Appreciate your response but disagree with the premise that
> That's how much everything, from infrastructure to land use to feed to water to labour to delivery costs for the same ground beef you'd get from livestock.
There are a ton of subsidies provided by the government that are not accounted for in this cost. Water rights, land, delivery all are accounted for differently and I would not say with any measure of confidence that they are all represented well in the consumer cost. There is also the large externalities that are completely not accounted for like carbon emissions.
It is sort of like comparing electric cars vs gas back when people would comment how cheap oil is and ignore the wars fought over it and the environmental devastation wrought from its production.
Subsidies simply offset the cost, they don't magically make those portions of it disappear. If you were to remove them, then by some estimates the price would go up anywhere between 30% and 180% for meats, because that's how much the subsidy covered. Subsidies at any point changes the end result as the price change percolates without subsidy, the primary point of them being to cover variance (such as harvest quality and weather) and to offer incentives to the customer, which incentivises business by artificially opening the market. Meatonomics puts a $4 Big Mac at roughly $11 in "societal cost", including environmental and health.
In the end, if the seller wants the same margins as before, then they'll raise by exactly as much as the subsidy covered. Even if it's the higher amount and a bit over double the price, that's perhaps $10 for a pound of ground beef. That's practically half the price of cultured meat, and about the price of meat alternatives; meat alternatives being currently a high margin business as companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are trying to increase R&D and production to meet demand, so they could actually drop prices now, they just won't since they have nowhere near the supply.
Adding similar subsidies to meat culture products would simply narrow the gap, fundamentally they are more expensive and that's even with the "optimistic" estimates Humbird gave. Reminder that Future Meat is an impressive $18 per pound for chicken cultures, whereas actual chicken runs about $2 per pound. Meanwhile, meat alternatives around $9 per pound TODAY will improve by 2030 to be much more cost competitive than meat cultures seemingly will be able to, unless they can manage all these frankly miraculous breakthroughs and get as cheap as chicken (based on the $5.66 per kilo figure, or little over $2 per pound), which seems unlikely.
As I saw it put nicely elsewhere, removing the subsidy would result in a "more accurate, divorced-from-government cost of their inputs and externalities which affect the health of everyone, to include the consumer and the planet at large."
There are a ton of subsidies provided by the government that are not accounted for in this cost. Water rights, land, delivery all are accounted for differently and I would not say with any measure of confidence that they are all represented well in the consumer cost. There is also the large externalities that are completely not accounted for like carbon emissions.
It is sort of like comparing electric cars vs gas back when people would comment how cheap oil is and ignore the wars fought over it and the environmental devastation wrought from its production.
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