In Meat, Bruce Friedrich makes the case that the future of protein will be built, not argued

When Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food – and Our Future goes on sale today, it arrives with an unusually broad audience already paying attention. Environmentalists, food scientists, investors, policymakers, and military strategists are all among the book’s early readers, an uncommon overlap that reflects both the scope of the argument and the scale of the problem it addresses.

Bruce Friedrich, Founder & President of the Good Food Institute, does not write Meat as a plea for dietary restraint. Instead, he offers a detailed account of why humanity’s appetite for meat has proven resistant to decades of education and advocacy, and why the only credible way forward is to change how meat itself is produced.

The starting point is straightforward. Humans now consume more than 550 million metric tons of meat and seafood each year. That figure has increased every year since global records began in 1961 and is expected to keep rising through at least 2050. Whatever people say they intend to eat, their actual behavior follows a different pattern.

For at least half a century, Friedrich notes, environmental groups, health experts, and animal welfare advocates have urged consumers to eat less meat. Some people have responded. The aggregate data has not. Global consumption continues to climb.

Friedrich’s conclusion is not that people do not care. It is that food choices are driven less by ethics than by taste, price, convenience, and familiarity. Behavioral science has shown this repeatedly. When asked about values, people often answer honestly. When standing in front of a menu or a supermarket shelf, instinct and environment take over.

In the USA, nine of the 10 most popular entrees remain meat-based. The tenth, Friedrich observes, is the grilled cheese sandwich.

If better outcomes for health, climate, and animal welfare are the goal, Friedrich argues, then alternatives have to align with how people actually choose food. Appeals to sacrifice have limited reach. Better products scale.

This idea runs through the heart of Meat, particularly in Chapter 5, where Friedrich lays out what he calls a theory of change grounded in adoption curves rather than moral persuasion. When plant-based and cultivated meat taste the same or better and cost the same or less, he argues, adoption accelerates rapidly. Not because people have been convinced to behave differently, but because they do not need to.

That argument draws heavily on the history of technological change. Friedrich reminds readers that innovations often move quickly from disbelief to ubiquity once they meet experiential expectations. Cars replace horses. Smartphones replace landlines and film cameras. None of those shifts require mass persuasion campaigns. They require better tools.

One of the book’s most memorable sections revisits a moment that Friedrich himself once dismissed. In 2013, Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled the world’s first cultivated hamburger in London. It was grown from animal cells, funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and cost roughly US$300,000 to produce.

At the time, Friedrich thought the demonstration was interesting but irrelevant. A six-figure burger did not look like a serious response to 12,000 years of animal agriculture.

What he later understands, and what Meat explains in detail, is that early prototypes are never meant to be affordable or scalable. Their purpose is to answer a single question: is this possible? Once that question is settled, cost curves, learning curves, and industrial optimization begin their work.

The first cultivated burger is not a product. It is proof.

Since then, Friedrich documents, progress has been steady and measurable. Governments across the USA, Europe, and Asia have funded research centers dedicated to cultivated meat. Peer-reviewed papers rise from just 27 between 2013 and 2020 to 160 in 2024 alone. Patent filings increase from 10 before the end of 2016 to more than 1,000 in the years that follow.

The challenge today, Friedrich writes, is no longer scientific feasibility. It is whether cultivated meat can be produced cheaply, safely, and at scale using food-grade inputs and industrial manufacturing. That is a difficult problem, but a familiar one.

A similar logic applies to plant-based meat, where Friedrich traces a shift away from messaging built around health or environmental virtue toward a focus on sensory experience. One of the book’s central figures is Patrick Brown, a tenured Stanford professor who leaves academia in 2011 to found Impossible Foods.

Brown, who holds both an MD and a PhD and has spent years in cancer research and genomics, reaches a blunt conclusion during a climate-focused sabbatical. Animal agriculture is not hard to criticize. It is hard to replace.

People eat meat because it tastes good, is affordable, and is woven into everyday meals. If someone can make a burger that fast-food chains would serve instead of beef, Brown realizes, the impact would dwarf decades of advocacy.

Brown later puts the problem in stark terms: understanding what makes meat taste good is the most important scientific question in the world.

Impossible Foods does not try to persuade consumers to eat differently. It tries to recreate the experience they already want, using different inputs. Friedrich treats this not as a branding insight but as an engineering one, and returns repeatedly to the idea that scale, not sentiment, determines success.

