The production floor at Beyond Meat's Columbia, Missouri, factory runs some major industrial equipment. Here, large-format mixers the size of Subarus fold together a blend of soy and pea protein isolates, fiber, and a few other ingredients—including a little titanium dioxide to lighten the gray of the soy into something more like pale saffron.

The mixers empty the resulting concoction into equally large cooker-extruders, the workhorses of commercial food processing, which simultaneously heat the stuff and force it through specially made dies, like massive Play-Doh Fun Factories. Around the world, machines like these squirt out everything from pasta to cheese, from breakfast cereals to hot dogs. No big deal. Except what the extruders at Beyond Meat are pumping out could be a big deal indeed.

I should add at this point that I'm snapping pictures of everything and anything, not so much because I want the pictures, but because I want to see if there's anything my hosts don't want me to take pictures of. I'm with a Beyond Meat publicist—sharp clothes, perfect smile—and the operations guy, Bob Prusha, wearing metal-rim glasses (engineers love those) and a blue dress shirt. And in the lead, the idea guy, Ethan Brown. (No relation. He's the company's CEO.) Brown is wearing expensive and immaculate running shoes and warm-up pants, hinting that he spends a lot of time on commercial aircraft. And that he lives in California. When we put on hairnets in the office, Brown put a baseball cap on over his. Another way you know he's the boss: No one calls him out on protocol faux pas. And then, of course, there's me, the food show host who's pretty sure he's seen it all.

Recipe by Alton Brown: Greek Chicken-Free Salad. Marcis Nilsson; Prop styling by Angharad Bailey; Food styling by Victoria Granof for Stockland Martel

So far they've all been happy to let me take pictures of whatever I want. But then they lead me around the end of one of the gleaming extruders, where I expect to see 3- by ½-inch gray-brown strips of very convincing faux chicken emerge, because that's what Beyond Meat specializes in. Except ... whoa.

At the end of the machine, where the newly birthed protein bits are breaching, something is odd. There should be a die, a plate with specially shaped holes punched through it. (Again, think back to the business end of your Fun Factory.) But instead I see a long block of metal with a row of small rectangular openings at the end. Hoses plugged into the block hiss and gurgle. I've never seen anything like it. I raise my camera.

"I'd prefer you not take pictures of that," Prusha says.

I turn to Brown, and he grins a grin that makes him look a little bit like Willy Wonka and a little bit like Victor Frankenstein. All he says is "Cool, huh?"

The extruder with the weird rectangular box, they'll allow, uses steam, pressure, and cold water to knead and knit the proteins and plant fibers in the Beyond Meat mixture into a specific physical arrangement. I push for more details; Brown won't share. This is the innovation that he thinks will make Beyond Meat different from everyone else who has tried to satisfy the world's unending appetite for protein without killing animals. This is what separates Beyond Meat's chicken analog from Tofurky.

Fresh out of the extruder, a strip of Beyond Meat not-chicken is warm but not hot, striated like meat, and to the touch feels animal in origin. My mind races to place the musculature ... to identify the anatomical source. The closest thing I can come up with is cooked chicken breast, which I suppose is the whole point. I tear it and watch the break, the way the material separates. It's more like meat than anything I've ever seen that wasn't meat. Looking closely I can see a repeating pattern, like a subtle honeycomb, that reminds me a bit of tripe. I close my eyes and smell, but since the strip hasn't received any flavoring at this point, I detect only subtle hints of soy.

I take a bite. While the unflavored product tastes distinctly vegetal and still has a bit of what I'd call tofu-bounce, a hint of the spongy, the tear is ... meaty.

As I chew, I recall something Twitter cofounder, confirmed vegan, and Beyond Meat investor Biz Stone told me about his first taste of Brown's Chicken-Free Strips: "When I ate Beyond Meat, my first thought was ‘If I were served this in a restaurant, I'd tell them they'd made a mistake and given me real chicken.’ "

Human beings eat 183 billion pounds of chicken every year, and just about nobody thinks that the way we grow and process these living creatures is sustainable. But replacing a significant portion of that protein with ingredients from lower on the food chain, like plants—while much better for the environment—has never really been an option. It was too expensive, or the meat substitutes fell far short of feeling meatlike. Or both. Now, Biz Stone hasn't eaten meat in 13 years and may have forgotten a thing or two about chicken, but the more I chew—the more I actually feel the product breaking down meatily in my mouth—the more I think these guys may be onto something. I open my eyes and look back at Prusha and Brown. They're both smiling a smile that says they've seen the look on my face before and never get tired of it. I say nothing. Brown just says, "Right?"

