Billion Dollar Burger

A thorough, thoughtful dive into the revolution coming for our plates. I learned so much
A wild ride to the far horizon of our food system. Chase Purdy breaks important new ground in this gripping account about the innovators, activists and big-money investors who are reinventing meat as we know it. Not only are they changing the world - they're doing it a lot faster than you think
This is a fast-paced, early peek into what will soon be the topic at dinner for the next two decades: lab-grown meat. What do we call it, is it good, should I eat it? Read this and get ahead of the curve
Billion Dollar Burger is a journalistic feat, offering us the first real, behind-the-scenes look at the wild world of vegans, scientists and venture capitalists racing to upend our plates. A thoughtful, entertaining, well-researched and essential book
Can humanity move beyond the slaughterhouse? Billion Dollar Burger is a compulsive and well-researched account of the scientists, entrepreneurs and activists trying to save the world through high-tech meat
A deeply reported account of the science, politics, and personalities behind cell-cultured meat that every eater needs to read. Chase Purdy brings the stuff of science fiction to life in this fascinating book
Chase Purdy brilliantly chronicles the emergence of a new industry poised to set us on the path to a more humane future, with dramatic implications for agriculture, the environment and the way we think about food

A thoroughly enjoyable read. Chase Purdy offers us a window into this nascent industry at a particularly interesting time in the growth of the early pioneer cultured meat companies. He delivers an insightful narrative into the future of our food system and navigates the politics and personalities that are shaping the scaling, regulation and consumer acceptance of cultured meat
A very interesting read. This advance in technology could have a massive influence on our future. Whether or not you'd serve lab-grown meat on your dinner table, it has the power to save billions of animals from exploitation and could enable us to conserve the planet
A well-researched and insightful narrative of the "edible space race" . . . Billion Dollar Burger is an exciting and unpredictable journey into the heart of a growing new sector that will have huge consequences for the future of the planet
The riveting story of the entrepreneurs and renegades fighting to bring the future to our plates


In 2013, an unassuming burger patty made global headlines. It wasn't exceptionally delicious or even grass fed. It caught the world's attention because of how it was made.

Unlike every other burger, this one didn't come from a cow - at least, not directly. Instead, a Dutch laboratory had painstakingly grown the meat from a handful of cow cells in a petri dish, at a cost of $330,000. This burger was the stuff of science fiction brought to life: real meat created without slaughter or environmental devastation.

Now a group of entrepreneurs and scientists are on a mission to bring cell-cultured meat to the masses. Billion Dollar Burger follows their fight to upend the trillion-dollar meat industry, drawing from exclusive and unprecedented access to the main players, from polarising activist-turned-tech-CEO Josh Tetrick to Dutch scientist Mark Post, creator of the 2013 cell-cultured burger. Armed with a mountain of investment capital, they're tugging at the seams of the meat system as we've known it and attempting to carve a more sustainable path into the future. But the entrenched interests, who have everything to lose, are playing dirty. Cell-cultured meat is an existential threat to Big Meat and a potential gold mine for the entrepreneurs who make it happen.

The stakes are monumentally high. Are we ready?

'A deeply reported account of the science, politics, and personalities behind cell-cultured meat that every eater needs to read. Chase Purdy brings the stuff of science fiction to life in this fascinating book' JOHN MACKEY, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market