Item — HN Reader

I've been having this thought, however strange it may seem, it seems to me that the vegan movement, rightly justified by the cruelty that industrialization brings towards animals, is probably achieving the opposite effect of its original goal, that is, to stop killing animals for food.

The ideal solution, in my opinion, would be to brew tissue in a factory, sans brains, just the muscular system of animals. Seems plausible, right?

The problem is to reach that state, we require research. Research needs funding, and the only ones with an incentive to do that are companies that deal with meat. I imagine it is way more expensive to take care of animals than it would be to just grow muscles. But now that veganism is eating the world, that creates an impediment to that incentive, as the demand is now reduced and so the companies can just sustain their current production levels instead of finding ways to optimize them and therefore funding the research necessary.

So, in effect, veganism is causing more animals to die in the macro-process of us reaching the technological state of growing tissue in the lab.

What do you think?

4 comments

Your argument reads a lot like the "millenials are killing X" meme -- you're blaming people who've stopped engaging with a system for the continuing of that system. Factory farming is not vegans' responsibility, just as fossil fuel extraction is not bike-commuters' responsibility.

I agree with you that cultured meat is a much better food solution than factory farming, and I will absolutely advocate for that. But veganism isn't causing more animals to die by reducing demand for meat -- that logically doesn't follow.

(Also, "veganism is eating the world" is false -- it is on the rise, but less than one per cent of Americans are vegan, at least as of 2015. As a vegan, I still get a lot of looks and comments that prove that my lifestyle is not the norm.)

> veganism is eating the world

I don’t think veganism is eating the world. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/is-the-percentage-o... “2017 saw the highest per capita egg consumption in the U.S. in over 20 years.5 Per capita red meat and poultry consumption in the U.S. has been increasing as well, and is expected to reach a record high in 2018.”

Although there may be some larger % of vegetarians or vegans than a few decades ago, I don’t think that anywhere near a majority of the population will ever convert to that movement. They’ll happily continue eating meat rather than switch what they eat for moral/ideological reasons.

Even if veganism caused diminishing meat demand around the world (it does not, see other comment), I see no reason why artificial meat research would be impeded. The meat industry will try to optimize their production cost, no matter what.

Your line of thought would make sense if meat production was artificially limited and exponentially more expensive (because of environmental restrictions or farmland price, for example). Instead the opposite is happening. Meat's never been cheaper.

> The ideal solution, in my opinion, would be to brew tissue in a factory, sans brains, just the muscular system of animals. Seems plausible, right?

It doesn't seem plausible to me at all. Why not just eat plants and cut out all the inefficient processing (either via animals or lab grown tissue)? It seems like a solution in search of a problem.