meat tastiness * degree it affects me > immorality of killing animals * degree it affects me

I dunno, how much worse could it be if it is substituting the meat in, say, a McDonalds hamburger? By the time the cheese and special sauce are added, does anyone notice the difference? Sure, one might have special occasions when you go spend $200 for a real, dead cow dinner. But I’ll bet most meat consumption isn’t in the form of “slab of ribeye” but ground up to be unrecognizable Taco Bell meat and chicken nuggets. I’m also willing to bet the person placing the order at Taco Bell is not in meat conisseur mode, but in “fill the hole so the grumbling sounds stop” mode.

Yeah, if you're only concerned about taste/texture/juiciness, I think that's the easiest concern. lab grown meat is still the same muscle cells. I would bet a lot of money that it's going to taste awesome.

these sentiments are not random when you consider the history of Monsanto, of DuPont, the tuskegee syphilis experiments, etc. You don't need to look far to find reasons to distrust global corporations and governments.

* a.k.a. artifical and natural flavours - the only difference between artificial and natural is the starting ingredient in the synthesis

Whereas, when you have cells, you already have a system that grows and does the chemistry via it's own enzymes. The dream is that you "just add sugar / water / salt" and it'll grow. I'm not saying that there won't be problems. (Like, maybe the meat tissue think that it's stressed or has been cut, if it's exposed to water/air? Maybe stressed tissue will taste bad or produce bad hormones?) But they will be very very different problems.

As an example, given a pastured chicken, a factory chicken, and a lab chicken, is it easier to get the factory chicken to taste like the pastured chicken, or to get the lab chicken to taste like the pastured chicken?

I have never tasted a factory chicken that compares to a pastured chicken, and I'm skeptical about whether it's possible. But nevertheless I believe that's an easier problem than getting the lab chicken right, which of course implies that in my opinion a good-as-pastured lab chicken is exceedingly difficult.

But I'll readily agree we can make something that most humans would identify as meat in the lab and that a large number of them would be happy to eat it. After all, people enjoy eating all sorts of processed food as it is.

Given this, I guess the real question is, can you make a lab chicken taste as good as a factory chicken? I don't know, probably...