Billion Dollar Burger

The riveting story of the race to bring lab-grown meat to market--and upend the way we eat forever.

In a fast-paced drama spanning multiple continents, Quartz reporter Chase Purdy takes us inside the battle for the future of food. In the laboratory of a Silicon Valley company called JUST, scientists are growing real meat from microscopic animal cells. Its CEO, Josh Tetrick, has been racing to ready lab-grown, slaughter-free meat for the mainstream market. The goal? To bring his meat to the masses, fulfilling a dream of creating meat without ever having to kill an animal.

Purdy follows Tetrick as he crisscrosses the globe to find a government daring enough to approve serving his high-tech meat to diners. Tetrick plays regulators in the US and abroad, hacking a path forward for this unprecedented technology. At the same time, more than a dozen seasoned entrepreneurs and PhD biologists are nipping at Tetrick's heels.

Drawing from exclusive and unprecedented access to the main players, Billion Dollar Burger is a high-tech thriller with monumentally high stakes: cell-cultured meat is possibly the best hope for sustainable food production, a key to fighting climate change, a gold mine for the people that make it happen, and an existential threat for the farmers and meatpackers that make our meat today.

Billion Dollar Burger is a science fiction tale brought to reality that shows us what the winners stand to gain from this groundbreaking technology--and what we might lose.