On 5 August 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historic burger, made from cattle cells grown in a laboratory by Mark Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The burger had taken two years to produce and cost €250,000 (about £210,000 at the time), money furnished by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Now it was being tasted in public for the first time at Riverside Studios in London, at an event attended by 200 members of the press and livestreamed to thousands.

To make this particular burger, Post had extracted stem cells from the shoulder muscle of a living cow, then cultivated them in plastic containers filled with a nutrient-rich supplement called foetal bovine serum, which is derived from cow foetuses. The cells eventually became 20,000 strands of tissue, which in turn became a single 140g patty. Post believed that beef produced this way had the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and slow the climate crisis. Raising cattle for consumption requires massive amounts of land and water – and massive amounts of feed grown at a high environmental cost. He projected that global demand for meat would soon outstrip our ability to produce it the old-fashioned way, at which point our food systems would become unsustainable. But that didn't have to mean a mass recalibration of our consumption habits or a global shift away from red meat. Post and his team had found another way.

Standing at a blond-wood island on an otherwise empty soundstage, Post lifted the kind of stainless-steel cloche usually found on a room service cart to reveal his creation. The raw patty sat in a petri dish on a bare plate, where it shone wetly under the studio lights. With the ITV London anchor Nina Hossain presiding, a Cornish chef named Richard McGeown pan-fried the burger in sunflower oil and butter for two volunteer tasters: Josh Schonwald, the Chicago-based author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutrition scientist. So precious was this meat that they were given just the one burger to share between them. It was served deconstructed, alongside a sesame-seed bun, lettuce and tomato – showmanship to sell the burger a bit, give it context. The patty itself was reddish brown, flat and perfectly circular. When Schonwald and Rützler cut it, the burger did not bleed.

The two of them ate with forks and knives, passing the plate, sawing off thoughtful bites. Chewing slowly. Afterwards, they rendered their verdicts. "I would say it is somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger and McDonald's," Schonwald told a reporter from NBC. "The absence of fat makes a big difference. It has the texture, which I was not expecting. It was like an animal-protein cake." Rützler noted the burger's blandness to a reporter from Science. "There is room for improvement here," she said. At the end of the event, about €113,000 worth of burger remained uneaten. But none of this stopped Post from predicting that meat cultivated in a lab would become a consumer product within the decade.

The event – the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle – triggered a kind of gold rush. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail. Investment to the tune of $3bn (£2.2bn) flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight the climate crisis and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to "set the new standard for meat" and to "make meat a force of good in the world". A company called Vow created an enormous woolly mammoth meatball, though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn't know whether it was actually fit for human consumption. The thinktank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the US beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70%. As the organisation wrote, "We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago."

And yet, despite the frenzy, the meat itself never arrived. The challenges were numerous. There was the exorbitant upfront cost of building manufacturing facilities and the daunting amounts of energy required to run them. There was the difficulty of producing sufficient quantities of the stuff, at a price point low enough for people to buy. There was the lack of a highly skilled workforce trained to operate the new technology. There were rounds and rounds of inspections by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). There was even, occasionally, the unwanted appearance of rodent DNA in research samples, which happened to the companies Upside and Eat Just. After peaking in 2021, investment began to fall off. In 2023, the industry raised a measly $177m globally.

But it wasn't only venture capitalists who had started to grow sceptical of cultivated meat. The technology soon became a target of conservatives. The state governments of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska and Texas moved in quick succession to legislate against cultivated meat, passing laws that banned its sale, production, or both. The Florida governor Ron DeSantis made a media event out of signing that state's law, posing for pictures in front of a blood-stained cutting board piled high with steaks. "Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere," he said. "We're not doing that in the state of Florida." In 2024, the industrial biotech consultant Joel Stone told the New York Times that, if he had to put odds on it, the likelihood of the industry producing even 10% of the meat supply in the foreseeable future "would be zero". Today, cultivated meat is available for purchase at just one store in the world: Huber's Butchery in Singapore, where customers can buy packages of lab-grown chicken shreds from a manufacturer called GOOD Meat.

