Despite the very large recent decreases in the price of lab-grown meat (I have just seen an announce about a company that claims that they "can now produce 100

Despite the very large recent decreases in the price of lab-grown meat (I have just seen an announce about a company that claims that they "can now produce 100 percent cultivated chicken (85 percent muscle and 15 percent fat) at $11.79 per pound on a large scale"), it is not yet proven that lab-grown meat can be produced at a lower price and by consuming less resources than traditional meat. On the other hand, it is pretty certain that it is possible to produce high-quality animal proteins, like whey protein or egg white protein, in a sustainable way and at a lower cost, by cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which can be fed with cheap carbohydrates from cereals and with minerals, unlike the animal cells which require a very complex food. The company that has achieved the low price quoted above has done this by replacing the animal food that was given previously by everybody to the cultivated cells (e.g. serum and albumin) with some mixture of substances extracted from various vegetables. It is unlikely that it will be ever possible for the food given to cell cultures to be cheaper than the food given to real chicken. The only chance for lab-grown meat to become cheaper than real chicken meat is given by the fact that only the edible part of a chicken is grown, i.e. the equivalent of a breast or thigh, instead of growing the entire chicken body with many parts that have a low value. While fungal cultures would be much more efficient than any lab-grown meat, they could provide only protein powder, which could enrich in proteins any vegetable food, but from which it would not be easy to make something resembling a steak.