The Last Hamburger on Earth

The Last Hamburger on Earth

The screen in Maya Chen's bedroom went dark, but the numbers didn't.

She sat cross-legged on her unmade bed, headphones around her neck, staring at the reflection of her own face in the black monitor. Her phone buzzed once—probably Devon asking where the garlic salt was—and she ignored it. The documentary had ended forty seconds ago, and she still hadn't moved.

The voiceover in the film had been calm, almost bored, like a weather reporter announcing rain. *By 2050, a real hamburger could cost more than a smartphone. Real beef could become a luxury item, served in tiny portions, mostly remembered. Not because the cows disappeared. Because the system that raises them stopped working.*

Maya was sixteen. She liked cheese fries, gym class, and the color yellow. She had never thought about cows as a *system* before. Now she couldn't stop.

Her stomach growled. She was hungry, the way you're hungry at nine p.m. when dinner was three hours ago and you skipped the apple because you were too busy watching a documentary about the end of cheese fries. The irony was not lost on her.

She opened her phone. The first result for "hamburger near me" was her favorite diner, twelve minutes away, four-point-seven stars, six-dollar cheeseburger with caramelized onions. Six dollars. Less than a movie ticket. Less than a paperback. She thought about the cow that became that burger—somewhere in Kansas or Iowa or Argentina, chewing grass in a field, or maybe never touching grass at all, standing on concrete in a feedlot the size of a parking lot, eating corn that a human could have eaten, drinking water that a village could have drunk.

She thought about the methane that cow burped into the air every day of its short life.

She thought about the antibiotics in its feed, the ones keeping it alive in conditions its body was never built for.

She thought about the Amazon forest cut down to grow soybeans to feed that cow.

And then she thought the thought that would change her entire junior year:

*How will we feed ten billion people?*

She didn't know it yet, but that question was about to lead her down a hallway of microbes, fermentation tanks, edible algae, lab-grown steak, vertical farms, and robots that harvested lettuce. It would lead her to a food-science-obsessed friend named Sam, to her skeptical older brother Devon, and to arguments at her family's dinner table that would get louder and louder until her mother finally said, "If you two don't lower your voices, neither of you is getting seconds."

It would lead her, in other words, to the rest of this book.

But first, she had to understand why the question mattered at all.

---

A Burger, a Brother, and a Banned Phrase

Forty minutes later, Maya was standing in the kitchen holding a frozen veggie patty like it was a piece of evidence.

Her brother Devon, eighteen, leaned against the counter and gave her the look he usually reserved for her "school project" opinions about climate change, phone-screen time limits, and whether pineapple belonged on pizza. Devon was a senior with a half-loaded college application and a fully loaded supply of older-brother energy.

"You're not seriously thinking about going vegetarian because of a YouTube documentary," he said.

"It wasn't YouTube. It was PBS."

"That's basically YouTube."

"Dad, tell him." Maya turned to her father, who was draining pasta and pretending not to be involved.

Her father, a structural engineer who spent his days calculating how much weight a bridge could hold, shrugged. "I'm staying out of this."

"Mom?"

Her mother, Dr. Linda Chen, an oncologist, appeared in the doorway. She had the posture of someone who had just finished a twelve-hour shift and was running on black tea and muscle memory. She looked at the veggie patty, then at Maya, then at Devon.

"Is this a thing?" she asked.

"It's a *learning experience*," Maya said.

"It's a phase," Devon said.

"It's an *investigation*," Maya corrected. "I'm not saying I'm vegetarian. I'm asking questions."

"Oh no," her mother said. "Questions. Worse than phases."

"Way worse," Devon agreed.

Maya put the patty in the pan. It sizzled in a way that real beef never quite managed. She had eaten real beef approximately 4,380 times in her life, give or take a few birthdays and one unfortunate incident with a school cafeteria meatball. She was not ready to give it up. But she was, for the first time in her life, *curious* about it.

The questions kept stacking up like cafeteria trays:

• Where did this cow come from?
• What did it eat?
• How much land did it need?
• How much water?
• How many other animals, plants, insects, and microbes shared that land with it, or got pushed off it?
• What did its life look like?
• What did its death look like?
• And the big one—the one that made her stomach flip—*what did eating it do to the planet?*

She didn't have answers yet. She had a documentary, a half-formed feeling in her chest, and a brother who thought she was being dramatic.

She also had Sam.

Sam Okafor was her best friend since seventh grade, the kind of friend who kept a sourdough starter named Bertha in his bedroom closet and could talk for forty minutes about the umami properties of miso without getting bored. Sam's mother was a food scientist; his father ran a small kombucha brewery in their garage. Sam had grown up watching fermentation happen, smelling it happen, occasionally *eating* it before it was ready. He had an opinion about every single ingredient in every single product in their school cafeteria, and most of those opinions were negative.

Maya texted him at 9:47 p.m.

> *can you come over tomorrow after school? i need to talk about meat.*

Sam replied in eleven seconds.

> *on my way. bringing bertha.*

---

Sam did not, in fact, bring Bertha. He brought a notebook, a pen, and the kind of look Maya had come to recognize as *Sam has been waiting for this moment his entire life.*

They sat on Maya's bedroom floor. Devon was not invited but kept wandering in anyway.

"You watched the cow thing," Sam said. It wasn't a question.

"How did you—"

"You posted a black square on Instagram with no caption. That's your crisis signal."

Maya laughed despite herself. "Okay. Yes. I watched the cow thing. And now I can't stop thinking about it."

"Okay. Cool. Where do you want to start?"

Maya pulled up the documentary on her laptop and they watched it together, pausing every few minutes so Sam could scribble notes. Devon sat on the bed and contributed comments like "this is biased" and "where are the sources" and "this narrator has a weird voice."

Sam ignored him with practiced grace.

When the documentary ended, Maya turned to Sam. "So. Ten billion people. How do we feed them?"

Sam tapped his pen against the notebook. "That's the question of the century. Literally. But to answer it, you have to ask three smaller questions first."

"Which are?"

"One: how many people are there going to be? Two: what are they going to eat? Three: what is eating that food going to do to the planet?"

Devon snorted. "What if they just eat less?"

Sam nodded seriously. "That's actually one of the answers. Diet change. Smaller portions, less meat, more plants. But it's not the only one, and it's not the easiest one. People really like hamburgers."

"People *love* hamburgers," Devon said.

"Exactly. So we need a different plan, or several different plans, or both."

Maya grabbed the notebook from Sam and wrote at the top of the page, in big block letters:

HOW DO WE FEED TEN BILLION PEOPLE?

Below it, she drew three branches:

1. How many people? 2. What do they eat? 3. What does eating do to the planet?

"What we need," she said slowly, "are *facts*."

Sam grinned. "Now you're speaking my language."

Devon crossed his arms. "Facts are great. Just make sure they're not from TikTok."

This was the team, whether they knew it yet or not. Maya, the question-asker. Sam, the explainer. Devon,