Carnivores everywhere were shocked (shocked!) this October when the World Health Organization came out with a report that labeled bacon and hamburgers as carcinogenic . It was more bad news for meat-based businesses such as McDonald’s, which in 2015 will close more U.S. stores than it opens, the first time this has happened since at least 1970.

Americans’ meat consumption is still alarmingly high, just over 200 pounds of red meat and poultry per person in 2014 (second in the world only to Australia), and that number is down from early-2000s highs. True vegetarians are a rare breed: they make up just 2% to 5% of U.S. adults. But a 2012 Gallup poll found that a third of Americans regularly eat meatless meals, driven by health concerns and a growing public awareness of the negative environmental consequences of raising animals for food.

Here in the U.S., a small contingent of venture-funded startups are trying to capitalize on the move away from meat, at least somewhat successfully creating vegan or vegetarian stand-ins for things like chicken, hamburgers, and mayonnaise. Beyond Meat, which sells faux chicken strips and burgers; Hampton Creek, a maker of eggless “mayonnaise”; and Impossible Foods, which promises a juicy plant-based cheeseburger soon, have collectively raised $245 million in funding from VCs and investors such as Bill Gates and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

In the Netherlands, however, the pressure to go meatless, or at least less meat, is felt even more intensely. With nearly 17 million people in a land area about the size of Maryland, it is the most densely populated nation in the world. It also has the highest density of livestock of any European country. “We have a small country with 100 million chickens,” says Atze van der Goot, a professor of food technology at Wageningen University. “People are more and more aware of the negative aspects of meat related to health and diseases. There is also a an active political movement in the Netherlands stimulating alternatives to meat.”

One result of this is that Holland has become a center of innovation in lab-grown meat, edible animal muscle tissue grown from stem cells rather than harvested from living animals. In October of 2015, the southern Dutch city of Maastricht hosted the First International Symposium on Cultured Meat, and Maastricht University physiology professor Mark Post is credited with creating the first lab-grown hamburger, in 2013. A startup called Mosa Meat aims to commercialize the burgers within five years.

Another Dutch startup, the Vegetarian Butcher, takes a more conventional approach–but one more likely succeed for reasons, of cost, complexity, and the not-inconsiderable yuck factor of lab meat. Like Beyond Meat, the Vegetarian Butcher (makes chicken strips and “hamburger” meat from soy and other vegetable ingredients. But it has out-innovated them. Since being founded in 2010–by ninth-generation dairy farmer-turned-vegan Jaap Korteweg, and Niko Koffeman, a member of the Dutch Senate representing the Party for the Animals–the company has collaborated with academic partners at top Dutch universities to develop an astoundingly diverse line of vegetarian or vegan versions of everything from chicken and beef strips, ground beef, and bacon, to shrimp and tuna, to more typically Dutch dishes like croquettes, shawarma meat, and smoked eel salad.