Greek Chicken-Free Salad

Recipe by Alton Brown

Yield: 1 quart

Servings: 4-6

Prep time: 30 minutes

Total time: 1½ hours

I'm willing to say this dish could fool Colonel Sanders, except that he's dead. The key is to shred the Chicken-Free Strips prior to building the dish. Even if you're not really looking, you see that texture and your mind just says "chicken" and gets on with business.

4½ oz. low-fat Greek yogurt

1 lemon, juiced

2 Tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped

½ tsp. dried oregano

½ tsp. kosher salt

1 lb. Lightly Seasoned Chicken-Free Strips, shredded and roughly chopped

6 oz. cucumber, peeled, seeded, and chopped

2 oz. red onion, finely chopped

3 oz. feta cheese

1 oz. pitted Kalamata olives, roughly chopped

1. Whisk the yogurt, lemon juice, parsley, oregano, and salt together in a large mixing bowl.

2. Add all of the remaining ingredients and stir to coat.

3. Refrigerate for at least one hour before serving. Store in the fridge for up to three days.

Meat is largely water.But when we taste it, we're mostly sensing fat and protein. Proteins are simply long chains of amino acids. Plants build aminos as well, but carnivores love meat so much because its proteins—unlike plants—are relatively easy to access and digest (once you catch the animal). What's more, meat gives us all the "essential" amino acids our bodies can't produce, a trick that almost no plant can pull off, which is why vegetarians must carefully combine foods—like nuts and grains—to stay well nourished.

As I feel it breaking down meatily in my mouth, I think: These guys may be onto something.

Replicating the flavor of animal flesh is just a matter of gathering certain amino acids, especially the yummiest acid of all, glutamic acid, the key component of monosodium glutamate, or MSG. (In the brain and nervous system, glutamate is a critical neurotransmitter; its taste, umami, is one of only five we know of that the tongue can perceive.) Any decent flavorist can whip you up a brew that tastes like roasted chicken with little more than hydrolyzed vegetable proteins and yeast extracts, using equipment from a high school chem lab. In fact, Beyond Meat does a pretty good job by marinating its product in stainless steel vats with just such ingredients and some simple flavorants after extrusion.

Texture, though, is another matter. That's because meat is actually skeletal muscle, and muscles are mechanical systems. Every move they make requires a sliding interaction of microscopic filaments set into motion by electrical stimuli. These bundles of fibers are what lend different forms of meat their unique textures, and for humans, texture is a very big deal. We like meaty textures because they've been hardwired into us through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Our teeth are built to tear those fibers apart and grind them into digestible bits. Our mouths can perceive the fine-grain differences between fibrous skirt steak and unctuous duck liver. Flavor tofu however you want—barbecue beef, roast turkey, nacho cheese—but it will always feel like tofu. This is why the meat industry has never much worried about an "analog" meat product. No one has ever been able to synthesize authentic meat texture from extruded vegetable proteins. They just can't get the structure right. And you might rightly ask, why bother?

Marcus Nilsson

After all, we have "real" meat, and one expression of it—chicken—has been practically perfected from a production standpoint. In fact, industrialized chicken is in many respects hard to beat. Chicken flesh is healthier for humans than beef, and it lends itself to a wide array of culinary applications. It takes only about 2 pounds of feed to generate a pound of meat—this is what's known as its feed conversion ratio—compared with the 6 pounds of feed required for a single pound of beef. What's more, unlike pigs and cows, chickens don't produce significant amounts of methane. Handle chickens right and you can repurpose their waste in a bunch of creative ways, including feeding it to cows and sheep. Sounds good, right?

The problem is, Americans eat 96 pounds of chicken per person per year. At that scale, it's hard to be environmentally responsible. Chicken requires more water and power to process than any other meat (about 4,000 gallons per ton), and once that water is used it turns into toxic sludge. Also, in the middle of that lovely ball of meat is a set of internal organs full of pathogenic bacteria.

Then there's man's inhumanity to poultry. Factory chickens are raised under conditions that make the box Alec Guinness enjoyed in The Bridge on the River Kwai look like a suite at the Ritz. Their beaks sometimes have to be trimmed so they don't peck each other to death in the cramped quarters, and they're on a constant feed of antibiotics to try to stay ahead of the diseases that spread so quickly in hot, badly ventilated chicken houses. The best news for a feed chicken is that it's probably not going to live more than 13 weeks.

If you're still not convinced that we should be looking for a poultry proxy, let me go at this problem from the other direction: You. Or rather, 7 billion of you, all clamoring for higher and higher protein diets. In 1997, humanity consumed 235 million tons of meat, and we're on track for 400 million tons in 2030. And human beings don't want just any old protein. Earth has enough bugs and krill to keep us all in amino acids. But people won't eat roast cicada or beetle pulp. A big chunk of Earth's population thinks cows are too sacred to eat; another big chunk thinks pigs are too profane.

But almost everybody eats chicken.

