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Despite their diminutive scale, peanuts play an outsized role in American culture. Peanut butter has long been a mainstay of the American lunch box, with its sticky, slightly sweet nuttiness flavoring the memories of generation after generation of kids. And it’s hard to imagine ball games without, as the song goes, peanuts and Cracker Jacks (which, of course, also contain peanuts). But today, peanuts are the source of both hope and fear: While there’s been a surprisingly steep rise of peanut allergies in recent decades that can—though rarely—lead to death, peanut butter is also the basis of a

Six years ago, Dr. Pat Brown and a team of researchers set out on a culinary Mission: Impossible. Their goal was to create an “uncompromisingly delicious” meat from plant-based materials. Last year, they debuted their Impossible Burger, which looks, tastes and bleeds like meat. In March, Impossible Foods announced its first partnership with a chain restaurant, Bareburger. Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable foods, says Impossible Foods is one of two companies creating plant-based burgers that taste like meat. While veggie burger

Thirty minutes by car into the scrubby desert outside Korla, in China’s remote Xinjiang region, a textile manufacturer owned by Jinsheng Group is building its latest factory complex. Inside the 16 billion-yuan ($2.4 billion) facility—a collection of stark white warehouses surrounded by an enormous expanse of pristine artificial grass—are rows of huge cotton spools, more than a million bright red and blue spindles, and almost no people. A few German engineers wander around, making sure the equipment runs at peak efficiency. This is the depopulated future of an industry that’s lifted millions of