Clean Meat Hits Shelves

On January 2, 2018, Gallery Books released Paul Shapiro's Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, one of the first mainstream books to chart the young cultivated-meat industry. Shapiro, who founded the animal advocacy group Compassion Over Killing in 1995 and later spent over a decade as a Humane Society of the United States vice president, toured labs and interviewed scientists and entrepreneurs racing to grow real animal meat from cells rather than from slaughtered animals. The book carried a foreword by historian Yuval Noah Harari and traced the field from a single, staggeringly expensive lab-grown burger in 2013 toward a future where the price kept falling. It became a Washington Post bestseller within its first week on shelves.