Meat
How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food—and Our Future
-
- Pre-Order
-
- Expected Feb 3, 2026
-
- $15.99
-
- Pre-Order
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
"This packed account makes food science feel like an urgent and essential undertaking." —Publishers Weekly (Top Ten New Release in Science)
“A strong case for how science can come to our rescue in the kitchen—if we let it.” —Kirkus Reviews
Good Food Institute founder and president Bruce Friedrich offers a hopeful and rigorously researched exploration of how science, policy, and industry can work together to satisfy the world’s soaring demand for meat, while building a healthier and more sustainable world.
The human love of meat appears to be hard-wired. The world consumes more than 550 million metric tons of meat and seafood each year. That number has been climbing for decades and is expected to continue to rise through at least 2050.
What if we could give humanity the meat it craves, but produced differently? Plant-based and cultivated meat that are just as delicious as the meat you love, but more affordable and healthier.
Think it’s not possible? With examples ranging from the “horseless carriage” (car) to the smart phone in your pocket, Meat reminds readers that scientific innovations often move from disbelief or opposition to inevitability and ubiquity, much faster than almost anyone expects.
Envisioning a future where meat is both a delight and a force for good, Friedrich explores:
• Humanity’s 12,000-year-old practice of raising animals for meat, and why we need to figure out a better way.
• The science and scientists behind the efforts to create plant-based and cultivated meat that is indistinguishable from conventional animal meat, but less expensive, more nutritious, and safer.
• How plant-based and cultivated meat can preserve forests and biodiversity, mitigate climate change and ocean pollution, and lower antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk.
• The economic and food security benefits of making meat more efficiently, which include trillions of dollars in economic output annually, tens of millions of good jobs, and the possibility of a revitalized farm economy.
Meat offers a vision of the next agricultural revolution that is optimistic, achievable, and delicious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute, debuts with a passionate case for plant-based and cultivated (aka lab-grown) meat. Positing that humans will never choose to eat less meat, yet something must be done to halt the inefficiencies and environmental devastation of farmed protein, he argues that alternative meats are critical for a flourishing future and will quickly gain widespread adoption once they reach taste and price parity with conventional meats. As an early player in the field, he shares the history of alternative meat, highlighting key breakthroughs like Impossible's plant-based heme, or iron-containing compound, and Good Food's first cultivated chicken. He points to the benefits of alternative meat, including significantly fewer calories spent on producing them, lower risks of the next pandemic emerging from factory-farmed herds, and the national security of self-sufficient food chains. Countering arguments against alternative meats, he asserts that recent declines in sales of plant-based meat could be related to price, that converting land from conventional farming will open up more than enough crops for alt meats, that funding has not yet reached the necessary levels for mass adoption, and that consumers are more open to cultivated meat than many people claim. He sometimes belabors his points and gets lost in personal anecdotes, but his enthusiasm sharpens his arguments. This packed account makes food science feel like an urgent and essential undertaking.
