how much fake seafood do you see engineered out there?
Crab sticks are usually fake, but generally, fish is harder to immigrate accurately than other meats, and there’s less demand for it since people in the west don’t generally eat tons of fish anyway.
Less demand for real fish means less demand for imitation fish, though there is apparently a company somewhere making lab grown salmon and tuna.
The fake stuff (and cultivated meat for that matter) are getting closer to parity every year. You don’t go back to something “for the taste”, if the alternative you switched to offers a near identical experience.
I don’t want to stop eating meat, I want to stop the exploitation and suffering of animals.
While I want to stop the exploitation of animals more than I want to eat meat, if there is a path that allows me to do both, I will have a preference for that path.
The same goes for leather. It’s use isn’t worth what has to be done to create it, but it is a fantastic material with a lot of versatility that’s better than near all alternatives in plenty of applications. Fake leather and synthetic leather are wonderful innovations because we can enjoy the benefits without the negatives, and that’s something to be encouraged rather than avoided.
Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants. If this was even a problem, which it isn’t, the root cause is capitalism.