The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

Now, thanks to the ingenuity of modern food science, we had a choice. We could eat things designed by humans for the express purpose of being eaten by people—or eat “substances” designed by natural selection for its own purposes: to, say, snooker a bee or lift a wing or (eek!) make a baby. The meal of the future would be fabricated “in the laboratory out of a wide variety of materials,” as one food historian wrote in 1973, including not only algae and fungi but also petrochemicals. Protein would be extracted directly from petroleum and then “spun and woven into ‘animal’ muscle—long, wrist-thick tubes of ‘filet steak.’” (Come to think of it, agribusiness has long since mastered this trick of turning petroleum into steak, though it still needs corn and cattle to do it.)