of various tissue types and whether you want say steak shape versus paper thin (for that crazy pastry with meat layered in you've been hankering for),
THAT will be awesome.
The trick is what to grow it on. Previous lab meat experiments used fetal calf serum.
Engineering meat directly on a large scale is probably going to happen before a significant percentage of people ethically convert to animal-free lifestyles. It would make a huge difference in human-perpetrated cruelty, as the U.S. currently slaughters 10 billion land animals and around 15 billion aquatic animals (not counting by-catch) every year.
However, general consensus among farm animal rescues/sanctuaries is that egg and milk operations are the cruellest, moreso than beef. Thus, contrary to popular belief, eating steak while avoiding milk and eggs puts more of a dent into animal cruelty than becoming an ovo-lacto vegetarian.
Another common misconception is that fish is healthy; due to environmental pollution, however, fish now frequently contains unsafe levels of mercury and other heavy metals; plus DDT, dioxin, PCBs, etc. This is due to concentration as you go up the food chain, where the fish that humans eat have several orders of magnitude more contaminants than the water they swim in.
DHA and EPA, the Omega-3 fatty acids that are present in certain types of fish oil, are also now available in oil from marine algae. E.g. http://www.water4.net/ (this brand has no discernible taste, unlike some others). Brain food is probably a good idea for hackers.
As prices come down to near hamburger level, I would be willing to change to vat grown to spare cows the feedlot unpleasantness they are exposed to now. Of course this would reduce the worldwide population of cattle, so its a moral judgment whether a smaller number leading better lives is preferable--is welfare measured by the sum or average--I'd lean towards the smaller and better camp to the tune of about 15 cents a pound.