Carnivorous Vegans

Today, vegans are a small but dedicated group who, despite market pressure, make morally driven consumption decisions. That is, they allow a moral principle to guide their purchases and consumption over personal utility. Of course, some vegans just hate the taste of meat or are vegans for health reasons. But the vegans that I’m talking about specifically are Moral Vegans. Be it about rights, welfare, or the environment, Moral Vegans are stubbornly principled in the face of social conventions and economic influences. They often pay more for vegan alternatives, and are relatively marginalised in the marketplace (although a fairly robust niche for vegan alternatives has definitely emerged in the last few years). They remain stoic: they're in the right, and everyone else is making a terrible consumptive mistake.

At some point in the near-ish future, it seems likely that “clean meat” will become widely commercially available. This is meat that is grown in cell culture rather than being harvested from an animal. It has the potential, when fully developed as a product, to have many benefits over farmed meat:

• Less exploitation or harm to animals
• More resource efficient cultivation on many levels, including less land-use for livestock and agriculture devoted to feeding that livestock, and less water use
• More hygienic, and with less of the bacterial risks that intensive farming practises carry (including the accidental breeding of superbugs)
• Lower transportation costs (clean meat could be cultivated in more compact urban spaces)
• Lower carbon emissions (through avoiding the direct emissions of livestock, reducing deforestation, and through lower transportation requirements)
• Novel food possibilities

Some non-vegans will be swayed by these reasons. But for most consumers, one thing will make the difference more than any of these benefits: that the clean meat is cheaper than farmed meat, while being of (at least) equivalent quality. If this price point is reached, the shift in the centre-of-gravity of the market will be inexorable. Many people would be likely to comfortably make the switch to clean meat. After all if it is the same price and an identical product to normal meat, people will opt for the more ethical option (at the very least to signal savviness to others). The market will flip over a period of time as the product becomes more popular and normalised, with most people eventually becoming “Carnivorous Vegans” who comfortably follow market forces.

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I’d like to inject a side-note about human psychology here. Most people don’t like to admit that they’re doing something wrong or unethical. If questioned about the morality of behaviour, many people shut down and enter an adversarial and defensive mode of communication. Sometimes, one has to accidentally find themselves on the right side of the argument to admit that their previous behaviour was unethical. I think this is likely to happen with farmed meat. Once previous non-vegans are eating clean meat (even for simple reasons like cost), it will become much easier for them to accept arguments about the immorality of farming practises and farmed meat. This is because they are no longer directly implicated by the conclusions of the argument. In short, they have found themselves on the “right side of history”, free from the cognitive dissonance of eating animals while suspecting that farming practises are unethical.

Children growing up a few decades hence will likely wonder how we could ever have allowed factory farming to go on for as long as it did. It will be similar to the way we reflect on most white people’s complacency before the Civil Rights Movement, or the photo of those Auschwitz guards laughing and enjoying a day off. Those of us old enough to remember a time where most people ate intensively farmed animals may have a hard time explaining it. “Everyone did it, it was hard not to. Most of us knew that it was a bad situation, but we put it out of our minds. It’s easy to judge if you didn’t live through it”. Regardless of what our ancestors think of us, it really won’t matter. We will have (almost by accident) put an end to factory farming, and allowed everyone to agree that eating animals is largely immoral in the process. Introducing clean meat to the market is thus analogous to giving slave-owners access to cheap and efficient robot workers instead. Sure, those slave-owners are bad people, and it would be nice if they stopped owning slaves out of the goodness of their hearts. But regardless, the outcome is still the same desirable one: people stop owning slaves in favour of something better, and are thereby more susceptible to coming around to the idea that slavery is actually bad in general.

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In the meantime a small but sizeable minority will hold out, claiming that "real meat" from an animal is natural and therefore better, and perhaps will claim clean meat to be evil or in some way a conspiracy. In short, people who continue to eat animals will become in the future what vegans are today; a small but vocal group making a moral consumption choice regardless of the whims of the market.

I thought this was a funny reversal. Let’s see how my prediction turns out in 20 years.