Are You Ready to Eat Meat Grown in a Lab?

Chase Purdy's book Billion Dollar Burger was reviewed in the New York Times.

Human appetites are strange things. Most eaters (I include myself) will salivate at bacon, despite what we know of the waste, squalor and suffering caused by mainstream meat production. Yet when we hear about a new type of “ethical” meat with a much lower carbon footprint, cultured from cells without killing a single animal, our initial response is usually something like: “Ew! — I wouldn’t eat that.”

We should try to get beyond our disgust about “lab meat,” argues the journalist Chase Purdy, who is in the rare position of having actually tasted it. In a fast-paced global narrative, Purdy follows the various cell-cultured meat companies that are currently competing to get their product to market first. The front-runners are in Israel, the Netherlands and (no surprise) Silicon Valley. The results of what Purdy calls this “edible space race” may shape the future of meat eating around the world.