Not much.

Soylent? Terrible. You have the people shitting themselves when they sneeze without bracing, the name itself, the "fan base," the substandard forms of nutrients, the lack of chewing.

Eating isn't just the nutrients. It's the entire act—it all matters. https://twitter.com/AXQ62/status/1262436278592823302

Maybe they've improved. It's been a couple years since I dove into the ingredients. But even if you "get it right," you're missing all the compounds we have yet to quantify.

It could be perfect on paper and still be missing something. Consider baby formula.

Formula is the most engineered food replacement in existence. They tweak it every year, trying to get it closer and closer to actual breast milk. It gets better every year, but it's still missing something.

Soylent and similar replacements have far less thought put into them.

Fake meat patties aren't much better. They use a novel compound that tries to mimic heme (animal form of iron), extracted from yeasts, that shows possible kidney toxicity in animal models. This soy heme doesn't actually appear in human diets, as it resides in the soy root system.

It's totally novel, but you can't escape it, you can't do a workaround if you want the things to taste somewhat edible and believable.

The pea protein? Peas are fine foods, long history, but isolated pea protein is novel and less effective than equivalent amount of beef protein

Cultured meat. This one sounds the most promising, on paper. I have questions.

What are the inputs? Is it more efficient to engineer meat from the top down or let it grow up in a field of grass?

If you care about this, is vat meat more carbon neutral than real meat?

As @hrestey said, meat is a product of its environment. Real life is rich and impossibly varied. Everything, from the compounds in the dozens of forage species the animal eats to the sun it gets to the stress it endures, affects the nutrition of the meat.

Can lab create that?

How does a cow's muscle tissue develop from birth, on a granular level? Does the lab replicate that 1:1? If not, could there be any ramifications?

Do animals have souls or spirits? Many of us feel there's something ineffable about life that can't be measured with instruments. If that thing exists, does it impact the health or value of that animal's meat?

What if it's absent, as it would almost certainly be from lab meat?

Some will disagree, but it matters that cultured meat is repulsive, viscerally. Our sense of disgust and disquiet must be heeded. It developed over millions of years. A kind of sixth sense. Ignore at your peril.

I'm not optimistic.