“Clean meat could be a huge win for animal welfare, human health, and the planet. If you want to learn more about the scientists, entrepreneurs and activists who are leading this revolution, read Paul Shapiro’s compelling and optimistic book.” —Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, former CEO of Google " Clean Meat offers an enthralling look into a near future where many of our most dangerous food safety risks could be all but eliminated. Paul Shapiro tells a tale in this important book that could just save your life.” —Michael Greger, M.D., bestselling author of How Not to Die “An intriguing argument from an animal rights perspective for developing an economy of cultured, lab-born meat. Shapiro, a vice president at the Humane Society, observes at the outset that the seemingly science-fiction-y thing he calls "clean meat" is a reality. . . Shapiro serves up portraits of a rapidly developing technology.” —Kirkus Reviews “Shapiro’s book is a wake-up call informing Americans that not only will lab-grown, cultured meat be healthier—unnecessary antibiotic usage on animals living in crowded, contaminated quarters has made the quality of much of our meat questionable at best—it will also tremendously reduce animal suffering.” –Big Think “The meat we sell at Whole Foods Market is rated on an animal welfare scale of 1-5+ but when clean meat hits the market, I’d like to put it in our meat section with an animal welfare rating of 10 since it means no animals were harmed or killed. Read Paul Shapiro’s captivating account of the entrepreneurs working to enable us to sell that meat soon.” —John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market “Paul Shapiro provides a fascinating look at the future of food and the innovators who are working to interrupt and reinvent the food system. Clean Meat is an interesting and worthwhile read." —Ann Veneman, former executive director of UNICEF and former US Secretary of Agriculture " Clean Meat offers an inspirational look into a future where the cellular agricultural revolution helps lower rates of foodborne illness, greatly improves environmental sustainability, and allows us to continue to enjoy the food we love." —Kathleen Sebelius, Former US Secretary of Health & Human Services "An interesting and controversial glimpse into how cellular agriculture may supplement conventional agriculture and how innovation offers a variety of additional ways to feed a hungry and growing world." —Dan Glickman, Former US Secretary of Agriculture "Paul Shapiro has written a timely and informative book on the exciting transformation that is about to happen in the way we produce our food. He introduces us to the bold young innovators and entrepreneurs who are developing clean meat, milk and eggs. What they are doing has the potential to put an end to a vast quantity of cruelty, and to make a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions." —Peter Singer, bestselling author of Animal Liberation and Princeton ethicist “Clean meat is poised to revolutionize the business of food and agriculture, addressing many of our most pressing problems. This book artfully tells the story of the roots of that revolution and where it may be leading us.” —Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, and Suzy Welch, TV journalist, co-authors of Winning "Paul Shapiro has artfully chronicled a most important development in his very worthwhile book Clean Meat , destined to take its place in the literature of moral progress.” —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Moral Arc “This is the book to read to understand the story of the cultured meat movement.” —Mark Post, creator of the world's first clean burger “[A] carefully researched and lively written volume.” —Pacific Standard "A brisk and engaging case, "Clean Meat" advocates without overselling." —Wall Street Journal When Paul Shapiro took his first bite of clean meat in 2014, more humans had gone into space than had eaten real meat grown outside an animal. In addition to being among the world’s first clean meat consumers, Paul is a four-time TEDx speaker, the co-host of the Business for Good Podcast , the CEO of The Better Meat Co., and longtime leader in food sustainability. He’s published hundreds of articles in publications ranging from daily newspapers to academic journals. Paul lives in Sacramento, California with his wife Toni Okamoto, author and founder of Plant-Based on a Budget . His first book, Clean Meat , is a Washington Post bestseller, and has been translated into numerous other languages. You can read more about Paul’s work and contact him at Paul-Shapiro.com.
Features & Highlights
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.
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Most Helpful Reviews
★★★★★
5.0
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An important and inspiring book
Growing food to feed animals destined for the slaughterhouse is a grossly inefficient process, using seventy percent of all agricultural land and thirty percent of all land on Earth. Peoples of the Third World are experiencing rapid improvement in their living standard, leading to increased demand for meat. Earth’s ecology cannot support the further confiscation of land to accommodate this demand. Clean meat, produced by the direct growth of animal tissue (started with biopsies that do not harm the few animals involved) will be far more efficient and will occupy far less land to grow the foods to support the tissue growth. Meat in this context includes the flesh of sea creatures which have been over-harvested to the point that many species are threatened with extinction. That too can be reversed. Reversion of farmland to wilderness (with compensation for farmers) will play a major role in solving our world ecological crisis.
