Paul Shapiro had spent most of his career as a lobbyist, working for organizations like The Humane Society. While he found his work advocating for animal welfare extremely gratifying, around 2016, he started to reevaluate.
He started thinking he could effect change in a way that he couldn’t as a lobbyist by helping to build one of these new technologies that could make animal agriculture—in other words, raising cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals for human consumption—obsolete.
So he decided to write a book. Paul had never published a book before, but he had done plenty of writing. Op-eds, columns, and other pieces as a lobbyist. And because he was so early to the topic and pitched a book no one had written before, it didn’t take long before a publisher became interested.
While writing the book Clean Meat—the first to focus on the nascent cultivated meat industry—he spent a lot of time talking to folks on the front lines of the future food industry. It was during this time he had a realization.
“What I learned was these people were mere mortals like myself,” said Shapiro on the latest episode of The Spoon Podcast. “I thought if you were going to start your own company, you had to have some kind of special skillset that commoners like myself lacked. It was at that point that I decided that instead of writing about these people who I thought were going to solve this problem that had been animating my life for the past couple of decades, I would become one myself.”
In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Shapiro talks about their journey to start The Better Meat Co., his decision to pursue hybrid meat solutions instead of technologies like cultivated meat, his first big win with Purdue, and his company’s eventual transition to developing mycoprotein based products.
You can listen by clicking play below, or you can download it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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