So i guess this is becoming more and more of a reality. They're doing it for all the same reasons i'm vegan; as the article says, "Breeding animals destined for the dinner table takes up about 70 percent of all agricultural land", and with that comes additional use of oil and water, major pollution (animal waste and fertilizer), etc.. Finding other sources of protein is a great way to reduce all that resource use.

I'm curious if this would be accepted any more than, say, soy burgers are, though. Anyone who's been vegan for the past 15 years or so (all six of us) knows that vegan burgers have come a long way. From burgers that tasted like dry newspapers to burgers that tasted like mushy newspapers to Boca patties and now Gardein, which as far as i'm concerned is amazing. So my first reaction to someone devoting all this R&D to growing burgers in a lab is "Why bother?". But i can also admit that being away from real meat for 15 years has moved the goal posts for me and someone going directly from real meat to Gardein is not likely to be as impressed.

One advantage these guys have is they recognize that you have to have some fat in the product. "Taste is the least (important) problem since this could be controlled by letting some of the stem cells develop into fat cells". One big problem with a lot of vegan products (not Gardein so much) is that they're also serving people who think that all fat is bad, and they're also afraid of salt, so you get these dry tasteless products. Again, it's gotten a lot better. But since hippies won't be the primary target market, the lab meat people can skip all of that.

But the question remains: will people eat this? I'm fairly certain i wouldn't, despite it really addressing all the problems i have with eating meat. The gross-out factor seems too high to me, but again, with 15 years away from meat there's an additional gross-out factor for me than there would be for a current meat eater. I did think this was a hilarious juxtaposition, though:

"I'm a vegetarian but I would be first in line to try this," said Jonathan Garlick, a stem cell researcher at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston. He has used similar techniques to make human skin but wasn't involved in the burger research.

The other possibility is that when this starts becoming mass produce-able (they're still a ways away from that) it could just start showing up in stores without any indication that it's different from other meat. That's already true of genetically modified vegetables so i don't think it's unlikely that the same might become true of lab produced meat.