What will the food miracle be? [Blueprints for a Miracle]

ATZE JAN VAN DER GOOT removes a laptop-size slab from a refrigerator and deposits it on a table with an icy thump. It's a reddish-brown mass, with clearly visible fibrous striations. And though it's half frozen, it's still pliable: You can pick away small pieces with your fingers, but it retains its shape, just like a hunk of frigid raw beef would. This is no ordinary fake steak. For one thing, it has attracted the interest-and money-of some of the world's leading food conglomerates, including Unilever, the Swiss flavor maker Givaudan, and Avril Group, the Parisbased agro-industrial concern. Then, too, it was not made with an ordinary food extruder, like most meat substitutes on the market today. Rather, it was produced with a new and radically different kind of machine. This machine was designed by Van der Goot to do one thing extraordinarily well: turn vegetable-based ingredients into something so similar to meat that it can grab a healthy share of the fast-growing market for meat substitutes, which was estimated at US $4 billion last year by the research firm Visiongain, in London.