Imagine picking up some Wagyu beef as easily as you can buy ground chuck. Imagine the fried wings at your local greasy spoon having the unique marbled quality of meat from a Bresse chicken. Imagine if the roast-beef sandwich you make at home had the tender heft of prime rib, or if shrimp from the supermarket freezer had the sweetness and minerality of fresh-caught langoustine. Imagine purchasing chicken with the nutritional profile of wild-caught salmon.

Don’t stop there. Imagine grilling duck thighs juicy with Iberico pork fat. Imagine eating meat derived from the DNA of a dodo or a brontosaurus; Australia’s largest cultured-meat company, Vow, recently made meat from mammoth DNA. Imagine consuming meats grown from the most delicious cells from a menagerie of animals and plants—sea urchin, morel, blood orange. Imagine eating meat with the umami of a Dorito or the density of flavor of an Oreo. Vow is working on a food that, as the company’s co-founder and CEO, George Peppou, put it to me, is not a “faithful replica” of animal flesh. Rather, it will have its own characteristics—an earthy, mushroom-esque, quail-based product unlike anything anyone has ever had before.

Open your mind to unicorn meat. Because companies want you to open your mouth—and your wallet.

ntil recently, few people were fooled by vegan burgers or expected a cultivated-protein nugget to taste better than chicken. Meat was meat—delicious, ubiquitous, all-American. Fake meat was fake. The bean burgers and not-dogs that began appearing in American grocery stores and on restaurant menus about half a century ago were generally aimed at vegetarians, hippies, and/or health nuts. In many cases, they were not meant to taste like meat; in even more cases, they were not that tasty at all.

The deepening catastrophe of climate change has made fake meat a matter of moral urgency. By some estimates, 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come directly from animal agriculture. In the late aughts, a number of entrepreneurs cottoned on to the idea of reducing emissions by producing fake meat that carnivores could love. Venture capitalists have pumped billions of dollars into companies such as Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Eat Just, which set out to bring advanced materials science to bear on sausages, meatballs, and eggs.

For plant-based meat to taste more like meat, it needed to become more like meat at the molecular level, Priera Panescu, a chemist at the Good Food Institute, told me. Scientists needed to figure out how to lace plant-based proteins with fat—specifically, with fat that is solid at room temperature and liquid when heated, as lard and schmaltz are. (Fun fact: To do this, some companies use the same cryogenic equipment used to make Dippin’ Dots.) They needed to figure out how to develop long, stringy proteins, like the ones in muscle fibers, using industrial extruders. They needed to develop a meaty taste in plant products too. One big leap forward came when scientists at Impossible figured out how to grow heme—a compound that is found in blood and is a central reason beef tastes beefy—from yeast. “It took a lot of experimentation to expand the toolbox,” Panescu said.

In time, experimentation did expand the toolbox; plant-based burgers and sausages went from being lentil-based fiber pucks to pretty good imitations of the real thing. The Impossible Burger, for instance, really and truly tastes great. “The coconut fat will give it a lot of nice juice and sizzle and yumminess. And the heme will give it that red-meat look, feel, taste,” Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Impossible, told me. “When you put it on a grill, it’s gonna bleed, sizzle—and you’re going to have that whole sensory burger experience.”

A whole sensory experience very similar to the real one. In the past half decade, plant-based-meat companies and independent assessors have conducted blindfolded taste test after blindfolded taste test. Many consumers have proved incapable of telling what is real and what is fake; some chefs have too. In certain studies, people have even preferred the fake stuff.

Let’s stop and marvel at this for a moment. Human beings have been eating meat for as long as human beings have existed. “We have fossil animal bones with definite butchery marks left by stone tools,” Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, told me. “Two and a half million years ago, early humans, not even our species, were occasionally butchering animals, eating meat, and likely also eating fatty marrow.” (These primates were part of our great-grandparent species, she said, “still spending some time in the trees.”)

Eating meat is in our DNA. One prominent scientific theory even holds that meat-eating made us Homo sapiens. “Humans have really big brains,” Pobiner said. “They’re very big for our body size. They’re very energetically expensive. And so there is a hypothesis that what allowed for human brains to evolve so big is a high-quality food resource—namely, meat.”

Humans instinctively crave meat, seek it out, associate it with wealth and well-being. Frédéric Morin is the chef and an owner of Joe Beef, one of Montreal’s most feted restaurants, and a co-founder of the International Society of Neurogastronomy, a group dedicated to the study of why things taste the way they do. We chatted for a while about why meat tastes good: its fat content, its minerals and micronutrients, the compounds that give it umami. He emphasized its emotional and cultural significance as well. “Meat has a position in a lot of cultures as a celebratory dish—the ceremonial killing, or the slaying of the animal,” he told me.

Somehow, though, scientists have figured out how to make such a delectable product out of yeast and peas that we at times cannot tell the difference. In just adecade, plant-based meat has reached the point of taste parity. It has gone from being a niche food for vegetarians to a product consumed byfour in 10Americans.

lant-based meat’s techie cousin, lab-grown meat, has developed on a parallel path, though its advances have been slower and more expensive. Scientists first grew animal tissue in vitro at the turn of the 20th century, leading futurists to theorize that the era of the feedlot and the slaughterhouse might soon come to an end. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing,” Winston Churchill predicted in 1931, before becoming occupied with other matters. Yet the first cultured meat did not debut until the late 1990s. The first cultivated burger arrived in 2013. The first cultivated meat was approved for sale to the public in 2020, in Singapore.

Growing pig- or cow-muscle cells in a laboratory is not the problem, Amy Rowat, a biophysicist at UCLA, told me; making a large quantity of meat with an appetizing texture at a reasonable price point is. “We can grow cells in petri dishes in a lab—that’s what we do for biomedical sciences. But for that purpose, you might want milligrams of cells,” she explained. “For food production, you want kilograms. It’s orders of magnitude more, and the technical challenges are different.”

Challenge one: gathering crucial ingredients without killing a lot of cows first. Until recently, companies primarily used fetal-bovine serum as a growing medium for cultivated meat. This was costly and raised significant ethical concerns: Producing a single burger’s worth of lab-grown meat required extracting blood from the fetuses of numerous slaughtered pregnant dairy cows. (Firms now have access to a variety of synthetic and natural alternatives, such as those made from algae.)