Oxygen cannot diffuse past 200 microns, capping tissue thickness

Every cultivated meat company attempting to produce structured products (steaks, chicken breasts, pork chops) hits the same physics wall: oxygen and nutrients can only diffuse approximately 100-200 micrometers into avascular tissue. Beyond that distance, cells starve and die. So what? This means any tissue construct thicker than ~0.2mm will develop a necrotic core — dead cells in the center surrounded by a thin living shell. So what? A beef steak is typically 25-40mm thick, roughly 125-200x the diffusion limit. Without vascularization, you physically cannot grow a steak-shaped piece of meat in a bioreactor. So what? This confines commercial cultivated meat to thin, unstructured formats — nuggets, ground meat, thin patties — which are the exact product categories where plant-based alternatives already compete effectively at lower cost. So what? The highest-value meat products (ribeye, filet mignon, whole-muscle cuts) that would justify cultivated meat's premium price are precisely the ones that are biophysically impossible to produce with current technology. Why does this persist? Biological vascularization (growing blood vessel networks through the tissue) requires endothelial cell co-culture, angiogenic signaling, and perfusable channel engineering — none of which have been achieved at food-production scale. The tissue engineering field has studied this for 20+ years for medical implants and still hasn't solved it reliably.