These developments were inconvenient for me, a person who became obsessed with the prospect of tasting cell-grown meat just as the possibility of ever doing so seemed to recede before my eyes. I was enthralled by the story of the meat, which seemed to contain so much of what defined this era of American life: dubious techno-optimism, bombastic culture-war posturing, carnival oddities like the mammoth meatball. It presented a snarl of competing motives, a mix of altruism and cold-blooded striving for capital (nothing can ever exist just for the common good; it has to make someone a billionaire). There was also the fact that I had been a vegetarian for almost 20 years.

The last meat I ever ate was a hotdog at Shea Stadium in New York in 2007. I don't remember how it tasted – probably like every other hotdog I had eaten before. I washed it down with an exorbitantly priced but very cold Budweiser in one of those metal bottles. I quit eating meat after that, not because the hotdog had been disgusting but because I didn't like the sensation of the inevitable bad bite, the periodic tangle with gristle or tendon or bone. Then my abstention grew into habit, and the habit was reinforced by other concerns: the catastrophic environmental consequences of industrial meat production; the creeping doubt, as I grow older, that I'm necessarily higher in the cosmic order than a chicken or a cow. But cultivated meat raised a compelling question. If you could subtract some of the downsides – make meat less destructive, engineer away its aesthetic flaws – what reason would there be not to eat it?

This question had begun to feel moot as the potential of cultivated meat grew less and less promising. But just when it seemed as though Post's vision would never be realised, encouraging news emerged from a surprising place: North Carolina. In May 2024, when many of his peers were fleeing the sector, Jeff Bezos granted $30m through his Earth Fund to establish the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at North Carolina State University, an initiative dedicated to developing "dietary proteins that are environmentally friendly, healthy, tasty and affordable". The donation cemented the state's status as a new global centre of the cultivated-meat industry. The Bezos Center would join the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, an economic development organisation for the life sciences in Research Triangle Park.

On the commercial side of things, Believer Meats, an Israeli company producing cultivated chicken, had recently broken ground on a 200,000 sq ft manufacturing plant in Wilson, North Carolina. The plant would be the largest cultivated-meat facility in the world – capable, the company claimed, of producing 9.5m kilos of engineered chicken per year.

In September 2025, Believer received a "no questions" letter from the FDA, indicating that the agency did not encounter safety concerns in its inspection of the company's products. "We are proud to be commercialising in this state, creating high-quality manufacturing jobs and enabling us to realise our vision to lead food innovations that care for the planet," said Believer's then CEO, a man named (for real) Gustavo Burger, in a press release celebrating the milestone. I got in touch with the company shortly after. In a Zoom meeting with Heather Hudson, Believer's chief product and growth officer, and Rodrigo Lavall, from sales and marketing, the two dangled the possibility of a ribbon-cutting ceremony. They could tentatively plan something and invite me down to visit.

The whole thing felt a bit Wonka-ish. No one from the press had been allowed inside the factory yet. Only a few professionals in the field had even toured it. Why should I get the golden ticket? But I tried not to question my good fortune. Excited by the prospect of exclusive access, I started planning a trip to the Triangle. If lab-grown meat had a future, I might find it there. Maybe, I thought, I'd even get to taste it.

On a mild day in early December, I arrived at NC State's sprawling campus, home to about 40,000 students. I expected it to be lively, teeming with kids, but it was eerily dead. Rohan Shirwaiker, the friendly, bespectacled director of the Bezos Center, met me in a pristine building where I didn't see a single student. Everyone, he explained, had gone home for the holidays.

The Bezos Center aims to address, as its website puts it, the "critical barriers and gaps" still dogging cultivated meat. The process has changed as the industry scales up. It's no longer Post labouring over a single burger in his lab for years at a time. Cultivation now takes place in sterile factories that look more like breweries, with cells grown not in culture dishes but in giant, stainless-steel bioreactors. Producers have also moved away from feeding the cells with foetal bovine serum, which is expensive and requires harvesting cow blood from slaughterhouses (not exactly a good look for a cruelty-free alternative meat product). The industry now relies on what is referred to as "serum-free media", or SFM, proprietary compounds that vary from company to company. Still, the basic science remains the same: in one typical version of the process, stem cells are harvested from a living animal via needle biopsy, then nourished in solutions containing glucose, vitamins, fats, minerals, proteins and amino acids, which are swished around inside a reactor to ensure an even diffusion of nutrients. In these conditions, the cells divide, multiply and differentiate just as they would inside an animal. They are ready for harvesting when they reach the desired density: roughly within two to eight weeks, depending on the species being cultivated.

