Can we have our beef and eat it too by embracing high-tech lab-grown meat?

Climate One Conversations feature energy companies and environmentalists,

Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge.

I'm Greg Dalton.

To all be petty, special sauce, lettuce cheese.

What's more American than a big, meaty hamburger?

What you make isn't neat, it's a plant-based burger.

That's freelance journalist Chase Purdy, recalling a conversation he had with a CEO of Impossible Foods,

one of a new generation of companies that are developing high-tech alternatives to animal protein made from plants. Chase's new book is called Billion Dollar Burger, Inside Big Tech's

race for the future of food. They're not targeting vegans and vegetarians. They're targeting

diehard carnivores. Sophie Egan is author of How to Be a Conscious Eater, Making Food Choices that are Good for You,

Others, and the Planet.

She formerly served as Director of Health and Sustainability Leadership at the Culinary Institute

of America.

She says the future of protein features two innovations that could reduce the climate impacts

of our diet, meat manufactured from plants, and meat grown in a laboratory from the cells of real animals.

The future of protein, I would argue, is far more diversified or could be far more diversified than those two camps.

We can certainly get into the many parallel pathways that are needed given the scale of the protein,

the need for the protein shift in terms of feeding the growing population in ways that really

stay within planetary boundaries, that is the carrying capacity of the Earth.

As far as how those camps are different, I mean, what's interesting is, you know, sell meat,

and certainly my colleague here, Chase, can speak to this in far more detail,

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