Leather, Grown in a Lab Without Cows

To make leather, first you have to raise a cow.

Or another animal, though you really do need the whole animal because since pretty much the beginning of time, it has not been possible to grow skin for leather without the attendant flesh and bone and blood and guts.

But now a company called says it can “biofabricate” leather without the rest of the cow. It does not quite grow cow skin, either; it grows a strain of yeast engineered to produce collagen, the protein in skin that gives leather its strength and stretch. Traditionally, making leather amounts to removing almost everything from skin (fat, hair, etc.) that collagen. Modern Meadow