Giving Compass' Take:

• Mike Selden explains how nonprofits are playing a role in accelerating the development of lab-grown meat, specifically fish at his company: Finless Foods. 

• What are the nutritional, environmental, and animal welfare implications of this technology? Can philanthropy or impact invest help this tech become standard more quickly? 

• Learn more about "clean meat."

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Selden, co-founder and CEO of Finless Foods.

What role have nonprofits played in supporting your work thus far? How effective has that support been? What are other ways you’d like to see nonprofits contributing to the advancement of cellular agriculture?

New Harvest really built this company in a lot of ways. I was given the opportunity to work there before I started Finless Foods and to travel around with them and meet their network and decide my strategy in starting this whole thing. They inspired me to move forward with it and have continued to be really supportive through conferences (by inviting us to various conferences and then hosting the New Harvest conference, which was an awesome set of interesting angles and a great overview of progress in the field) and introductions.

I think the Cellular Agriculture Society (CAS), which is a newer nonprofit, has a lot of potential. They’re a volunteer-based student organization with clubs at nine universities and counting. There are different ways students can get involved with CAS—they can do social science research, they can lobby their university administration to get specific classes or a curriculum that’s more focused on subjects relevant to this field (to find opportunities in labs that do research relevant to clean meat), they can put together donation drives to get a grant program going at their university, put money into New Harvest or start CAS grants on their own…there’s just so much possibility in a grassroots organization like this. I think CAS will be a big part of building the future in this arena.

Read the full interview with Mike Selden about Finless Foods by Sofia Davis-Fogel at Animal Charity Evaluators.