Slaughterhouse meats are inherently filthy. Animals brought to the slaughterhouse typically defecate in their terror of what they are experiencing. Food regulations call for some minimal level of fecal contamination (and the associated e.coli, salmonella, etc.)—zero is impossible. But there is no fecal matter in clean meats. In crowded factory farms antibiotics are administered to prevent infections that may kill the entire herd. This leads to a residue of antibiotics in the dirty meats. Agricultural misuse is the primary cause of the rise of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and the creation of lethal strains. Universal adoption of clean meats could greatly ameliorate the problem of bacterial resistance and save many lives. The annual flu epidemic is an artifact of animal agriculture and may cease with its termination.
Animals raised for the slaughterhouse live in unremitting misery, in filth, overcrowded together to the point that they cannot move. Their miserable existence ends in the terror of slaughter. These are conscious creatures. Worldwide clean meat production from tissue growth can end this moral abomination. We cannot fully empathize with creatures we consume as food. The freedom to fully experience that empathy will support the ongoing civilization of the human species.
Market forces will drive this project forward at an accelerating rate. The inherent efficiencies of tissue growth compared to animal agriculture will lead to the production of clean meats substantially less expensive than chicken. But the choice of the seed tissues will not affect the price, so we may expect an initial concentration on products equivalent to currently expensive luxuries—from lobster tail to fois gras to Kobe beef filet mignon. The developers assert their intention not to bring their products to market until they can match or exceed comparative taste tests with the products of animal agriculture. They will have great flexibility in the production process. Conventional meats are not known as “health foods” because of their fat profiles. But there are healthy fats in nature, and these will be employed by the clean meat producers. Shoppers around the world will become fully knowledgeable of the comparative qualities of clean meats versus slaughterhouse meats, as well as the moral costs of the slaughterhouse. With this knowledge together with the great price advantage of clean meats, we may expect and hope that clean meat production will supplant the slaughterhouse globally as quickly as the scaling up of clean meat production may be technically accomplished.
I hope you will be as inspired by Paul Shapiro’s Clean Meat as I have been.
17 people found this helpful
★★★★★
3.0
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Little science, thin and tepid.
Excessively verbose storytelling with a paucity of science. I’d assume most of the companies Shapiro interviewed sit on proprietary information, but a chapter of the basic processes would have been immensely orienting.
Instead, I think too much page space was devoted to concepts like “ethics,” and “environmental benefits,” which are excellent concerns but don’t need to be reiterated and rehashed on every page just to fill space, IMO. He did do a good, if noticeable, job at resisting the urge to preach veganism.
Some of his assumptions are also outdated; for example the company intending to add vegetable oil to their faux milk to bulk it up. Which oil was not mentioned, and Veg oil is no longer thought of as a healthier alternative to animal fat. In fact, the entire treatment of fat was minimized, despite the fact that it’s one of the most important nutrients in meat, if not the most gram for gram with protein.
A better book could be written by someone with a rounded knowledge of nutrition critical of these issues, and with an understanding of bioscience
Still worth a skim-through as an introduction to the topic.
13 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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A Fascinating Dive Into the Innovators and Innovation that is Transforming Meat
Clean Meat by Paul Shapiro is the definitive book on creating real meat, eggs, dairy, and leather without having to raise or slaughter animals.
The book begins with a beautifully written reflection on where we are in global history by the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, who notes that technology created industrial animal farming with all of its harms, and technology could also be used to usher in a new era where we produce exactly the same products but in a safer and more sustainable manner: “just as we need clean energy to replace fossil fuels, we need clean meat to replace factory farms.”
From there, author Paul Shapiro presents eight chapters, which offer a detailed look at how these technologies came into being and the scientists and entrepreneurs who are powering them. Because Shapiro presents all of this information by telling the stories of the people behind this agricultural transformation, the book is fast-paced and thoroughly engaging.
We learn about Sergey Brin funding the first clean meat burger and Dr. Mark Post, a former Harvard Medical School professor who grew it in his lab at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands; about Mayo Clinic trained cardiologist Uma Valeti, founder of Memphis Meats, a company that has attracted funding from Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and even Cargill, the meat giant; about Jason Matheny, who is currently director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and who previously founded New Harvest, a research institute focused on funding groundbreaking research into clean meat; about Andras Forgacs, a serial entrepreneur in tissue engineering who has raised tens of millions of dollars to make real leather without the cow; and about the founders and origin stories of companies that are using a similar technology to create egg, dairy, and collagen proteins.
Perhaps one of the more interesting observations from the book is that kerosene replaced whale oil (and saved the whales) and that automobiles replaced horses and buggies (saving countless horses); that is, technology has fueled social progress consistently in the past, and what's happening with this new technology is similar.
