Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

Paul Shapiro gives you a front-row seat for the wild story of the race to create and commercialize cleaner, safer, sustainable meat—real meat—without the animals. From the entrepreneurial visionaries to the scientists’ workshops to the big business board­rooms—Shapiro details that quest for clean meat and other animal products and examines the debate raging around it.

Since the dawn of Homo sapiens some quarter million years ago, animals have satiated our species’ desire for meat. But with a growing global popula­tion and demand for meat, eggs, dairy, leather, and more, raising such massive numbers of farm animals is woefully inefficient and takes an enormous toll on the planet, public health, and certainly the animals themselves.

But what if we could have our meat and eat it, too? The next great scientific revolution is underway—discovering new ways to create enough food for the world’s ever-growing, ever-hungry population.

Enter clean meat—real, actual meat grown (or brewed!) from animal cells—as well as other clean foods that ditch animal cells altogether and are simply built from the molecule up. Also called lab-grown meat, cultured meat, or cell-based meat, this race promises promise to bring about another domestication. Whereas our ancestors domesticated wild animals into livestock, today we’re beginning to domesticate their cells, leaving the animals out of the equation. From one single cell of a cow, you could feed an entire village. And the story of this coming “second domestica­tion” is anything but tame.

• The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System
• Clean Protein: The Revolution that Will Reshape Your Body, Boost Your Energy-and Save Our Planet
• Eat for the Planet: Saving the World One Bite at a Time
• Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism
• How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach
• Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World--80+ Recipes for a Greener Planet and a Healthier You
• Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement (P.S.)
• The In Vitro Meat Cook Book
• The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World
• Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat