It’s a product without a market. Unless you’ve got a genius marketing firm, it’s simply one of the worst business plans I’ve ever heard of.
The likelyhood of getting vat grown meat with the taste of a good grass fed cow is about as likely as being able to walk into a supermarket today and get margarine that tastes like a good, cultured normandy butter. It’s not that we don’t neccesarily know how, it’s just that theres no point. The taste of meat and most other things come in most part from their complexity. When you bite into a ripe, off the vine tomato or sip a great red wine or chow down on some argentinian grass fed beef, that flavour comes from the thousands of extra chemicals that were the product of a particular growing and ageing regime. Complexity in nature is easy, open up a stalk of grass and theres hundreds of different chemicals inside it. Feed a cow on a different patch of grass and you’ll get a different flavor.
Complexity in processed goods is difficult because in order to reproduce that same quality, you need to isolate and then add in all of those flavours. This is why strawberry flavoured cookies, for example, taste nothing like real strawberry. Because it’s only economical to reproduce the top 10 or 20 different flavour compounds. The same will happen with vat grown meat. It will taste like factory farmed, industrial chicken, only moreso. Conventional meat grown the old fashioned way is still the cheapest and most economical way of producing really high quality meat, despite all the advances in technology.
We have the technology today to take an arbitrary protein source (e.g. SOY! SOY! SOY! SOY GIVES YOU STRENGTH! STRENGTH CRUSHES ENEMIES! SOY!) and turn it into a food product indistinguishable from a nice grilled steak. There’s no market for that level of costly simulation. Vegans aren’t secretly aching for a juicy slab of cow meat.
Even if a market were to develop, due to the loss of natural meat for one reason or another, demand still probably wouldn’t support near perfect simulation… just like it doesn’t today in fast food.
We sort of are, I thought. Not for consumption, though. 
Now I would have no problem wearing a vat-grown leather jacket or fur coat. That doesn’t set off the squick meter.
People have been talking about this idea for the better part of a century. Is anybody close to making it a reality?
I’d happily eat some lab-cultured cowflesh, but I’m more interested in the possibility of learning to grow human kidneys, hearts and livers from the patient’s own cells.
I don’t really get the squickiness for vat meat from people who normally eat meat. Sure the thought of a pulsating blob of tissue in a petri dish isn’t very appealing, but imagine ripping off a chunk of a live cow and putting it on a plate. Not very appealing, is it? That’s not what they’re going to feed you of course, they’re going to cook and prepare it just like any other meat, and at least visually, once it arrives on your plate it should look identical to real meat. Personally for me there’s a much bigger squick factor when thinking that the meat I’m eating was once attached to a living creature.
Perhaps, with a nod to Anthony Burgess, they will call it Ultra Meat-Plus.
I’m also all in favor of it. I suspect it will be somewhat bland because the veins of fat give it sweetness but then again, buffalo meat is extremely sweet and leaner than beef. Maybe we can get them to do only buffalo meat in the vats?
The Date: 2107
The Place: Old New York
The Restaurant: Peter Luger’s Steak House ( hey, some things will never change )
Instead of asking what’s on tap, a patron might well ask the waitstaff, " What’s on vat tonight? "
Cartooniverse
(for some reason “Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Science at Utrecht University” cracks me up)
Quorn seems to have exactly that business model in the UK - all their products seem to mention some dead animal they’re meant to taste like
Apparently most of their coustomers aren’t Veggies, but people worried about health:- animal fats, BSE etc
Do they taste better than cow?
A scene from Cheers 2100
Woody 4869: Evening, Mr. 5879, what’ll you have?
Norm 5879: What do you have in the vat tonight?
Woody 4869: Looks like meat.
Norm 5879: Then that’s what I’ll have.
God don’t you just hate it when someone else out-riffs you with your own riff?
Man. That just chafes my chaps.