I'm not surprised that Shapiro was able to line up such a compelling line-up of endorsers, from former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman (“Paul Shapiro provides a fascinating look at the future of food into the innovators who are working to interrupt and reinvent the food system”) to Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who sums up my thoughts on the book: “Read Paul Shapiro’s compelling and optimistic book.” Indeed.
Disclaimer: I co-founded and run The Good Food Institute, which works on plant-based and clean meat innovation; GFI appears (and I appear) throughout the book.
12 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Excellent read on the short but promising history of a tech field that could help change the world.
I thoroughly enjoyed and can’t recommend “Clean Meat” enough. Shapiro accomplishes the near impossible, engaging us in the excitement of the short but fascinating history of the field, giving color, tone, humor, and heart to many stories along the way.
Paul also manages to present a balanced perspective on a field that, while a little controversial early on, holds the promise of effecting large-scale change in the world.
I am grateful for this book. I would consider this a must-read for any dreamers out there who are also skilled at taking action. I’m inspired and excited to help out in any way I can.
11 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Five Stars
It's fun, fascinating read about a topic that will forever change the world.
8 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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... have the power to shape the future for the better. This is one of those books
Some books have the power to shape the future for the better. This is one of those books. It's no exaggeration to say that clean meat holds the promise of transforming our world dramatically, hugely reducing climate change gasses entering our atmosphere, protecting precious fresh water, diminishing dead zones, greatly decreasing soil erosion, reversing extinction rates, saving millions of human lives from sickness and death and hunger, and ending the most egregious cruelty perpetrated on trillions of land and sea animals. It would be easy enough for an author like Paul - who as an animal protection advocate has been working tirelessly throughout his career to end cruelty to animals - to treat this subject with bias. Instead, he fairly explores the science, the emerging clean meat companies, the possibilities and pitfalls, the potential consumer response, and discusses every aspect of clean meat thoroughly and with wit, understanding, respect, and endless interest. You wouldn't expect a book on cultured meat to be a page-turner, but this book is. I've already purchased two more copies to give to others. It's that good and that important. If you need some hope and inspiration for a healthier, kinder, and more sustainable future, read this book. If you know of a budding molecular biologist, buy her a copy. If you are interested in economics, politics, manufacturing, energy, science, the environment, animal rights, social justice, global warming, or a host of other topics, this book is a must read because clean meat is relevant to all these subjects and more. What a great way to start the new year.
7 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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The best in-depth resource on "clean meat" and "cellular agriculture"
There's been a lot of new coverage of "cellular agriculture" in the past few years, but if you want a deeper understanding of this growing field, there's no better resource than Shapiro's book Clean Meat. Shapiro shows you the people and the stories behind the burgers, meatballs, yogurt, leather, egg whites, and more.
Public figures from Steven Pinker to Bill Nye have predicted that the future of food is animal-free, and I believe that in a few decades, historians will pore over each page of this book to understand the fascinating origin of the technology that tossed animal farming into the dustbin of history.
7 people found this helpful
★★★★★
3.0
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Not a technical book describing the science
I bought this book hoping to learn about the science underlying clean meat. There is almost no technical detail about the process. So this is not a bad book. It’s readable and informative about the entrepreneurs working to commercialize clean meat. Since I’m well aware of the environmental and ethical problems with factory farming, I found the space devoted to the subject excessive. In sum, this is not the book I thought I was buying.
6 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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The author even exhibits a good sense of humor and is very even handed in ...
Well researched , fascinating and very readable particularly given the significant amount of science involved.The author even exhibits a good sense of humor and is very even handed in his analysis of the likelihood and timing of success of clean meat.
6 people found this helpful
★★★★★
4.0
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Focused summary of the past decade of growth in the cultured and clean meat industry.
Shapiro cleanly summarizes the industry and organizations that are working in the clean meat space. The book does not dive deep into the science, though some of it is there, but does look at the major investors that have helped to develop clean meat and the cellular agriculture over the past decade. For such a potentially breakthrough technology there is a surprisingly small group of companies and individuals working on commercializing the technology though that is changing rapidly.
Hopefully the book stands to be a strong historical narrative of how the early days of the industry formed, though there is no doubt that the events chronicled in it will quickly be outdated. Even since the printing of the book at least two of the major players highlighted in it (Tyson Foods and Memphis meets) have announced collaborations, via Tyson funding Memphis, that would have been worth noting had it happened only a few months prior.
Overall Shapiro also does a good job of avoiding a "preachy tone", and does not appear to demonize or crimalize everyone involved in the existing industry or meat eaters as a whole. Instead the book highlights countless observations where progress and the status quo have lead to questionable and unsustainable practices and lets the author draw their own conclusions. If you were someone driven to pick it up it is unlikely you will come away enthusiastic about your next meat eating experience, unless of course you are one of the lucky ones who will be dining on cultured meat.