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

In this “important book that could just save your life” (Michael Greger, MD, bestselling author of How Not to Die), 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—he details that quest for clean meat and that’s “poised to revolutionize the business of food and agriculture,” (Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric).

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 “cellular agriculture”—real, actual meat grown from animal cells—as well as other clean foods that ditch animal cells altogether and are simply built from the molecule up. Whereas our ancestors domesticated wild animals into livestock, today we’re beginning to domesticate their cells, leaving the animals out of the equation. This is “a fascinating look at the future of food and the innovators who are working to interrupt and reinvent the food system” (Ann Veneman, former executive director of UNICEF and former US Secretary of Agriculture).