Even if its not, you can still use the resources used to produce that feed to produce human food instead. And feeding cows waste has its own environmental problems, as it tends to play hob with their digestive systems and make them release considerably more greenhouse gasses.
> Even if its not, you can still use the resources used to produce that feed to produce human food instead.
If the resources required to produce (or harvest) the cow-food is more than producing synthetic meat: sure.
> And feeding cows waste has its own environmental problems, as it tends to play hob with their digestive systems and make them release considerably more greenhouse gasses.
Waste? How about plain grass? Or growing crops that are not human edible, since the conditions of the farm or land does not allow you to produce human edible crops? Of course those crops would still have to be easily digestible for the cows.
Sure, but those same arguments apply to synthetic meat. If you're processing inputs in a lab, you can likely be far more flexible than how a specific animal's digestive system happened to evolve, and you don't have the overhead of running a cow for 1-3 years¹ before slaughter. From what I can tell, about 75% of a non-lactating cow's energy input goes into body gain. So that's 25% off the top before you even consider what goes into skin, blood, bones, and the less palatable organs. Apparently, beef yield makes up about 40% of a cow's total mass, so assuming uniform energy usage for all body parts (which could be wildly wrong), only around 30% of the calories actually processed by a cow will turn into beef.
¹And having searched for that statistic and read the necessary surrounding material, I need to lie down for a while. Jesus Christ.
