Twenty years from now, will driverless, electric vehicles and lab-grown meat be the default mode? Both have the capacity to remake the world as a greener place and save countless lives, human and animal. Google has taken the lead in the former, scaring up all kinds of new competition, including Tesla. And the taste race is on in latter category. From a new Wired article by chef Alton Brown about Ethan Brown and his company, Beyond Meat, which is attempting to make a facsimile that’s as delicious as the original:

“So if you could consume a product that tasted and chewed like chicken in, say, half of your at-home or restaurant meals, would you? And what if that product delivered healthy protein with no antibiotics, cholesterol, trans fats, or saturated fat, yet required only a fraction of the resources to produce while creating little waste or environmental risks? Why wouldn’t you? Ethan Brown thinks you would, even if the price is a bit higher than skinless, boneless chicken breast.

Later, Brown, 42, insists that he isn’t really trying anything new. ‘You know, the harnessing of steam and then the development of the diesel engine removed the horse from the transportation equation while ultimately providing a better product for consumers,’ he says. By the same token, eating animals may someday seem like a quaint relic of a bygone era. I ask him if he’s really that close to a product that would make carnivores forget the succulence of critters. ‘We are obsessed with perfectly replacing the sensory experience of animal protein,’ Brown says. ‘We’re not 100 percent there yet. But we’re close.'”