To grow a hunk of meat without spoilage you need an immune system that basically just requires the rest of the animal

Wouldn’t that happen in plant based approaches as well? Or be mitigated by growing in exceptionally sterile environments?

This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.

My understanding is it actually reduces the use of antibiotics, and this benefit is one of the main things people point to as a selling point.

No you wouldn't. Plenty of things are grown in labs or even on industrial levels which don't need immune systems. Maintaining a sterile environment is a challenge but not that hard.

Then why are the only lab grown meat products ground / reconstituted ? I'm only going off a interview with a startup CEO that pivoted to lab grown egg white because of the aforementioned challenge. You can keep sterile petri dishes, but if you try to reach even a chicken nugget sized piece of solid muscle, you aren't going to keep it free of contaminants.

I thought the ground/reconstituted part was because they couldn't form long chain proteins. Or at least they could not simulate the structure of muscle tissue over long stretches. That is, they could make ground beef, but they couldn't make steak.

It's hard but people culture animal cells in 5000 gallon bioreactors so it's not about size. We're not really to the point of producing tissues with 3D structure and cell differentiation. That's why lab grown meat is always pink paste ground into something else.

Building lab grown tissues and not just cell lines is what's being worked on now, for any purpose not only food.

Not really, if you clean your bioreactors well.

Bioreactors are not producing hunks of meat.

They don't say much, but my guess is the plant ingredients are there to give the white stripes. The cells are probably just a homogeneous pink mass without it.

'homogenous pink mass' really was their best album