But what also remains is one of the industry's fundamental challenges. You cannot simply grow a steak – yank it out of the reactor and slap it on the table at a restaurant – because a steak contains multiple kinds of tissue. At the moment, muscle and fat can only be cultivated separately, and typically they do not form solid matter but a semisolid slurry that must be taken from the reactors, washed, combined with other ingredients for flavour and texture, and extruded or 3D-printed into something you would recognise as meat: a burger or a nugget or a meatball or a fillet. Some companies are trying to circumnavigate the slurry stage by building scaffolding inside reactors for cells to cling to, producing a firmer product. (Certain types of cells don't like floating in a tank all free like that. Tissue, I'm told, wants to adhere to bone.)

The cost of all this has come way down since Schonwald called Post's burger an "animal-protein cake", but right now, cultivated meat is far more expensive than the real thing. At Huber's, in Singapore, the ominously named GOOD Meat 3, which contains only 3% chicken cells, sells for $5.62 (£4.20) per 110g serving. Meanwhile, chicken at my local supermarket, containing 100% animal cells, starts at $3.49 per 450g.

Shirwaiker took me on a tour of the Bezos Center's brand new protein lab, which was still being set up. It was spacious and filled with light, lined with 3D printers and a humming but empty stainless-steel fridge. The printers, in particular, were huge and impressive. But the lab was still in the early phases of assembly; cables dangled from the ceiling, waiting for equipment that had yet to be delivered.

As Shirwaiker and I walked back to his office, we discussed the day's shocking headline: while I was travelling to North Carolina from my home in upstate New York, news broke that Believer Meats was being sued for $34m by Gray Construction, the firm that built its hulking factory in Wilson. Believer had recently defaulted on an agreement to pay Gray an instalment of $22m. Maybe I should have seen it coming: after her initial enthusiasm, Hudson, my contact at Believer, had ghosted me in the days leading up to my trip.

I asked Shirwaiker what all this meant. He was as surprised as I was. He thought that the plant was so close to opening that the staff just needed to turn on the lights and boot up the chicken vats. No one knows yet what happened at Believer, he told me. It was unclear whether the company would survive.

Before I left the Bezos Center, Shirwaiker introduced me to the concept of the Gartner Hype Cycle. To me, it had the ring of an old concept, a framework invented in the mid-20th century by an economist or a professor. But no: it was formulated in 1995 by a woman named Jackie Fenn, who worked at the consultancy firm Gartner. Its purpose, according to a YouTube video made by the company, is to help you – a savvy investor, the video assumes – "understand the real risks and opportunities of an innovation so you can avoid adopting something too early, giving up too soon, adopting too late, or hanging on too long".

Shirwaiker showed me a chart to illustrate. The -axis was time, and the -axis was visibility. The cycle begins with an "innovation trigger", when a new technology is introduced to great fanfare, then arcs upward toward the "peak of inflated expectations" as excitement mounts. But this rise is inevitably followed by a dramatic fall, when investors realise how difficult it's going to be to actually commercialise the innovation. Later comes a gentler climb up the "slope of enlightenment", when second- and third-generation products emerge, until, finally, we reach the "plateau of productivity", the slow, unflashy development of the technology. If Post's burger was the innovation trigger, I asked Shirwaiker, where were we now? He circled the deep valley in the middle of the chart: the "trough of disillusionment".

