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There has to be at least one exotic meat that hits a sweet spot for: relatively tasty; more expensive in real life than the lab; nobody is familiar with the real thing. If I were in charge of a lab-grown meat company I'd throw money at this question until one suitable species could be identified. Ideally several. Find a few celebrity chefs willing to experiment with and serve the product. You might not want to go to the grocery and buy lab-grown meat for the grill, but your girlfriend will want to post nice Instagram selfies of herself enjoying the lab-grown whale meatballs at a fancy restaurant. Politicians are not going to ban your product if they enjoy it. If you could get lab-grown steaks served regularly at the French Laundry, it's over.
Artisinal meats are the perfect test-case for lab-grown. Everything is small-scale and gives the tech a chance to develop. Lab-grown will not win a head-to-head competition with real meat without significant R&D. Developing beef steak first seems to me like the worst proposition, driven by (well-meaning) idealists who want to replace meat consumption. Surely it'd be easier to pass off a fake chicken nugget than a steak. Steak is something everyone is familiar with, is a food cooked to be eaten as itself with minimal coverings or dress. People will not accept lab-grown steak as viable until the technology is fully mature. Why would you pay 5x for a substitute that's worse? Because it's moral? That's a terrible proposition for most consumers. If the lab-grown meat industry wasn't run by idealists with a chip-on-their-shoulder about the morality of meat, they could easily see the business model I'm describing.
Galapagos Tortoises are apparently tasty enough that it was a real problem getting living specimens back because they kept getting eaten.
I'm sure their deliciousness was at least somewhat exaggerated due to hunger being the best sauce, but they were certainly praised highly.
Snapping turtle tastes excellent. If they tasted anything like that I'm not surprised they were eaten.
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I've always wondered how much reprovisioning affected their judgement. The tortoise would have been their first fresh meat after months at sea depleted their stocks of everything except dried peas and biscuits full of weevils. Hunger is the best spice, after all.
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Mammoth DNA exists well enough to in-theory be cloned. Green sea turtles are legendarily tasty. Bear meat is hard to get but supposedly pretty good.
I’ve had bear meat on several occasions, and while it is good, I don’t think it’s that much better than venison, squirrel, or beef. It’s also not exotic enough. Mammoth, whale, and giant tortoise meat all seem like winners though.
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