That focus on systems rather than individuals extends to the book’s treatment of public policy. One of the most persistent claims Friedrich addresses is the idea that agricultural subsidies make it impossible for plant-based meat to compete.

The numbers, he writes, do not support that belief. In the USA, agricultural subsidies total roughly US$10 billion to US$20 billion per year. Spread across national meat and dairy consumption, that works out to just a few cents per pound, even under the unrealistic assumption that every dollar goes to meat.

Other crops, including cotton, rice, sugar, and peanuts, receive substantial support as well. More importantly, Friedrich argues, governments often act to protect domestic meat industry profits through trade barriers and price supports, keeping prices higher rather than lower.

Subsidies are not irrelevant, but they are not the main reason alternative proteins cost more. Manufacturing efficiency, scale, and technology are.

Where government involvement matters most, Friedrich suggests, is not in dismantling existing supports but in accelerating innovation. He rejects the idea that food system change will emerge through laissez-faire markets alone. Every major agricultural shift in history, from synthetic fertilizers to modern breeding, involves public investment.

Climate change features prominently in the book, though Friedrich avoids treating food as a substitute for energy policy. Even aggressive progress on fossil fuels, he writes, will fall short of climate targets if conventional meat production continues to rise.

Land use, rather than emissions alone, is the binding constraint. Large-scale animal agriculture requires vast areas for grazing and feed crops. Alternative proteins, by contrast, offer a way to decouple meat production from land intensity.

Friedrich also challenges common narratives around deforestation, particularly the tendency to focus solely on cattle. Much of the world’s soy, he notes, is fed not to cows but to chickens, pigs, and farmed fish. Misunderstanding those flows leads to poorly targeted policies.

Public health risks form another major strand of the book. Friedrich devotes an early chapter to antimicrobial resistance, pointing out that most of the antibiotics that make modern medicine possible are not used in hospitals but fed to farm animals. Roughly 100,000 metric tons are administered each year, and the total is rising.

Reducing that dependence, he argues, requires reducing reliance on animal agriculture at scale. Individual consumer choices cannot solve a system-wide exposure problem.

Friedrich also addresses skepticism around cultivated meat, particularly claims that it is synthetic or unnatural. Cultivated meat, he writes, is animal meat, grown from animal cells in cultivators similar to brewing tanks. The science comes directly from decades of tissue engineering for human medicine, which explains why early pioneers such as Mark Post and Uma Valeti are medical doctors.

Early doubts, Friedrich acknowledges, including his own, are not about whether cultivated meat is theoretically possible. They are about whether it can ever be practical. A decade of research, investment, and industrial learning has shifted that question.

Perhaps the book’s most provocative sections deal with the 'ick factor' and the idea that conventional meat is natural in ways alternatives are not. Friedrich catalogs the realities of industrial meat production, including routine antibiotic residues, contamination thresholds, and regulatory allowances that bear little resemblance to pastoral imagery.

The comparison, he suggests, is not between natural and artificial, but between two industrial systems, one far more controlled than the other.

Throughout, Meat avoids utopian promises. Friedrich does not claim alternative proteins will eliminate all problems or replace animal agriculture overnight. He argues instead that they offer a way to meet rising demand with fewer downsides, and that the choice is not between perfection and failure, but between better and worse systems.

The tone remains pragmatic. Friedrich engages with critics directly, acknowledges uncertainty where it exists, and returns repeatedly to the same point: food systems change when products work at scale.

That approach appears to resonate widely. Endorsements come from scientists, economists, climate leaders, and writers across ideological lines. The late-Jane Goodall calls the book engaging and hopeful. Harvard geneticist George Church praises its scientific grounding. Kim Stanley Robinson describes it as clear, persuasive, and entertaining.

The Guardian devoted a two-page spread to the book this past week. “These alternative proteins are the electric vehicles of food,” Friedrich tells the paper. “The same experience, but better.”

Whether readers agree with every conclusion or not, Meat succeeds in shifting the conversation. Rather than asking what people should eat, it asks how the food they already love can be made differently.

If Friedrich is right, the future of meat will not be decided at the dinner table, but in laboratories, factories, and policy rooms. And by the time most people notice the shift, it may already feel inevitable.