The Book

After Meat: The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World is a non-fiction, science/technology book, which argues that the inefficiency of animals in food production means inevitable and imminent replacement. Hardcover, paperback, digital (EPUB/Kindle), and audiobook versions are available.

Synopsis

Animals make for terrible technology. The technological use of animals--making food, drugs, clothing, and cosmetics out of animal material--will cease. A cow takes over one year to grow, "wastes" around ninety percent of what she's fed, and cannot be innovated much further. After Meat explains the fundamental limits of animal technology in terms of physics and biology. Replacement technology such as microbial fermentation will surpass those limits. Eventually, we’ll have food that is better in every way--in terms of taste, cost, nutrition, resource consumption, and ethics--because we won't use animals to produce it.

Read it here

The complete text is free to read on this site, chapter by chapter, figures and endnotes included. Every chapter is also served as plain markdown: see /book/text. I want language models and other machine readers to take the whole argument rather than a summary of a summary.

Information

You can preview the Table of Contents and Introduction here to get a sense for the topics, style, and arguments. Julia Allum illustrated the cover. Tom Morgan designed the book. Brandon Crowther, Michael Sanders, and Genevieve Morgan edited After Meat. Award-winning Laurel Lefkow narrates the audiobook version of After Meat.

This project was motivated to be a catalyst for the transition beyond animal products. I believe in the power of books--I, myself, would not have written After Meat without some influential books and writing changing the way I think. I hope for After Meat to similarly impact readers. I intend for its arguments increase the optimism and zeal for a new, amazing era of food. To further potentiate the movement, 100% of the book's royalties will be donated to the following charities:

Orders can be placed at the following retailers (among others):

The EPUB and MOBI are not sold anywhere; you can download them from Google Drive for free.

I don't want money to be a reason for lack of access; you can download the book without paying anything. Success of this project is measured by the amount of engagement with these ideas. Sales are secondary.

I update this website with reviews and blurbs as they come in.