Ep. 132 - Brief thoughts on the alt-meat movement and my role in it

SHOW NOTES

I’m excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there’s a new, updated, paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that’s coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold.

Aligning with this new edition release, for the next couple months, this podcast is going to focus squarely on the issue that’s animated my life for the past 30 years: how to wean humanity off our animal-centered diets. The extraordinary suffering of the literally trillions of animals who we farm and kill for food has plagued me for more than three decades, and alleviating some of their suffering is the cause to which I’ve devoted my entire career.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Shapiro: Hello, friend, and welcome to episode number 132 of the Business for Good Podcast. I am very excited to use this short episode to announce that there is a new, updated, paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that is coming out on April 9th, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster's Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for pre-order everywhere books are sold.

I'll tell you more about it in a moment, but first, I just want to say the following. For the past six or so years I've hosted this show, we've profiled leaders from a wide array of companies making the world a better place. That includes really cool companies creating business models to solve problems of plastic waste, nuclear waste, fertilizer runoff, coral bleaching, animal agriculture, fossil fuels deforestation, inequitable birth control, and much, much more.

We have released 131 episodes on a cadence of once per two weeks on the first and 15th of each month without fail for the past six years. And these episodes have inspired listeners around the world to invest in the profiled companies, apply for jobs with them, and even to start their own companies taking on the problems that animate their lives. And for the next couple of months, we are going to focus squarely on the issue that has animated my life for the past 30 years, how to wean humanity off of our animal-centered diets.

The extraordinary suffering that literally trillions of animals who we farm and kill for food has plagued me for more than three decades and alleviating some of their suffering is the cause to which I've devoted my entire career. As the British antislavery crusader William Wilberforce put it a couple hundred years ago about his animal advocacy, if to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large. While I doubt that I will ever be as impactful as Wilberforce during the brief time that I've been permitted to be at large on this planet, I began as a picket-wielding, civil disobedience-committing, teenage grassroots activist who seemed more focused on being angry than on being effective.“I then transitioned to conducting undercover investigations at slaughter plants and factory farms, thinking that exposing the abuse that animals adore would be sufficient to create change. And while such efforts are important and are persuasive to some, I eventually came to believe that the adage that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we'd all be vegetarian is obviously not true, since most people who watch slaughterhouse videos, including the ones that I produced, did not become vegetarian. And if they did, their new lifestyle usually lasted only for a finite period.

In fact, some of the very people conducting those undercover investigations, even themselves, eventually returned to carnivory. At time would pass by. And I came to the conclusion that I would shift my focus merely from raising awareness about the plight of animals, to creating new public policies and corporate policies to try to help them.

So I spent the next 13 years doing just that. I was and remain very proud of the role that I played in the passage of dozens of state laws banning factory farming practices, along with hundreds of corporate policies requiring animal welfare improvements in food industry supply chains. We also prevented a number of terrible bills from becoming law and more.

Working with so many great animal advocates during that period of my life was a real, real honor. At the same time, around 2015 and 2016, when the animal-free food tech sector was just starting to catch fire with the rise of Eat Just, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and others, I started wondering if perhaps food technology and innovation were gonna do more than what I was doing to solve the problem that again had animated my whole life. I started reading about the history of technology's role in liberating animals, and it became quite clear to me that in fact, pretty much the only time that whole categories of animal exploitation had essentially been eradicated was when new technology rendered the exploitation obsolete.

Think about it. In William Wilberforce's day, which at this point is really like the early 1800s, the big animal welfare campaign was the treatment of the mercilessly abused carriage horses. Animal advocates waged campaigns to garner protections for these miserable horses like mandatory watering stations, resting hours, Sabbath days of rest, and more.

Yet in the end, it wasn't humane sentiment that liberated horses. It was the invention of cars, or what at the time were called horseless carriages. In fact, Henry Ford did more for horses than animal welfare campaigners at the day even envisioned doing, and he didn't care about horses at all.

Now, side note before anybody complains, I'm of course not saying that Ford is a great guy. After all, he was a pretty big fan of Hitler and he didn't like Jews that much, but you can't ignore the beneficial side effect of his work on horses. In fact, Ford famously declared himself that if he had asked the public what they wanted, they would have told him faster horses.

For thousands of years, we whipped and otherwise abused horses to get around. Then, within a matter of mere decades, we stopped. Similarly, for thousands of years, we harpooned whales to wet our homes with whale oil.

We stopped not because consumers were persuaded to care about whales, but because of the invention of kerosene, rendering whaling obsolete. We live plucked geese from millennia to keep the literate world writing, yet no one stopped using quill pens because they cared about geese. We stopped using quills because metal fountain pens were invented.

The list goes on and on and on, where long entrenched categories of animal exploitation were rendered obsolete by a new technological innovation. And so it was that in early 2016, I'd been thinking about publishing a novel about the human-animal relationship, but I was having a hard time finding a publisher for it. Publisher after publisher kept telling me that if I had a non-fiction idea for them, they wanted to see it.

