If you haven’t heard of clean meat, now’s the time to stop living under a rock and start reading up on the topic on a lot of vegans’ minds these days. If you have heard of clean meat, now’s also the time to learn more about this breakthrough that could start CLOSING SLAUGHTERHOUSES DOORS FOR GOOD. Which is the goal, OK? Because, seriously, those places gotta go.
We were lucky enough to sit down with author and animal advocate Paul Shapiro (yes, the famed Paul Shapiro of Animal News You Can Use!) to break it all down. Paul’s new book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, comes out January 2 on Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books, WHICH IS TOMORROW! Go get it!
Paul, congrats on writing the book on clean meat!
PS: Thanks! I guess it’s true I’ve written the book on it, since I’ve written the only book on it! Not the highest bar, admittedly, but there are others working on books on the topic too, and I can’t wait to read theirs.
Ha, fair enough. But yours is still the best-selling one out right now…
Good point!
So for the totally ignorant, I mean, for the less familiar, can you tell us just what this clean meat is?
We’re talking here about real meat, just grown outside animals. Not an alternative to meat, like Gardein or Tofurky, both of which I love. But real, actual animal meat, grown from animal cells as opposed to animal slaughter. Yes, it may sound like science fiction, but it’s now science fact. The book chronicles the pioneering startups and their investors racing to commercialize these animal-free animal products and the potential such commercialization has to address many of the most pressing sustainability concerns we face.
It’s called clean meat because, like clean energy, it’s so much cleaner for the planet. But it’s also just literally cleaner.
What do you mean the meat is literally cleaner?
Well, right now meat from animals is typically riddled with feces: E Coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella, all of which are intestinal pathogens. That’s why you have to cook the crap out of raw meat—literally—to prevent it from sickening you. But when growing clean meat, you don’t grow intestines; you just grow muscle, meaning it’s much cleaner and safer from a food safety perspective.
Cook the crap out of meat—literally. OMG. I get it: it’s cleaner. But it’s still animal meat. Should vegans eat this?
Well, clean meat’s not commercially available just yet, but that will change within a matter of years, not decades. And in many ways it doesn’t really matter if vegans eat it. The goal is for clean meat to displace factory farmed meat, not to displace plant-based foods, of course. It’s an alternative for people who feel like they’re wedded to eating real meat.
Why can’t those people just eat plant-based meats?
I hope they will and expect the plant-based protein sector to explode in the way the plant-based milk sector has exploded in recent years. But even with the popularity of plant-based milks, 90-percent of fluid milk sold in the US is still coming from cows. In the case of meat, more than 99 percent meat sold
in the US still comes from animals. (Plant-based meats are less than 1 percent of meal sales.) To the extent that many people want actual animal meat, clean meat is a way to provide it while causing much less cruelty, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and with fewer resources.
That all sounds great, but will people actually eat clean meat?
Well, look at the meat people eat now. It comes from animals who were raised in the most unnatural and inhumane conditions imaginable. Sure, there may be some people who’ll say they refuse to eat meat unless an animal was slaughtered for it, but I suspect a lot of people will be quite glad to be
able to enjoy real meat with so many fewer downsides. And consumer surveys suggest that quite a lot of Americans would be happy to eat clean meat, too.
But will clean meat have the same unhealthy aspects of meat, like increased heart disease risk?
The nutritional quality of clean meat will likely be the same as conventional meat, but again, with food safety improvements. Theoretically that could be improved upon, but it’s likely that at least at first, it will just be nutritionally equivalent. All that said, I’m friends with a lot of vegans on social media, and
my feed is generally populated by celebratory messages about the latest vegan donuts, pizzas, ice creams, and other foods that are delicious but certainly unhealthy, so I don’t know what percentage of vegans are so concerned about health that they don’t occasionally eat unhealthy foods. Still, the goal
isn’t for vegans to eat clean meat, but vegans concerned about animals and the planet certainly should be enthused about the prospect of commercially viable clean meat so that many who do eat clean meat can switch.
GOT IT. So where can people learn more about the book?
PS: Check out www.CleanMeat.com, get the book, and tell me what you think about it!
You heard Paul Shapiro! Now leave our site and go buy the book! (Don’t worry, you can come right back afterwards!)
