At some point I think either lab-grown meat, or sufficiently realistic synthetic "meat" will become cheaper to produce than the real thing, and real meat that has come from an actual animal will come to be seen as more of a luxury item. There are other factors that can accelerate this trend, health concerns, climate impact, etc, but price to the consumer will be the fundamental driver. Would you pay $2 for a fake or lab-grown steak that is 99% realistic, or $20 for the actual thing?
for years people paid for cheap walmart(asda) economy 'basics' meat.. but more recently people are preferring to buy the more organic premium meat.
i personally stay away from the cheap own brand crap. their ready meals taste of cardboard and their 'basics' range of frozen meat is tasteless..
i prefer a real joint of beef or real fresh chicken breasts from a proper butchers/farm shops, even if it is a premium.
by the way. the 'lab' meat wont be producing a whole 'breast' of chicken it will produce chicken cell lumps which then become nuggets or chicken burgers.
you are not going to get a 'lab made' T-bone steak. but you will get lab made burgers
even if they can recreate the cells. they will have other additives and stabilisers to combine it into form.
take alook at them cheap turkey 'rounds' you can get (reformed and binded turkey meat)
which use potato and rice starches to bind actual breast meat together..
these actual breast meat with bindings to form it into a 'round', taste worse compared to a proper turkey/crown.
so dont expect lab meat to be exactly the same as their equivalent steak, breast, crown proper counterpart.
after all who buys walmarts 99p pink sludge economy 20 nuggets, when there are actual breast meat nuggets at £3 for 10
many people prefer to spend £6 on mcdonalds 20 piece breast meat nuggets instead of getting walmarts 99p pink sludge equivalent, since the "pink sludge" saga become commonly known. even mcdonalds stopped doing the pink sludge variety