> This sounds cool, but ... it's a little mystifying to me why food is the area where people are willing to work the hardest to recreate traditional products developed in a period where reality was just very different.
Two reasons, broadly speaking:
First, you get to co-opt existing preferences, instead of trying to displace them by establishing new ones.
Second, to some extent, existing animal-based products are best-in-class due to decades, centuries, or even millennia of survivorship bias. Some of those may represent a local maxima, but discovering that often requires some out-of-the-box thinking, such as Herman Miller's Pellicle as first demonstrated via the Aeron chair, which IMO is superior in practically every respect than traditional chair upholstering methods and materials, no matter how high-end, but absolutely isn't a one-to-one replacement for them.
Two reasons, broadly speaking:
First, you get to co-opt existing preferences, instead of trying to displace them by establishing new ones.
Second, to some extent, existing animal-based products are best-in-class due to decades, centuries, or even millennia of survivorship bias. Some of those may represent a local maxima, but discovering that often requires some out-of-the-box thinking, such as Herman Miller's Pellicle as first demonstrated via the Aeron chair, which IMO is superior in practically every respect than traditional chair upholstering methods and materials, no matter how high-end, but absolutely isn't a one-to-one replacement for them.