738
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
738 points (98.4% liked)
Futurology
1779 readers
70 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Sausage seems like the perfect entry point for this technology. People don't really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good. It's also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective. It would even be feasible to expand to more exotic sausages like pheasant or alligator.
You have to compete with plant based sausages though which, unless some big breakthrough happens, will be much cheaper. They'll also probably taste pretty similar cause this is only generating cells, they'll have to add in a bunch of other artificial stuff like heme to make it taste like a sausage at which point I'm not sure if people could taste the difference between animal cells and plant cells as the base.
As someone who really enjoys meat but tries to eat vegetarian (and does so 99% of the time), I can't say that I've ever been impressed by the taste of a non-meat sausage. Every single one I've had has left me wishing I'd just had falafel instead. Fortunately falafel is delicious and cheap
Notably, though, vegetarian haggis - which is essentially just a large sausage - is usually pretty damn good. I have no idea why it seems to end up differently. Maybe because haggis depends less on the meat flavour in the first place?
I had a vegetarian sausage that had a close-ish flavor recently. It might have been Beyond? The texture was surprisingly awful though. Far from inedible, but I'd expect all parts of the texture to be closer, especially the casing.