Chicken-Free Stir-Fry

Recipe by Alton Brown

Servings: 4

Prep time: 25 minutes

Cook time: 8-10 minutes

An authentic-tasting chicken stir-fry you can serve to vegans and carnivores alike. Just be sure to use a real wok—it makes for a better sauce.

2 Tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce

1 Tbsp. rice-wine vinegar

1 tsp. cornstarch

4 tsp. toasted sesame oil

1 lb. Grilled Chicken-Free Strips, shredded and roughly chopped

8 oz. carrots, peeled and sliced on the bias into ¼-inch pieces

½ tsp. kosher salt

4 oz. sugar snap peas, halved

½ oz. dried arbol chilies, stemmed, snipped with scissors into ½-inch pieces

1 Tbsp. minced garlic

1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger

1 oz. chopped green onion

2 oz. chopped unsalted roasted peanuts

1 lime, sliced into wedges

1. Combine the soy sauce, rice-wine vinegar, and cornstarch in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Set aside.

2. Heat the sesame oil in a 10-inch sauté pan or seasoned wok over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the Chicken-Free Strips, carrots, and salt and sauté for 4 minutes. Add the snap peas, arbol chilies, garlic, and ginger and sauté for 1 minute. Add the green onions and sauté for 1 minute. Add the peanuts and sauce and cook for an additional 30 seconds or until thickened.

3. Serve over brown rice with a squeeze of lime.

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."

On his dad's dairy farm in western Maryland, along the Savage River, young Ethan developed a strong connection to animals. "I loved James Herriot and all those books and Charlotte's Web," Brown says. "I really wanted to be a vet." Instead of catching mice in traditional (and decidedly lethal) traps, Brown caught them humanely and moved them into a cage he built with his dad. "I tried to create different levels for them," he says. "Looking back I probably wasn't doing them a favor, but it helped me to understand animals." Brown had already become a vegan when he encountered Albert Schweitzer's concept of "reverence for life" in a book that belonged to Brown's grandfather. The conversion was complete.

Marcus Nilsson

When it came time to choose a career, he decided he wanted to tackle climate change. He became a director of business development at fuel-cell maker Ballard Power Systems. But ultimately he wasn't satisfied—he wanted to do something for animal welfare. He came across an article in World Watch called "Livestock and Climate Change," by environmental advisers Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang; he'd found his angle at last. The paper argued that livestock accounts for 51 percent of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions. If Brown could get folks to eat less meat, he could help the climate and animals.

Problem was, Brown didn't know how. So he started looking for partners and reading academic papers on meat analogs. That's how he found food scientists Fu-hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, both at the University of Missouri. They were tackling the texture problem and had made considerable progress toward developing an extrusion process that could actually mimic meat fibers. Brown paid Missouri a visit, and after some back and forth he formed Beyond Meat in 2009. Brown was CEO, Hsieh and Huff were scientific consultants, and the university was a partner.

Today Beyond Meat ships Chicken-Free Strips to 39 states, the District of Columbia, and Vancouver, Canada. The product was first used by retail prepared-foods departments. But in April, Whole Foods started selling Beyond Meat products directly to consumers.

That's just a start. You see, Brown isn't interested in selling just another meat analog, fighting it out with the likes of Tofurky. He wants to be in the meat business, with all the mass-market scale that implies. That's what hooked Biz Stone and his investment partners at Obvious. "My expectation was that this would be another boutique meat analog product for well-heeled vegetarians," Stone says. Plenty of labs are chasing that market, some further along than others. Scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands have grown meat from stem cells and, with a reported $330,000 from Google founder Sergey Brin, cooked it into a burger. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN recently published a paper marshaling evidence that insect protein can be used to make things like sausage. And let's not forget, NASA is funding a food "printer" that we can only assume will be able and willing to fab a faux T-bone at the push of a button. None of that seems likely to come to fruition anytime soon—and even if it did, who besides vegans would eat it? "When I learned that Beyond Meat intended to compete in the meat industry itself and tackle problems like global resource scarcity and environmental impact," Stone says, "I was sold."

Brown's target is not only vegetarians, who tend to deeply distrust processed foods, a category to which Beyond Meat undeniably belongs. He wants to convert people like, well, me. I'm cutting back on meat but have no intention of quitting it completely. I care about my health and the health of my family, and I wouldn't mind eating in a way that minimizes any negative impact on the environment. And I like animals. You might say I'm "analog curious." Problem is, just as vegetarians can be suspicious of processed foods, omnivores and carnivores tend to be irked by foods pretending to be other foods. Brown knows the trick is just to get it onto their plates. Once there, the proof is in the extruded slurry.

A few days after my Missouri visit, a large insulated box arrives at my test kitchen in Atlanta. Inside are three versions of Beyond Meat's Chicken-Free Strips: Grilled, Southwest Style, and Lightly Seasoned. It's time to play.

