I recently came across a staggering figure. Lab-grown meat, the prized innovation of Silicon Valley biohacking techies and a favorite venture for investors who believe they're saving the world, is actually 25 times more inefficient than real meat. In other words, it takes 25 times more energy and resources to produce a lab-grown steak – which doesn't even taste that good – than to raise a ribeye.
All the water a cow drinks, the forage it consumes, the land it requires to live, and the diesel fuel needed to transport it to the butcher and then to the grocery store, all pale in comparison, by a factor of 25, to the amount of energy, resources, water, and the blood, sweat, and tears required to produce a single piece of unappealing lab-grown fake meat.
The article presented this as if it were a surprise. How could a sterile, high-tech lab be less efficient than a cud-chewing ruminant wandering through its own poop?
Easy. Despite over a hundred years of the best minds engineering as hard as they can, birds still fly more efficiently than planes.
You have to understand that 1 billion years of multicellular organism evolution is incredibly efficient. You’d realize that what appears inefficient, dirty, messy, bloody, and painful is actually the efficient way. The blood and guts, the waste, the manure, the urine, the trampled grasses, and the land used – these aren't just byproducts. They're essential to the entire operation. Circumventing the process that Mother Nature has refined over hundreds of millions of years is not simple. If there was a way to bypass it efficiently, it would've already happened. Anytime something in nature appears inefficient, wrong, or extraneous, and if it seems like it could just be lopped off without consequence, you’re likely missing a crucial part of the picture.
Every time we try to circumvent nature, cut corners, and assume that something is unimportant or extraneous, we mess up. We get bad results and suffer for it. By the way, "efficiency" isn't the whole story. But that's a discussion for another time...
Let me know what you think about all this over on X.
