View original postI wouldn't know why, there's no 'yuck factor' on algae I'm familiar with, certainly not on a creepy-crawly level. They certainly don't care if you use it as animal feed. Kelp isn't a huge part of the western diet but its certainly available and I've never seen any react with disgust at the concept of eating it. As to lab grown meat, that's very wait and see, its too new and too R&D phase to deal with. I doubt most people would object to finding out their steak was grown in sterile, clean, meat-growth facility. It's all image and marketing though, one could make them appear as shops of horror contrasted to scenes of prisitne pasture and happy cows grazing, alternatively one could contrast screaming animals being slaughtered in filthy conditions to sterile white labs with no pain and suffering and loss of cute mammal life attached. But algae? No, people don't care, its already in the accepted direct human diet and nobody cares of their cow was eating kelp rather than corn, unless it effected the taste.
View original postFood culture is filled with imaginery, the pristine pastures you mentioned, people's need for "natural" food, etc. What kind of stories will you build when the food comes from some sterile laboratory? Where's the romance? I'm not saying there's a problem here, just mentioning that the way food is viewed from a cultural/sociological point will change when the supply chains, ingredients and industry changes. Something as simple as the emergence of processed foods changed the time of day food is consumed, made it more likely that families no longer eat at the same time, caused feelings of inadequacy in women who felt they should not feed their children processed foods, etc. And that happened decades ago and still ready-to-eat foods are something people discuss, compare and argue about in comparison to ordinary foods.
People's tastes are undeniably tricky to predict and not especially rational, no doubt. I think the 'natural' aspect is a lot more recent, wasn't as common even in my childhood which wasn't that long ago. People swing back and forth between antique and/or natural and high tech 20-minutes in the future tastes a lot.
Still its entirely possibly we could make 'meat trees' or something, although that summons an image of some terrifying death forest full of trees dripping blood from gobs of meat... decidedly not romantic except in some sort of gothic horror fashion. This stuff is highly unpredictable in its culture impact but Snicker's bars aren't grown in lush fields and very few soda or snack commercials stop to insert images of cocoa plants or sugarcane, and obviously they don't show the factory floor much either.
