I haven't tried lab-grown meat but assuming it tastes more or less the same, I think it's much more ethical and probably better for you. The substitute meats like Beyond and Impossible are good but like all groceries that aren't staples bought in bulk, they're ridiculously expensive, at least where I live.

Lab grown meat still requires live animals. You still need to collect stem cells to start a culture and you also need fetal bovine serum (blood plasma from baby cows) to keep the cells healthy.

We currently DO NOT have a way to culture mammalian cells without animal blood plasma. We currently DO NOT have a way of infinitely culturing mammalian biomass from a single cell sample. So lab grown meat still needs animals to be raised in captivity and slaughtered, just fewer. It's not vegan for that reason and won't be for the foreseeable future unless massive breakthroughs happen in multiple different fields.

IMO a better path to explore would just be to figure out which exact chemicals give meat their flavour and directly synthesize them from raw materials. Have something like a completely artificial bacon powder you can add to a vegan protein source and completely cut out anything to do with animals. We can make every other scent and flavour artificially, why not meat? And it's not even that hard, a science YouTuber can do it.

They were really helpful in my transition into Vegetarianism. When I first became vegetarian, I pretty frequently craved meat, Impossible/Beyond meat alternatives were great for those times.

Pretty quickly the cravings lessened, after a few months I rarely craved meat at all.

Almost 5 years later, I crave something meaty maybe 3 times a year. Sometimes I want a heavy savory burger during the summer. Impossible meat patties are great for that.

They are also useful for entertaining family and friends who still eat meat. I've cooked vegetarian burgers, brats, breakfast sausages, etc. And most people give them pretty rave reviews. I even have had some family members say "I didn't know you are eating meat again." because the taste/smell was so close, they thought it was real meat I was cooking.

I can't speak for lab meat, but it would be pretty cool if we were able to grow authentic meat from cell cultures that were acquired ethically, like painlessly from already dying/dead animals.

At this point, I can't see myself ever going back to even totally ethically synthetic meats, I just don't have a strong taste for it anymore. I prefer the health benifits I get from eating cleaner anyways.

I do wish they had a really good Impossible fish, I still often miss a hearty fish and chips with fresh tartar sauce and nice balsamic vinegar dip.

I haven’t tried any, but it seems like an inevitable endpoint. I’ve long held a rule that I can’t meet a cow in person because they look so cute on the internet and if I met one, I fear I’d have no choice but to go vegan.

I feel like the ethics of meat consumption is inarguably bad, but it’s a fundamental part of my diet and meat is some of my favorite stuff to eat. If I could eat meat like stuff that’s indistinguishable from the real stuff, that would be ideal.

I don't like fast food, beyond/impossible meat is factory produced slop. They even made a South Park episode about it.

Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices)

Could it be you were never taught to respect the animals we eat? I find that common in people who grew up in big cities / never spent time in the countryside / are young enough to have never seen a pig being dismantled / never fished.

My another point against lab grown meat is that so far any time we tried to manufacture food, within 30 years it turned out to be very bad for us (e.g. obesity epidemic is mainly caused by UPF).

People will do the craziest things just to avoid eating legumes