Editor's choice: How the sausage gets made

One of the most interesting parts of working on Alt-Meat is visiting manufacturing facilities.

I've had a chance to tour enormous rooms loaded with towering bioreactors, slick corporate setups with plug-and-play extruders and conveyor belts and early-stage companies where the machines are hacked together with what seems like ingenuity and prayers.

But even in that last group, the product rolling off the line is pretty finished. It may need…