Before leaving campus, I tried Hudson again. I let her know that I was in the area and asked if I should "stop by", as though the Believer facility were a conveniently located coffee shop rather than a meat factory in a rural area. I immediately received an auto-response that her email account was no longer active. Then I thought, what the hell, and decided to drive out to Wilson, about 45 minutes from Raleigh. I'll go to see what's up, I figured. I'll talk to someone face-to-face, have some sort of confrontation with a person overseeing the plant – maybe even Hudson herself.

Rural North Carolina felt enormous, flat and empty. The landscape was almost featureless; huge swaths of nothing streamed by, and then I hit factories. Believer was located among a loose cluster of manufacturing facilities. To get there, I had to turn off a main strip containing a Chick-fil-A, a Bojangles, a McDonald's and a Best-N-Burgers. At one point, I yielded to the flashing lights of what I thought was an emergency vehicle, only to find, as it passed, that it was a pickup truck towing a meat smoker. I was surrounded by the stuff. I thought of Post's prediction that demand for meat would soon outstrip our ability to produce it. Sometimes it seems that this will happen tomorrow.

What I found when I got to Believer was grimmer than I expected. Not a chipper-then-confused-then-annoyed desk clerk wondering who this was showing up at a meat factory without an appointment, but no one at all. The facility was deserted, gated: a royal-blue cube under a pale late-autumn sky, millions of dollars of groundbreaking technology locked inside.

There is a widespread feeling in the US that everything is a hoax or a Ponzi scheme, and this feeling is only reinforced by the news. The news that self-driving taxis, when they become confused, are actually operated remotely from the Philippines. The news that the mysterious invention that could scan your blood for any number of disorders was an era-defining scam. The news that the crypto entrepreneur who pledged to secure the longtime survival of the human race was actually stealing $8bn of his customers' money to fund his polycule in the Bahamas. I became paranoid, standing in front of the abandoned car park, that cultivated meat was just another lie, or a semi-lie, or a bluff. That the reason the meat was so difficult to get my hands on was that it did not exist. The possible implosion of Believer was disappointing not just because it represented a setback in the quest to reduce our carbon emissions and fortify our food systems against climate collapse, but because it seemed to confirm that we live in a cheap, mendacious world, where what passes for progress almost always turns out to be a confidence game.

The morning after my reconnaissance mission, more news broke: Believer was declaring bankruptcy and would shutter the factory in Wilson before it printed a single chicken strip.

I had timed my trip to North Carolina to coincide with the first annual Global Forum for Plant-Based and Alternative Proteins, held at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. This was how I found myself cloistered among the faithful as their meat dreams unravelled in real time. All the local industry players were in attendance, and more had flown in from around the world. We were sitting together in NCBiotech's blandly carpeted lecture hall for the opening session, listening to optimistic remarks about international collaboration, an opaque joke about an extruder, a shout-out to "Ian in the back from the insect side", all the while knowing that the industry's biggest gambit yet had just failed. With Believer gone bust, I hoped to salvage a glimmer of optimism for the industry from the day's proceedings – or, at the very least, an honest assessment of what had gone wrong.

During a break in the programme, everyone filed out and congregated in the atrium. We were in the trough of disillusionment, but we were also in the divot of gossip. We were in the furrow of hanging around outside the auditorium talking excitedly. We were in the ravine of wanting to know what the hell had happened. I was surrounded by guys in crisp button-ups and thermal gilets and navy-blue blazers. There were not a ton of women present. All around me, speculation began to fly.

"There was a time about three or four years ago, post-pandemic, the money was so easy to come by. All you had to do was put a pitch deck together, and VCs would throw money at you."

"They have a pretty star list of investors."

"Yeah. That doesn't guarantee a success."

"They got the building up. The building is ready to, like, turn on."

"It's probably gonna be a liquidation. Again, we're all assuming. We don't know what the heck's going on."

"There's got to be some news out of Israel."

Later, we heard from venture capitalists who had no choice but to address the news head on. "I mean, elephant in the room: Believer Meats just down the road basically went out of business," said Steve Simitzis, from Replicator VC, a firm that invests in early-stage food-tech companies. "I don't have any information about it, but I would speculate that building factories around technology that isn't ready at scale is probably a cause." Well, duh, I thought. The VCs on the panel saw Believer as a cautionary tale. Don't scale too quickly. Lower costs. Make something consumers actually want to eat. All these observations were sensible, even obvious, and yet wasn't it also the case that the VCs had put pressure on companies like Believer to expand rapidly in order to provide the returns they sought?

