What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Clean Meat: How Eating Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner is no ordinary book. It’s bound in leather that the Bay Area-based biotech startup Geltor grew from microbes treated to form a collagen that resembles leather from actual cows.
The book, which is all about the technological breakthroughs in producing animal proteins from cells, not slaughter, is essentially wrapped in its own methods. The author, Paul Shapiro, the former vice president of policy engagement for the Humane Society of the United States, wrote the book to chronicle the technological advancements in the realm of cellular agriculture and plant-based proteins–all of which happened in the last five years–and the myriad companies that have sprung up in the space.
After coming up with the idea to produce an animal-free leather copy of the book, Shapiro decided that all proceeds from the bidding (someone has already pledged top dollar) will go toward the nonprofit The Good Food Institute, which advocates for plant-based and clean meat alternatives to large-scale animal agriculture.
For Shapiro, writing this book at this time was just common sense. “We’re quickly reaching peak meat,” he says. “And the question really is: How are we going to feed the coming billions of people on our planet in the next few decades?” Certainly not through large-scale animal agriculture, a key driver of climate change and one of the most resource-intensive and wasteful industries on the planet.
So what might we expect from our future of cleaner meat? For one, Shapiro says, we’ll start to see a shift away from “big meat” companies, and toward “big protein.” While plant-based meat companies like Impossible and Beyond Meat, and cellular ag companies like Memphis Meats, necessarily follow different methods, their aims are the same: To develop meat alternatives with significantly less environmental consequences.
Read the full article about the future of clean meat by Eillie Anzilotti at Fast Company.