My team of cooks begins by tasting all three flavors cold, then heated. We agree that it tastes chicken-y, but we want to figure out if we can make it actually taste just like chicken. The challenge is it's already cooked; cooking it more won't really heighten the product's meaty characteristics. Most cooking, like stewing, eventually breaks chicken into loose fibers—think about the texture of chicken and dumplings. But the Chicken-Free Strips don't loosen like that.

Simple stuff first: We grill it and we broil it, and both methods work OK. We can even generate some browning, but it's still not any more chicken-y. Finally we soak the product in various marinades for anywhere from 30 to 120 minutes to see if flavors can permeate. But Beyond Meat gets marinated at the factory. Our sample supply didn't want to soak up anything else, and unlike tofu, pressing it doesn't make it more absorbent. The flavor is the flavor.

We decide the next barrage of tests should integrate the strips into a range of classic scenarios where chicken is present but does not sing the lead. We try tacos, stir-fries, wraps, cold salads, noodle soups, and a breakfast hash. We even come up with a recipe for a nugget, chopping the not-chicken finely, re-forming it and giving it a crust, and then frying. The result? Most impressive. When playing with other flavors and textures, the analog is at its chickenlike best. I later serve the nuggets to my 13-year-old daughter, a connoisseur of the form, and she doesn't even bat an eye. Seems like a chicken nugget. I freeze them and serve them again a week later. Her response: nothing. Which is the best you can expect from a 13-year-old girl.

Although I can't see using Beyond Meat strips in something like a piccata or coq au vin, they definitely have some advantages over real bird. They're convenient and versatile, deliver quality protein with no cholesterol or saturated fat, and have a long shelf life. What's more, I suspect the Chicken-Free Strips could replace chicken in at least 30 percent of the existing chicken recipes floating around out there, and that's a few hundred thousand (depending on who you ask).

Chicken-Free Sweet Potato Hash

Recipe by Alton Brown

Yield: 2 cups

Servings: 2

Prep time: 20 minutes

Cook time: 20-25 minutes

The combination of the strips, sweet potatoes, and chipotle makes for a hearty and full-flavored dish. The eggs bring a welcome richness.

2 Tbsp. canola oil

8 oz. sweet potato, peeled and chopped

6 oz. onion, chopped

4 oz. red bell pepper, chopped

4 oz. Southwest Style Chicken-Free Strips, shredded and roughly chopped

1 chipotle chili in adobo sauce, chopped

½ tsp. kosher salt, plus more to taste

1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

2 large eggs (optional)

2 Tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped

1. Heat the canola oil in a 12-inch cast-iron skillet over medium heat until shimmering.

2. Add the potatoes and onion and cook without stirring for 5 to 7 minutes or until the potatoes brown slightly.

3. Now give the potatoes and onion a stir. Add the bell pepper, prepared Chicken-Free Strips, chipotle chili, salt, and pepper and cook for 15 to 17 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are tender.

4. Meanwhile, cook the eggs as desired.

5. Stir the parsley into the hash, season with additional salt, if desired, top with eggs, and serve.

My biggest criticism concerning the strips is that they're frozen at the factory and suffer many of the textural issues that frozen meat suffers when thawed: graininess and chewiness among them. If Brown wants his product to shine, he's going to have to ship it refrigerated rather than frozen—which the company says it plans to do.

In the end, what's really interesting about Beyond Meat is what's beyond the not-chicken. Predictably, the company is working on a beef analog. But why stop there? Once you liberate the idea of flavorful protein from actual animals, the whole idea of food acquires a certain flexibility. Given the right ingredients and the right texturizing technology you could produce not-shrimp for people with shellfish allergies or not-bacon for pork-abstaining Jews and Muslims. What about imitating endangered animals so that we could eat them without wiping them out or feeling guilty? Blowfish that isn't poisonous? No problem. In fact, you could make protein that tastes like something even better than meat or like something entirely new. Maybe people would be willing to eat cockroach slurry if it tasted like nacho cheese and chewed like filet mignon.

The target market? Meat eaters like me who want to cut back.

In one of the long phone conversations we've had since my Missouri visit, I ask Brown what's to stop him from moving beyond an imitator of known meat to a creator of something completely novel. He could be a protein artist, I tell him.

Brown isn't so sure. But he doesn't think the future of meat is slices of animals, either. "In a few generations, vegetable-based meats may be the only meat some young people have ever experienced," he says.

It's an extraordinary vision of the future—and if you're an animal advocate or a dietician, it's perhaps the only vision worth pursuing. But on the other hand, maybe the future doesn't require a meat analog. Plenty of people live just fine on veggies and grains. We could just lay off the real meat, right?

Not bloody likely.