In the afternoon, we all tried to rally for a tasting of products by food startups. At last, I was sampling things. I drank some kind of fizzy peach tea. It was not immediately obvious to me what the innovation was, so I asked the young guy handing out the cans about it. It's supposed to be refreshing, he said. Like after a run you can drink one and it won't make you puke. Curiously, though, there was no cultivated meat on offer. The Research Triangle may be an industry hub, but the product did not seem to be available here. The product was still a prototype, or the product was too expensive to give out as samples. The closest thing on hand was plant-based vegan meat. I tried wheat-based turkey and wheat-based pepperoni from a company called The BE Hive. I tried "some kind of pulled meat", as the person wheeling it out from the kitchen described it, from a company called Delight Soy. It had a stringy texture and was an orangish brown. I tried a fungi-and-soy-based salmon substitute from a company called Juicy Marbles. This one was very close to tasting like salmon. They had got something right, everyone around me agreed. To our wonder and dismay, Juicy Marbles had nailed the fishiness. Probably algae in there, someone remarked. We nodded. Yes, probably algae.

The experience was nauseating, though the cube of salmon tasted good. Or rather, it would have tasted good if you could isolate taste from the other senses. Like, if you didn't see the morsel of fake fish, or feel it in your mouth, or smell its oily smell. And if you didn't also know that it was synthetic. The knowing added a layer of queasiness. The idea that they would infuse soy with an for verisimilitude – a cloying, marine smell, like the hold of a fishing boat.

So all it would take for this thing to be palatable would be to experience it in a sensory vacuum and preferably context-free, or immediately after a blow to the head that wipes out everything you know about it. Then it would be pretty nice.

In January, a few weeks after my trip to the Research Triangle, a man ate a chicken sandwich. He ate two, actually: one made with conventional chicken and one made with a cultivated fillet. In a video of his visit to the Upside Foods factory in California, he stands next to a vat of swirling chicken cells. The cells are foamy, the cheerful yellow of Campbell's broth. The man's name is Jimmy Donaldson, though he's known more widely as the YouTube sensation MrBeast, and he thinks that cell-grown meat has a lot of advantages. "These chickens don't get diseases," says MrBeast. "So then you don't have to worry about a disease spreading on the farm and then you eating a sick chicken." When it's time to try to guess which sandwich is which, he can't do it. "I honestly can't tell," he says, before guessing wrong.

Watching the video on my phone, it irked me that MrBeast had tasted the meat. That should have been standing next to the churning chicken water. For months I'd been trying to find cultivated meat on the east coast; I had even considered buying it from Singapore on the grey market. Nothing panned out. Finally, Rohan Shirwaiker sent me details for a public tasting in the Bay Area held by Mission Barns, another partner of the Bezos Center. It would take place at the supermarket Berkeley Bowl West, which had previously sold a limited run of the company's meatballs.

On a Friday in February, I flew out to San Francisco and got a cab over to the Mission Barns office, which was located in SoMa, on a desolate and unlovely block of warehouses. Not many Waymos swooping by out there, but at least it felt appropriately industrial, with the office upstairs and bioreactors below. Not that I got to see them: when I asked, I was gently rebuffed with the excuse that the company was in the process of moving to a larger facility in Alameda. I felt the ambient paranoia I'd experienced in North Carolina start to kick in again. After the collapse of Believer, Mission Barns seemed like one of the American companies closest to having its products on grocery-store shelves. At the end of last year, it received USDA approval for its cultivated pork fat. At the time of my visit, its products included bacon, pepperoni, meatballs and a couple varieties of sausage.

