Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat
There is a decent chance this article is correct but I also dislike part of article&#x27;s focus.<p>The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors needed in order to replace the US meat production. It is a bit unfair to compare the size of a bioreactor to a meat packing plant without considering the size of all the (organic?) bioreactors... livestock. There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time so the volume is considerable. To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are &#x27;free&#x27; instead of &#x27;cheaper currently&#x27;.<p>Considering how efficient meat production is (at the expense of everything else), we can basically make a single head of cattle as our standardized unit to evaluate the cost &amp; thermodynamics.<p>Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood &amp; bones bioreactor? Certainly not upfront unless small scale bioreactor in a bag technology... oh wait that exists [1]. Sucks that pricing isn&#x27;t easy to get but I think it is still more expensive than fixed&#x2F;reusable vessels at least over time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sartorius.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;fermentation-bioreactors&#x2F;single-use-bioreactors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sartorius.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;fermentation-bioreacto...</a><p>It&#x27;s really hard to know without having more knowledge about the specifics of but I think there&#x27;s a lot of unexplored areas that makes these projects worthwhile.