By 2050, more than half of meat, dairy, and eggs in high-income countries could be animal-free.

By the end of the year, you may be able to walk into a restaurant and order chicken grown from chicken cells in a bioreactor rather than from an animal. It’s already possible to buy plant-based burgers more realistic than anything available in the past. It raises a question: What would it take to fully replace meat from animals? In a new book, The End of Animal Farming, Jacy Reese, the research director and cofounder of the nonprofit think tank Sentience Institute, argues that it’s something that could feasibly happen by the end of the century.Reese studied past shifts, such as how long it took women to get the right to vote and how long it took for cars to be widely adopted, and then made adjustments based on the difficulty of the problem, how motivated people are to tackle it, and what tools are available.Increasingly, he argues, people are aware of the giant environmental footprint of producing meat, and problems with factory farms. And now it’s becoming more practical to actually replace it.