Clean Meat

Paul Shapiro follows the race to develop and commercialize real meat produced without animals, from entrepreneurs and scientists' workshops to corporate boardrooms, and examines the debate around it. His case starts from the cost of current farming: with population and demand for meat, eggs, dairy and leather growing, raising so many farm animals is inefficient and takes a heavy toll on the planet, on public health and on the animals themselves. Shapiro describes cellular agriculture, which grows actual meat from animal cells, along with other foods built from the molecule up with no animal cells at all. He frames the shift as a second domestication, this time of cells rather than animals. The book appeared in 2018.

Marvin Liao, a partner at 500 Startups, included it in a list he called random, made up of books he said he was 15 to 50 percent of the way through.