The basic idea is that animals were not evolved to maximize meat production. Just like horses were not evolved to maximize transport efficiency and hence were replaced by cars, plants were not evolved to maximize turning solar energy into electricity and are replaced by more efficient solar panels, pigs were not evolved to maximize insulin production and were replaced by recombinant-DNA yeast,...
I don’t think cars, solar panels, and recombinant insulin are analogous technologies here. Cars and solar panels won out because they are completely new approaches to transportation and solar energy capture that are not constrained by the biology of the systems they’re replacing. Cultured meat seems severely handicapped by its reliance on the growth of animal cells and tissues.
Recombinant insulin is still manufactured in biological systems (bacteria and yeast), but they are much simpler than mammalian cells and can efficiently express a protein that is only present in tiny amounts in the pig pancreases it used to be purified from.
Pigs are ~50% meat by mass, but less than ~0.01% insulin by mass. And animals are pretty well optimized for producing animal bodies with minimal food consumption, so the possible gains are
factor of ~2 from not producing the rest of the animal
Small factor from turning food into meat more efficiently than evolved animals
Small factor from turning energy into food more efficiently than evolved plants
Large factor from producing energy more cheaply than we produce crops for animal feed
I wrote a comment in a previous discussion about why I think cultivated meat can be expected to become at least as efficient/​cheap as animal-based meat: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​y8jHKDkhPXApHp2gb/​​cultured-meat-a-comparison-of-techno-economic-analyses?commentId=MJtLFZya2WqdNADSy
The basic idea is that animals were not evolved to maximize meat production. Just like horses were not evolved to maximize transport efficiency and hence were replaced by cars, plants were not evolved to maximize turning solar energy into electricity and are replaced by more efficient solar panels, pigs were not evolved to maximize insulin production and were replaced by recombinant-DNA yeast,...
I don’t think cars, solar panels, and recombinant insulin are analogous technologies here. Cars and solar panels won out because they are completely new approaches to transportation and solar energy capture that are not constrained by the biology of the systems they’re replacing. Cultured meat seems severely handicapped by its reliance on the growth of animal cells and tissues.
Recombinant insulin is still manufactured in biological systems (bacteria and yeast), but they are much simpler than mammalian cells and can efficiently express a protein that is only present in tiny amounts in the pig pancreases it used to be purified from.
Pigs are ~50% meat by mass, but less than ~0.01% insulin by mass. And animals are pretty well optimized for producing animal bodies with minimal food consumption, so the possible gains are
factor of ~2 from not producing the rest of the animal
Small factor from turning food into meat more efficiently than evolved animals
Small factor from turning energy into food more efficiently than evolved plants
Large factor from producing energy more cheaply than we produce crops for animal feed
Cars are not mechanical horses.