Here's another quick side note, I'd still really love to publish that novel actually, so if you work in the publishing industry, please message me and let's talk. But anyway, I was running on a trail one day in early 2016. It was after work and I was running with my then co-worker, Kenny Torella, and I was telling him about my thoughts on technology's potential to end factory farming, and Kenny suggested that instead of publishing my novel, perhaps I should instead pitch publishers on a book about the new industry trying to create real animal meat slaughter free.

Little did he know it at the time, but Kenny's suggestion, again, offered casually during a run through a forest trail after work, was going to have a transformational effect on my life. I took that advice and eventually sold the book to Simon and Schuster, and throughout 2016 and 17, I researched and I wrote. During that time period, I became more and more sold on the idea that what I was doing was important for animals, but perhaps I could be doing even more by advancing animal-friendly food technologies.

Of course, I thought then that the way I do that would be through this book, Clean Meat, and I didn't give much more thought than that, and I hoped the book would reach a lot of people. So when the book finally came out in January of 2018, I wasn't really sure what to expect, and man was I surprised. Yuval Harari, the author of the fantastic book, Sapiens, wrote the foreword.

The Wall Street Journal and NPR both reviewed Clean Meat. It debuted on the Washington Post bestsellers list, coming in above major author's books, like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Ray Dalio. I didn't realize what a nerve the book would strike.

It turns out that people really wanted to know more about the race to commercialize the world's first slaughter-free meat. But in addition to the book's unexpected success, I was also surprised that so many of the people I profiled in the book, nearly all of whom have since been guests on this podcast, had founded their companies without extensive entrepreneurial or even business experience. These were founders who in some cases were raising tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars from investors for their ideas.

Yet as I came to know them, I realized that they were mere mortals like myself, as opposed to the larger than life figures some might make them out to be. This realization led me to a new conclusion about the next chapter of my life. I could either continue writing about the people who I thought may possibly solve the factory problem with new technology, or I could just become one of them myself.

I contemplated writing another non-fiction book, this one about the history of plant-based meat, and I hope someone will still do that. It's a riveting 1,000 year long story. But I ultimately concluded with the guidance and support of my close friends and the person who would soon become my wife, that I would take the latter path and just start my own company.

As the mortal founders I profiled in Clean Meat did. And that's what I've been doing as the primary way to make my living for the past six years with The Better Meat Co. And amazingly, this company did not kill my marriage, which is now going on five years strong.

While I'm of course firmly committed to achieving our goals at The Better Meat Co, as the years have gone by since Clean Meat came out in 2018, the book has been published in numerous other countries. It's now in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and so on. Sadly, it's not in Hebrew.

I don't know what's up with that to all the Israeli publishers out there. But admittedly, some parts of the book have become somewhat outdated. The book is largely evergreen, but as I went back and reread it in 2022, I realized that I had actually thought the book was more evergreen than it really turned out to be.

So when Simon and Schuster unsolicitedly asked me to revise it for a forthcoming paperback edition, while I knew it would be a lot of work, I was elated to have the chance to update the book and hopefully make it a bit more evergreen as well. I finished the revisions in the summer of 2023, and the new edition is coming out on April 9th, 2024. Clean Meat still tells the stories of the entrepreneurs, scientists and investors all racing to commercialize slaughter-free meat, but it's been updated to include recent major debates and events in the still nascent industry, from nomenclature debates to regulatory approvals to scaling challenges and more.

To align with the new book release, on this podcast we are going to release a series of interviews with leaders in the cultivated meat movement. Starting March 15th and dropping weekly, not bi-weekly, but weekly for a couple months, you will hear candid conversations with CEOs of the leading players in the field about what they see as the key challenges and opportunities for cultivated meat to actually start meaningfully commercializing. I'm excited about this series and I hope you are too.

And if you value this type of content, please let me ask you now, why don't you go and pre-order the new paperback edition of Clean Meat? Again, it's available everywhere books are sold. I put this show out as a service in the hopes that it may help others progress towards solving critical social and environmental problems.

But I don't take any compensation for doing this podcast. We run no ads, no paid placements, nor anything related. It's just what I do in my spare time.

“So if you, as a beneficiary of that work that goes into making this podcast come out with high quality content like clockwork, if you want to show your support, please go and pre-order the paperback edition of Clean Meat. I promise you it is an entertaining and inspirational read. Some might even say a page turner.

And by the way, it makes for great gifts too. So even if you have a copy of the 2018 edition, you definitely need the 2024 edition for yourself, and so do all your friends and family. Now, now that you've already pre-ordered the new paperback Clean Meat edition, I hope you enjoy the coming Cultivated Meat series on this podcast.

The first episode to drop will be with Eat Just CEO, Josh Tetrit, and there's much more to come after. These conversations are quite frank. We don't shy away from addressing the negative headlines in the space lately, nor the funding challenges that companies face.

Whether you love or hate the cultivated meat sector, I think you will find value in these conversations. Now, go order the book!

Thanks for listening, I hope you found it useful, and if you did, please let the world know. Leave the show a five star rating on your favorite podcast app and share the episode with your friends. Who knows, maybe you'll inspire one of them to be in the business of doing good themselves.