The main reasons I’ve seen from vegans for not eating meat seem to be all about the morality of eating a sentient animal, the practices of the modern meat industry, and the environmental impact of it. And don’t have anything to do with the taste of meat.
Since lab-grown meat doesn’t cause animal suffering, and assuming mass production is environmentally friendly, would you consider going back to eating meat if it were the lab-grown kind?
The energy for lab grown meat has to come from somewhere - thermodynamics is always king. You can provide it via sugars/carbohydrates which the cells can motabolise, but you’ve got to put energy into making the sugar/carbs which is easiest by just growing some sugarcane/potatoes/etc. There’s more steps for meat vs plant and it’s very unlikely you can make 100 calories of lab meat with lower total system energy input than 100 calories of plant matter. (N.B., I’m a chemist, not a astronomical biologist, so if an expert refutes me and my assumptions, Place more trust in them)
Oh you’re right about the food for it. I wasn’t thinking about that. I can’t see any way they’d get those to parity even if it was room temperature.
Edit: Oh just a thought, but if we were able to somehow able to get the nutrients from things we were going to compost. But I have a feeling that’s not how that would happen, and that they wouldn’t be the proper nutrients for growing. Maybe way out in the future though like in Back To The Future, Mr. Fusion garbage fuel! Fresh meat from waste!