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I think your meat substitute is Quorn.

They grow fake meat in vats already, and it tastes great. It comes from a fungus, but who cares? It's just as good as chicken, and it's in stores now. It's my favorite fake meat. http://www.quorn.com/

I'm sure the market will grow slowly initially, but people had objections to microwaved food and irradiated spices originally too.

The tipping point will likely be when this can be made reasonably cheaper than "real" meat, combined with campaigns aiming for the "veggie sympathisers" that will figure that they can now take the step away from dead animals without giving up meat. Ensure it's grown very lean, so you can market it as a healthier alternative as well.

If it gets cheap enough it's bound to be a success eventually.

No, you can't have the entire world as densely populated as Japan is - as long as people still need to eat food grown on farms.

The problem is, as you can see if you follow the links above, most people are still under the mistaken assumption that you need land to grow food. That assumption is just so twentieth century.

Think about it for a minute - there have been doomsdayers predicting famine for a long time. Isn't it funny how the carrying capacity of the planet keeps increasing along with the population?

Even if we ignore the cost of media components such as hormones and growth factors (requirements that can probably be engineered out at our current tech level), there are basic problems with the metabolism of animal tissues (requirements that cannot be engineered out at our current tech level).

Probably the biggest stumbling block is that animal cells lack the ability to synthesize many amino acids, and even some of the ones that can be synthesized require other amino acids as the starting material. So, you end up needing protein to grow protein. From an efficiency standpoint, you'd be much better off just drinking the growth media.

In the case of growth factors (hormones, cytokines, etc), a change in one or two proteins can take care of things. For some growth factors, you can even see this happen spontaneously if you serially passage cells repeatedly. The problem with amino acid requirements is that you'd need to engineer in whole new metabolic pathways, which is much more difficult. Probably one of the most sophisticated examples of putting in a new pathway was in the example of beta carotene synthesis in "golden" rice. This was barely doable with something like three steps. I don't know how many steps would be required to cover all amino acids, but I'm guessing it would be several dozen at least.

A much better idea is to use lower organisms that can manufacture all 20 essential amino acids already. A good example is Quorn, a fungal meat substitute that is already available. To grow Quorn, all you need is water, ammonia, some minerals, and a carbon source such as glucose. The fungus can synthesize all necessary amino acids from carbohydrates, with the ammonia supplying the necessary nitrogen. What's more, it can be grown in a continuous process (as opposed to batch), which you can get a huge amount of a small reactor.

I'll take fungus over soylent green anyday.

There's also Quorn, which according to NPR is a popular european meat-substitute. It's made from fungus (not mushrooms, lower than that), and doesn't even require being farmed like soy beans. It can simply be made in a fermentation plant.

Sounded interesting, and apparently it tastes pretty good.

(Mmmm... Quorn Dogs...)

mark

Anyone who reads a.r.k will see this as pepsico finally admitting that they have Animal 57

This is freaking creepy. Maybe less creepy than Quorn, which is made from slime mold (mycoprotien) but it's far too creepy for me.