Why not directly go to vat grown or 3d printed meat?

because an animal is a self-contained unit which manages disease and feed conversion that scales fairly predictably, while cultured meat has a pretty high entry barrier in terms of feedstock, sanitation etc

An animal is also terribly inefficient at converting water and feed into human-consumable nutrients, because it's optimized for survival and reproduction.

The vat based solution is more scalable in the long run, and not impossible (we do it with beer).

> An animal is also terribly inefficient at converting water and feed into human-consumable nutrients,

I have an old book somewhere that says the milk cow is the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside covered with grass into human-usable protein.

>a rocky hillside covered with grass

Yeah, that's scalable.

the cynic in me says that the "manages diseases" part will become increasingly untenable in the future, as antibiotic-resistant everything proliferate in feedlot environments, and american regulatory agencies fail to put a check on antibiotics mixed into animal feed.

reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html

Or, you know, actual plants, that are healthy and probably always going to be environmentally better because you cut out a middle man in calories to mouth, one that is now sentient...

It's weird how much people try and peddle different solutions and proteins like "low methane cows" or crickets!" Instead of something much simpler and already tried and true, beans nuts, grains, etc...

> It's weird how much people try and peddle different solutions and proteins like "low methane cows" or crickets!" Instead of something much simpler and already tried and true, beans nuts, grains, etc...

Because very, very many people enjoy eating meat and meat-based products. Therefore, we're looking for alternative, better solutions.

Nothing weird about that.

I think discussions about alt-meat need to discussed in a way that acknowledges they are solutions to a solved problem.

Perhaps my original reply was a bit too down on them, because I do agree that research is good!

> I think discussions about alt-meat need to discussed in a way that acknowledges they are solutions to a solved problem.

No, alt-meat is a solution to a problem of how to influence behavior to create particular results that is rather emphatically not solved.

economics, i would assume

No, that's not logical at all; the next step will be meat grown directly in a petri dish. There have been successes the last two years, but it's going to take many more years to work well and scale up. The Gates foundation funded the first petri dish burger, btw.