I love to eat meat. I don't believe meat is murder (or chicken is manslaughter, or eggs are kidnapping, or milk is sexual harassment). But just because I don't object to people killing animals for food doesn't mean that I affirmatively demand it. If people can develop delicious, safe, low-cost vat-grown meat, presumably grown from actually animal cells, that would be excellent. Indeed, it may well help generate tastes and textures that are hard to obtain through normal animal growth. It may reduce food-borne diseases. And it may have lower environmental burdens; regardless of whether one thinks we need to sacrifice to reduce such environmental burdens, in principle it may be possible to get better taste, lower financial costs, and lower environmental burdens as well. What's not to like about that?
Again, that's if all is done right, and many initial attempts will be failures. But that's how so many excellent products were developed. Many companies engage in many experiments; the unappealing ones fail, the appealing ones succeed, and the next generation of products is improved. Vat-grown meat, like many technological developments, is likely to improve markedly over time, and become less costly (as it already apparently has); hoof-grown meat isn't.
Is there a risk that such developments, though at first just offered voluntarily to consumers, will lead to government coercion (such as a ban on traditional cultivation of meat) even when the vat-grown product remains inferior to the traditional product? Yes, there is such a risk (cf. my article on slippery slopes); indeed, as Virginia Postrel notes,
