In a few short years, artificial “meat” has gone from co-op curio to heavily hyped menu item at giant chains like Dunkin’ and Burger King. America consumes more meat than any other country, but new widespread awareness of meat’s heavy environmental toll has accelerated the race to find a more sustainable alternative. Larisa Rudenko, a research affiliate in the Program on Emerging Technologies at MIT, joins us to talk about Impossible Burger, lab-grown meat and where this exploding industry is headed. Plus: Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood taste test edible insects and answer a holiday listener question.

By the way, this is our last show before we go on break for the holidays. But don’t worry — for the next three weeks we’ll be revisiting some of our favorite interviews of the year, revisiting our 2019 predictions and creating new ones for 2020. We’ll have new daily Alexa explainers and email newsletters all through the holidays.