Beef is not very energy efficient anyways, around 10% conversion rate from pasture calories to animal tissue. Pork and chicken are much more efficient though.
From the very narrow perspective of energy efficient, the problem I see is that we are ditching a true and tested method of doing things with (up to a point) renewable resources and trying to create a substitute most likely based on petrochemicals, just at the same time as we're dragging our feet on finding and deploying a viable alternative to petrol based energy systems.
I am assuming those are cheaper/more efficient. After all, our grain production relies heavily on petrochemical inputs.
Historically speaking, one of the reasons[1] domestication of large herbivores for meat production makes sense is because those can be fed with agriculture byproducts not suitable for human consumption. In industrial terms, it is a sort of "rejects reprocessing" that partially recovers an investment that was already lost.
Nowadays, we feed our animals with human suitable food, which is possible due to the (cost) efficiency gains of the green revolution, which originally was mostly about petrochemicals.
[1] the other being that in nomad societies, they constitute a food store that can carry its own weight around.
I'm not sure it would be more efficient. Starches from corn or potatoes is pretty cheap, and if this synthetic meat can use it more efficiently (I wouldn't be surprised at at least an order of magnitude or two) compared to an animal in the wild, that's relatively little feedstock per pound of meat compared to what we pay now.
And using the same kind of biotech we use to break down cellulose to make cellulosic ethanol, we might be able to create feedstock for this meat from agricultural waste or fast-growing grasses.
This is precisely this type of reasoning that I fear:
* Starches from corn or potatoes is pretty cheap (money, heavily affected by federal subsidies).
* Synthetic meat can use it more efficiently (the engineer in me wants to say "energy", but depending on the context it may mean higher utility margins, or lower labor costs, or what not).
* Same kind of biotech [as] cellulosic ethanol. I am not familiar with the state of the art on this field, but (corn) ethanol companies just engages in arbitrage tricks to make a bundle on yuppie's eco-guilt and government's largesse. Both the economy and the environment would be better of if people just shut up and directly burnt the diesel used in machinery used to rise and transport the corn used as raw inputs to make the ethanol.
Not that this particular argument is wrong, just that I do not have the facts and would like to see them discussed without all the hype!
From the very narrow perspective of energy efficient, the problem I see is that we are ditching a true and tested method of doing things with (up to a point) renewable resources and trying to create a substitute most likely based on petrochemicals, just at the same time as we're dragging our feet on finding and deploying a viable alternative to petrol based energy systems.