Through gestures big and small, Bruce Friedrich conforms to the archetype of a lifelong anti-meat crusader. He bikes almost everywhere. He was once arrested for streaking in front of Buckingham Palace with the web address goveg.com painted across his body. He runs a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, the Good Food Institute, that champions alternative proteins and doles out grants to accelerate their development. And he is a dutiful vegan whom I have witnessed scraping the cheese from the patty of an Impossible Whopper.Yet he is also a savvy observer of popular trends, as you can tell from the opening pages of his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food—And Our Future. From the start, Friedrich recognizes that the human diet is stubbornly carnivorous, perhaps even trending in what he considers to be the wrong direction. But he has traded in provocation for the soft sell. “I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat,” he writes. “This book isn’t about policing your plate.”Friedrich’s thesis appears in a chapter titled “Humanity’s Favorite Food”: To address society’s “insatiable craving for animal meat,” we merely have to produce it differently. This includes plant-based options such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as well as the cultivated cuisine being generated by companies such as Upside Foods—meat grown from animal cells in bioreactors resembling the fermentation tanks at your local craft brewery. (Recall Winston Churchill’s wish that humans would “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”)Friedrich is a rationalist to the core. Meat “is absolutely not a diet change book,” he told me over email, “and to the degree it has a stance on meat, that’s pro-meat. It just suggests a shift in how meat is produced.” Friedrich meticulously marshals figures in his book to explain the predicament: Animal agriculture is the chief driver of methane and nitrous-oxide emissions, yet the world is on pace to produce more than 370 million metric tons of meat a year. Given the current trajectory, we’ll require another 3.3 billion hectares of land over the next several decades to house all livestock, a scenario that imperils the planet’s remaining forests. Producing and promoting meat alternatives is, in his framing, an easy choice.If only we lived in a moment when measured arguments led to lasting, technocratic solutions. The ascendant mindset isn’t exactly moving Friedrich’s way. Under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again movement, raw milk is trendy and slaughterhouse meat now sits at the top of the food pyramid. The data on the popularity of meat substitutes aren’t especially forgiving, either. Sales of plant-based meat fell by 12 percent in 2023 (a trend that continues)—and this was before MAHA came to the fore. As for lab-grown meat, the Good Food Institute’s own recent survey showed that it appeals to just 21 percent of Americans.[Read: America is done pretending about meat]Can a supply-side leap in production fix this? Consider the comparison with a larger industry that has similar goals: alternative energy. Electric vehicles began growing in popularity a few years ago thanks to sustained investment and policies that begot social and cultural buy-in. (These policies were dialed back, however, under the Trump administration, and sales of new EVs began falling again.) Yet cultivated meat, still a relatively fringe innovation, isn’t available to the everyday consumer. And plant-based meat, which you can find in grocery stores, isn’t exactly flying off shelves.Friedrich explains this trend with characteristically cheery forthrightness in his book: “The products are not good enough, and all of them cost too much.” A gentle proselytizer, he has a habit of amiably conceding the shortcomings of meat substitutes before gathering himself back up to explain just how and why they will shortly be overcome. Fifteen years ago, no plant-based-meat products even came close to the real thing; now we have fast-food burgers with imitation patties. Cultivated meat was once a scientific novelty; by 2023, you could order cultivated chicken at China Chilcano, the José Andrés–owned restaurant in D.C.At times, Meat reads like any other book encouraging readers to eschew animal protein out of concern for the climate. Environmentalists and animal-rights advocates have been trying for the better part of 50 years to persuade people unlike Friedrich to eat less of the stuff—or none at all. But Friedrich isn’t trying to outdo Michael Pollan or Jonathan Safran Foer in rhetorical force or depth of research.Instead, what he sets out to accomplish—what feels new about Meat—is to convince readers of a generational opportunity to replace like with like: plant-based and cultivated meat that matches, in price and taste, the stuff under cellophane in supermarkets today. If these products can really catch on, a sustainable path may be well in sight. Replacing 50 percent of meat consumption with alternatives—a goal that feels aspirational, for now—would free up 650 million hectares of land, Friedrich writes. In conjunction with regenerative-farming methods and carbon sequestration, that could be enough to move meat-related pollution far down the list of climate threats.We certainly have the means, thanks in part to Friedrich. In the decade since he founded the Good Food Institute, the alternative-protein sector has grown into a business with billions of dollars in research funding, products that are approved for sale in the United States, and financial investment from Cargill and Tyson Foods, two of America’s three largest meat companies. This amounts to lasting progress.And yet, for there to be a way, there must be a will. The average American consumes more than 200 pounds of meat annually, and that amount is growing. Last year, in this publication, Yasmin Tayag reported that America was experiencing a “meat renaissance,” adding, “It’s not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.”[Read: RFK Jr. is taking an axe to America’s dietary guidelines]Cultural trends shift, of course, but what seems to stubbornly persist is an intrinsic discomfort with food that feels somehow inauthentic, and therefore viscerally wrong. “Maybe they can solve all this eventually and create products people will want to eat,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at NYU, told me of Friedrich and his compatriots. “But in general, as far as I can tell, people want to eat real food.”Friedrich tries to parry this point head-on. He believes there’s still a lot of work to be done in educating consumers on the fact that cultivated meat is real meat, just grown from the muscle and fat taken from a grazing cow or a strutting chicken. He also addresses concerns that plant-based meat is “ultra-processed,” noting that it still contains less saturated fat and fewer calories than the real thing.Most effectively, he pulls analogies from the history of scientific innovation, including his favorite example, the automobile. In the early 20th century, more than 500 car companies went bust. Cars were hard to start. Cars broke down easily. Cars were expensive. They were even panned in 1906 by Woodrow Wilson, when he was the president of Princeton University, as “a picture of the arrogance of wealth.” Just seven years later, following the release of Ford’s Model T, more than 1 million cars were on New York City’s streets.“Nothing is going to be successful until it meets consumer needs,” Friedrich told me, touching on the real problem. The gulf between consumers and meat alternatives (including lab-grown meat) lies in their taste, price, and inconvenience. Until those metrics align with what we already get from animal meat, alternatives won’t become mainstream. While acknowledging this, Friedrich highlights the ongoing research that’s pushing alt-protein closer and closer to what we’ve come to expect. Will the meat we eat, so often intertwined with culture and politics, be changed only through persuasion on the basis of “ethics, health, or novelty,” as Friedrich writes? That’s easy, to him: The answer is no. “We still have a long way to go, but the path forward is a lot more clear,” he said. We’ll need to produce new versions of humanity’s favorite food that taste like humanity’s favorite food, in a way that doesn’t asset-strip the planet in service of the dinner plate. Perhaps that feels like a tall order, but stranger things have happened.