Bianca Lê, a smiley, put-together Australian and the then head of external affairs at Mission Barns, took me up to the company's third-floor office, which contained a large kitchen on one side. As we sat at the wooden island, she told me about the origin of the cells for all of the company's cultivated fat: a single Yorkshire pig named Dawn who was still, according to the company's marketing materials, "happily roaming free" in an animal sanctuary in upstate New York, not far from where I live. Dawn reminded me of Dolly the sheep – a mascot for something much larger than herself. One wants to picture her soulful.

"Can I ask how Dawn was selected?" I said, hoping to hear something about Dawn as a superior specimen, the fattest, happiest, healthiest, smartest pig in the US.

"Yeah, honestly, it's not that interesting of a story," said Lê. "It's just that she was available."

The Mission Barns cultivation process takes about two weeks. At the end, they drain the bioreactors until they are left with just the fat slurry. "It's white, it's semisolid, it's really pasty," Lê said. That slurry is then combined with plant protein to create the final product, which typically contains less than 10% of animal cells per serving. I tried to understand how they got the fat out of one container and into the next, miming a large scoop or shovel, but this part was a secret. The company's ultimate goal, Lê told me, wasn't even to sell products but to license the system itself.

Mission Barns's then CEO, Cecilia Chang, appeared: another smiley, put-together Australian. As she joined us at the counter, I asked her about the biggest challenges the company faces. "The timeline on being able to get costs down fast enough to get to a point of profitability," she said. "The technology is there, but investors have really aggressive timelines." Chang also mentioned a newer hurdle: the distrust of food science stoked by Donald Trump's secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Still, the industry was trying to look at Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement as an opportunity rather than as a disaster. After all, MAHA focused on protein; Kennedy's new, inverted food pyramid features steak at the very top. And, although the movement broadly disdains processed foods, Chang told me, it may appreciate that cell-cultivated meat is usually organic and antibiotic-free. I recalled the lay wisdom of MrBeast: "These chickens don't get diseases."

As we chatted, Zachary Tyndall, Mission Barns's product-development and culinary manager, prepared some meat for me in a frying pan. Tyndall is a former chef who once worked at the three-Michelin-star restaurant Noma, an apprenticeship that seemed unnecessary for the level of cooking involved here. He used a spatula to roll a single meatball around in a pan. The meat was a pale, pinkish beige, like real pork. It's not that different from cooking conventional meat, he told me, though maybe a little bit quicker, since the company's meatballs are precooked and only need reheating. It smelled savoury, like food, and indeed, it was food. I'll give it that.

I received my meatball on a tastefully speckled earthenware plate. Though nearly delirious with excitement, I tried to zoom out for a second and glimpse the situation with objectivity. I was looking at a single small meatball in the middle of a plate in a chilly, industrial office thousands of miles away from home. This was what I had elected to pursue over the course of months with single-minded determination. With all eyes on me, I used the fork to cut it in half and took a bite.

The taste. The taste was not terrible. It was seasoned, oregano-heavy. It even had a kick. Everyone was watching as I chewed, so I feigned deep consideration, the way you do when the waiter brings you a sample of wine at a restaurant. "Hmm," I mused. I am contemplating the tasting notes, my face said. I am weighing the mouthfeel. I tasted the salami too, which looked exactly like regular salami. It tasted like salty paper. Salty paper with a kick – they're good about putting in the kick. I could not find much to say to Chang and Lê about the meat, though I tried. The phrase "blandly inoffensive" came to mind. The word "anticlimax" came to mind. This was what I had come all this way for? To eat something that felt like mushy cardboard in my mouth?

"It's good," I managed to tell them. Then, suddenly, the nausea hit, a taste of vomit in the back of my throat. It was the Juicy Marbles effect again. The problem was not the flavour, not the texture, but the knowing. The Knowing. Knowing about the fat tank, about the sticky white substance. The envisioning of the scoop. The knowing about Dawn, an ordinary pig who was available, and the extraction process that took her cells. Earlier, I'd thought this feeling was triggered entirely by Juicy Marbles's ersatz fish odour, by its inherent artificiality. I hoped it would be different with the cultivated meat, which was, in the end, an actual animal product, at least in part. But no. If anything, it was worse.

