Grass is made from recycled carbon dioxide and cows are made from grass. And we already know beef is delicious.
The point of the exercise is to find alternatives that aren't so hard on the environment.
>“By contrast, our process takes a few days to make a steak, has very low water utilization, is carbon negative, uses zero arable land, and minimal land overall.”
The point is not recycling carbon for funsies, but to actually have a positive impact on the environment. Whether the process described actually achieves this is to be determined, but it is evident that animal agriculture today is a big contributor to our environmental issues.
Cows and grass are "the environment".
Millions of years of evolution refined cows to be the best mechanism for converting grass into meat. Some hippy scientists think they can do better? I doubt.
https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2AB4XKW/kersey-colorado-a-cattle-f...
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/feedlot-picture-id17360...
https://www.africahunting.com/attachments/cattle-feed-lot-jp...
Grazing cows actually make the environment better.
So rather than blaming cows, blame the way they have been grown over the past 50 years or so.
You example is great because it shows just that.
Solar panels might give better absolute numbers but: they are not recyclable, they can't feed cows, they are manufactured in China using materials coming from mines around the world. They need complex set-up and maintenance.
Grass if fully recyclable - in fact it builds soil after dying. It feeds other animals. It protects the soil from erosion. It mines its own materials while growing, in fact it even bootstraps itself given just a seed containing all the code that it ever needs.
A F1 car is faster on a race track, but a bicycle gets the job done much more efficiently in most cities around the world for most tasks.
Seriously though, by mass, aren't plants by mostly carbon that was separated from CO2?
God, the Captain Planet re-boot got weird...