For the first time in history, a book has been bound in real leather that was grown without a cow. The book—Clean Meat: How Growing Meat without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World—is the first to chronicle the new field of cellular agriculture: growing real animal products like meat and leather outside of animals. Biotech start-up Geltor grew the precedent-setting cover—made from real cow leather that it grew—to give a hint of a near-future in which our dependence on animals for food and fiber is substantially lessened.
The historic book, signed by its author Paul Shapiro, is listed with a minimum initial bid of $10,000, with all proceeds to benefit The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes plant-based and clean meat alternatives to the products of industrial animal agriculture.*By "real cow leather" we're referring specifically in this case to collagen grown through microbial fermentation.