The next day at Berkeley Bowl West, a large grocery store across the Bay, I watched a couple of dozen customers line up to taste the meatballs. Lê explained that Mission Barns has a fanbase, people who follow the company's progress and register for events in advance. Here, a new contingent of the public revealed itself to me: my fellow cultivated-meat-curious. They were young and slightly goth. They were gen-Z vegans with lip rings and huge black trousers that flapped in the wind. Aside from these devotees, the crowd was made up mostly of people who happened to be at the grocery store for other reasons: Saturday shoppers, parents with kids in tow, people in athleisure. It was a warm and sunny February morning, a good day for a free sample. Passersby queued up, mildly interested.

Previous tastings had drawn protesters. In 2024, the week before the Florida cultivated-meat ban went into effect, Upside Foods hosted the Freedom of Food pop-up, a tasting on a Miami rooftop that was pitched as a protest of the new law. A chef from Caja Caliente, a restaurant in Coral Gables, made chicken tostadas with chipotle crema while a group of conventional-meat zealots parked a van in front of the venue's entrance. The van was affixed with a huge LED screen displaying criticism of lab-grown meat. No long-term health studies, it read. Secret chemical formulas.

But nothing like that happened in Berkeley. Tyndall stood at a hot plate, gamely rolling the meatballs around a pan and placing them into small bamboo trays. As the samples were distributed, I made myself eat another one to see if my reaction would be the same as the day before. Instantly, I was clobbered by the Knowing, but around me, muffled sounds of approval rose from the crowd. A few people told me, shrugging, that the texture seemed right. A child, maybe two years old, accepted a meatball from her dad. She ate it happily, bobbing around like little kids do, with no objection.

A woman in a fleece jacket walked around asking tasters to fill out a survey on an iPad. She was an independent researcher conducting a study on consumer acceptance of cultivated meat for Tufts University. After the science, this is one of the biggest challenges to the product's long-term success. Do people actually want to try it? Do they want to incorporate it into their diets? According to a report published last year by the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting alternative proteins, only 18% of Americans find cell-cultivated meat extremely or very appealing, and almost 60% say they are somewhat or very unlikely to buy it. Interest typically decreases with age and increases with educational attainment, which tracked with my own observations. The goth college students were the most excited by the meatballs, but even they were muted in their praise. No one said "I love it" or "Hell yeah" or declared it a triumph. I did not hear the word "yum".

The days of cultivated meat as a possible panacea for the climate crisis are long gone. Many of the industry's biggest players – the ones still in business, anyway – are now embracing a more modest role in our food system. Since I tried its meatballs earlier this year, Mission Barns has announced a new strategy: it is pivoting from retail to wholesale and developing new products that will combine plant protein with pork fat – to be replaced by their own, cultivated fat only once they've achieved a certain scale. Elsewhere, cellular agriculture is being used to create exclusive novelty items that could be fairly described as Frankenmeat, whereby their freakiness and limited availability are not liabilities but rather the selling points. Vow, the Australian company behind the mammoth meatball, has also developed a variety of Japanese quail foie gras as part of its objective to craft meats "unconstrained" by "the limits of nature". Why, one might wonder? No real reason, except that they can. This, at least, feels like a more fitting use for cultivation technology and a more honest reflection of the ecosystem that has financed it.

This isn't to say that engineered food needs to be virtuous to justify its existence. Before I left Berkeley Bowl West, Dixon gave me a tour of the store's produce section, which was filled with the inordinate splendour of California. There must have been 20 varieties of crazy-looking mushrooms. She insisted I take two sumo citrus oranges – the ones with the bump on top – back home with me. Sumos aren't naturally occurring; they were created in the 1970s by Japanese scientists who crossbred two citrus hybrids in a bid to produce a more flavourful, seedless fruit that might sell better than existing varieties.

I peeled a sumo and ate it as I walked through Berkeley. The afternoon was hot and windy, but the orange was sweet, hydrating, refreshing. Enormous and delicious. It was one shade paler than a traffic cone, with a palm-filling heft. It was perfect: a perfect example of an orange. A miracle, really, how it had just been handed to me.

A longer version of this piece appeared in the September edition of Harper's