Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
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) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
We are on a similar path. My first replacement was veggie crumbles and fake burgers instead of beef. I LOVE fake burgers like Beyond Beef and Impossible. I don’t see a point in buying ground beef now that I have these options at a lower price. I also use seitan chicken and beef for things like stir-fry, but it doesn’t work well in every recipe. Mostly, I switched to recipes heavy on vegetables and beans. Pork is hardest for me because it is cheap and slow cooking a shoulder fills more tacos than we can eat. Enchlidas and Burritos get well-seasoned beans. Egg-wise, I found a semi-local farm that treats their laying hens better than average (low density coops with perches, sun and air, but not free-range).