By Karen Dawn

Tribune News Service

If you love meat, keep reading.

If one of the things you love about it is knowing it comes from a slaughtered animal, feel free to stop.

You are still here! The folks at the Good Food Institute are banking on that.

In early September, the group held a conference in Berkeley, California, bringing together the major players producing meat that is either plant-based or cell grown — no slaughter necessary.

Pat Brown, maker of the entirely plant-based Impossible Burger, told attendees to mark their calendars: By 2035, he predicted, all meat will be produced without slaughter.

Impossible Foods, like its main competitor Beyond Meat, is creating plant-based burgers aimed at the meat-loving market. Their goal, according to Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown, is “to save the world from the biggest environmental catastrophe that it faces, which is the insanely destructive impact of the meat industry.”

Neither company is trying to make people into vegetarians or change their behavior; they are just trying to reduce the behavior’s impact. As Brown says, “Give them meat, give them milk, just make it out of plants. Make it delicious and cheap and they will buy it.”

He has reason to be optimistic. The Impossible Burger really is “impossibly” meaty due to the addition of heme, the compound in blood’s hemoglobin that has been isolated in plants and added to the burger. It is also impossibly trendy. For now it is available only in restaurants, including White Castles nationwide.

Beyond Burgers don’t contain heme. They bleed something like beet juice as they fry. But they taste just as meaty and are selling out at Whole Foods and other supermarkets across the nation.

Meanwhile, meat grown from cells is currently being produced by Memphis Meats, and by all accounts the burgers and fish fillets are indistinguishable from those that come from slaughterhouses and environmentally catastrophic fishing nets.

One problem: The burgers produced by Memphis Meats currently cost about $1,000 a pop. But company founder Uma Valeti is a glass-half-full kind of guy, who cheerfully notes that the first serving of his meat cost a million dollars to produce; in just six years the price-per serving was “one thousand fold lower!”

Josh Tetrick of the plant-based food company JUST gives a timeline of 10 to 15 years for the new meats to be “the only thing on the menu rather than an option.” JUST mayonnaise, entirely plant based, is available in supermarkets from Safeway through Walmart. Now Tetrick is moving into the cell-grown meat space.

Some cell-grown meat companies are using the term “clean meat” — a nod to its astronomically smaller environmental footprint, and to the lack of both drugs fed to animals and pathogens introduced at the slaughterhouse.

In response, the animal agricultural industry is trying to claim ownership, through legislation, of the word “meat.” Groups, including not just alternative producers but also the ACLU, are fighting the effort. But meat companies could be in trouble if a judge decides that the origin of all meat must be clearly labeled. Imagine traditional sausages with a more thorough ingredient list that might include snouts from slaughtered pigs.

Thanks to these brave new companies, children are now growing up in a world where veggie burgers taste just like meat. Try the new ones, you’ll see! And true meat burgers, grown from cells, are soon to be on supermarket shelves.

Given all that, 2035 seems a reasonable timeline for the impossible dream of a world without animal farming. I’m going to take Pat Brown’s challenge and mark my calendar.

Karen Dawn runs the nonprofit DawnWatch and has written on animal issues for the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian. This column was written for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.