if they can make affordable plant based chicken that's as tasty and protein-packed as real chicken and veg beef that's as good as real beef, then I'm 100% in.
the biggest problem with non-meat foods (for me) has always been with their macros. I can get 32g of protein with nearly zero fat or carbs from 4oz of chicken for less than $2 a serving. Last I checked, this was not possible with alternative food.
I had the same outlook as far as taste goes. I really think it is just our palette being trained to love this type of food. After switching to a vegan diet, I do not crave meat whatsoever. I really enjoy all of the dishes I would have never eaten otherwise.
The company Tyson invested in stacks up quite well to conventional meat.
http://beyondmeat.com/
Here's a list written by a guy who wrote a book on the economics of meat production in the US. (Yeah, it's on the PETA web site, but somehow the 'i just really like big Macs' crowd doesn't get around to doing research on food in the same way...)
His top-line number is that a $5 burger would cost $13 without various subsidies, funded by $38B or year in subsidies to the meat industry.
I also found claims that removing subsidies would eventually lower prices by allowing competition from countries without subsidies. But my guess is there's a limit to bottom price globally given current tech, regulations, tariffs, and land availability. And it's difficult to know where that is relative to subsidizes process in the US...
The purported subsidies of $38 billion per year divided by the 50 billion burgers per year that everyone seems to think Americans eat (including this author) is less than $1 per burger.
My wife is vegetarian and I eat meat analogues typically one meal a day. For almost all applications Mock duck, seitan, soy-based chicken are all inferior substitutes for their meat counterparts. They're less flexible when cooking, don't absorb flavors as well, and are generally either chewier or stringier than real meat.
I have a lot of hope for lab-grown meat, but there's still a lot of progress to be made for meat analogues.
the biggest problem with non-meat foods (for me) has always been with their macros. I can get 32g of protein with nearly zero fat or carbs from 4oz of chicken for less than $2 a serving. Last I checked, this was not possible with alternative food.