Chase Purdy

One of the most exciting entrepreneurial sagas of the past few years has been the quest to develop viable alternatives to meat. Journalist Chase Purdy recounts the story in his new book, Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food. Among the protagonists: Josh Tetrick, a vegan activist, enigmatic Silicon Valley player, and founder of JUST, which makes a mung bean-based egg substitute. Purdy completed his book before the pandemic struck. The following is an edited excerpt.

The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 has brought United States meat production to its knees. In 2019, the US produced more than 103 billion pounds of beef, pork, and chicken, about a fifth of which was exported—both records for the nation. But as workers in several of the biggest US meatpacking plants have fallen ill with Covid-19, many production lines have been halted, changing the fortunes of meat producers in 2020 and even beyond.

In San Francisco, a group of renderings hangs on a wall near the product development kitchen at JUST, one of about a dozen main companies working to market cell-cultured meat. The drawings show a large facility that’s accessible to the public, a place where people can walk up and peer through large windows at shiny vats filled with growing animal cells—created without ever having to kill an animal. It looks like a giant brewery. It’s a far cry from what the company has actually built.