One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."

The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.

> Some say the slowdown in sales is a product of food inflation, as consumers trade pricier plant-based meat for less-expensive animal meat.

Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.

IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat.

Also what I really don't understand is how anyone can have anything against them spending $$$ on R&D? Worst case scenario: their whole productivity angle doesn't work out, they lose billions upon billions in the coming decade and eventually scrap the whole thing. Then they've still invented a lot of super interesting tech along the way. High resolution displays, low latency rendering pipelines, novel human interface technologies, high fidelity hand tracking, lightweight and sharp lenses, the list goes on and on. There's lots of applications for each of those things and almost nobody else is willing to spend this much cash for such an uncertain roi. I, for one, am super excited about what the future iterations of this will look like.

This is a very basic result called the No Communication Theorem. It's not in competition with quantum mechanics; it's a fundamental part of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

The verification of that fact is what this year's Nobel Prize in physics is about.