Thank you so much. 

Re: adding my scaling analysis to this piece: 

I feel like my posts are already way too long. It’s tough to know what to include and what not to include… 

One of the things I see quite a bit on the forum is people speculating about alternative proteins and things like consumer acceptance and scientific viability. Those are fair topics, of course, but it seems (to me) that there's often an assumption that unless we have absolute certainty on both those things now, we should work on something else. 

The problem is that nothing else can decrease the number of animals slaughtered (I don't believe) globally; and the farm animal welfare reforms are brilliant, but they really just eliminate the most hideous abuses (and even that is super-tough, hard to scale, etc.). 

If you don't have a plan B, then IMO, that should change how you discuss plan A. 

So this article is focused on this point: Yes, it’s going to be hard, and yes, it might not work, but since nothing else seems to have a greater than 0 percent chance of changing meat's steady upward trajectory (billions more vertebrate animals every single year), we really need to focus on solving the hurdles to alt protein success, not just identifying them.

And hey look, both scientific viability and consumer acceptance seem like they won't be nearly as challenging as we might think. 

Re: scaling and contamination:

I'm not sure it's true that with scaling, the contamination problem becomes greater. In response to Aidan’s Sandcastles post where he identified that problem, I checked in with a bunch of cultivated meat scientists, and they don’t agree with him. The stakes are much greater at higher volumes, but ensuring sufficiently sterile conditions appears to be a fairly easy challenge, according to the handful of experts I checked in with on this. He also got the challenge exactly backward: It's much harder at lab-scale conditions, not indutrial conditions.

Here’s what GFI lead cultivated meat scientist Elliot Swartz says on that issue: “You also don't need pharmaceutical clean rooms to run these processes. The largest cultivated meat production site in the world, built in Australia by Vow, features a 20,000L bioreactor sitting in essentially an open warehouse. Does contamination still happen? Yes, but proper protocols followed by personnel in facilities can drop contamination rates to near 0-2%. Regardless, a ~5% failure rate due to contamination is built into most techno-economic models of production.”

And here’s what David Kaplan from Tufts says: “Cultivated meat achieves a more controlled environment than is possible with livestock feeding, harvesting, and processing into meat. We do this through the use of highly controlled bioreactor settings with detailed attention to the production process. This achieves consistent, high-quality outcomes with significantly less risk of contamination or related concerns, all without the extensive use of antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics for livestock production can be compared with all approved cultivated meat products available to consumers today, all of which are produced without antibiotics. So it can be done, and while the process does require careful engineering design and attention to detail, the feasibility is already demonstrated.”

I interviewed all of the world’s top cultivated meat scientists for my book, and not a single one of them is still worried about contamination; that was a big unknown ~5+ years ago; it’s not now, is my understanding. 

Environmental impact: I don’t think that’s right. The only modeling that is ambivalent on environmental impact is modeling that takes the pharma production and scales it up. That is also the process that gets us the $330,000 burger. And as PAMC notes, there are other benefits, too: animals, AMR, pandemic risk, hunger and malnutrition. I just posted this on Substack - the introduction to my book Meat. You might find it interesting. 

I'd be happy to have a copy of the book sent your way, if you're interested in reading it. No pressure, of course. 

Ask, and ye shall receive. 😊

I'll be curious to hear what you think! 

Thanks very much - agree x all. 

I would just like to see us more actively soliciting ideas for advocacy that can work, in the same way we've been actively soliciting ideas around welfare campaigns. 

But yes I do, of course, agree with you re: the much greater likelihood of success for alt meats. 

So I would love to see more alt meat focused endeavors, alt meats in the various funds that are being put together focused on animal welfare, funding calls, etc.

No one said that cultivated meat is a silver bullet, of course. 

Saying that alt meats are necessary to decrease global meat consumption is very different from saying that they're a silver bullet. 

They are not, in quite a few different ways. For example, they don't do anything on their own; they don't solve quite a few problems with the food system; etc.

I'm not sure that bans in some places say much either way about consumer adoption for products that don't exist yet. Perhaps if the bans were passed via referendums, but not even then, I wouldn't think, for all the reasons I explore here. 

I am very impressed by this reflection, and I found it very helpful in adding strong corroborating support for things I already believe.

My one quibble is with the conclusion: "I (and I guess many in the EA community) would be excited to learn effective ways to promote plant-based diets, so please let us know if you find any!"

This feels a bit dismissive to me ("good luck Anita!"). 

Considering the stakes [~220 billion vertebrate animals/year (and growing) who are raised and slaughtered for food], and many more invertebrates, I think we should be a lot more enthusiastic about encouraging the broader EA community to take the possibility of effective interventions seriously, etc., as I discuss here. 

My key point: About a decade ago, the EA community walked away from diet advocacy, b/c nothing had succeeded in decreasting meat consumption. We've become a lot more creative and learned a ton in the past decade. Might there be ways to apply that creativity here, especially in a world of a lot more money and AI opening up options that have not, thus far, been available to us?

Considering the stakes, shouldn't we be a lot more focused on this than we are? 

I also think that we should consider other positive outcomes of such campaigns; I was very pleased to see that one of Lewis Bollard's "hot takes" was: "Vegan advocacy may have so far failed at its stated goal: to turn society vegan. But it succeeded in recruiting most of our movement’s top leaders and advocates globally. That’s an impressive track record for a few thousand leafleteers."

Fascinating post and discussion - I'm impressed by the level of candor. 

I had not seriously considered a bunch of the concepts in the post, which feel obvious in retrospect. Generally, I was thinking "more engagement = better." But of course that's not true. 

For me, if I post something here but nowhere else (as is the case with my most recent post), it felt worthwhile (increased reach, discussion, etc.) to promote it across other venues. But I can see how that might not be the right way to think about it. 

The post updated my thinking, and the comments even more so. Thanks. 

When I did a lot of leafleting, circa 1996 until the early 2000s, this was my favorite leaflet by far: the highest "take" rate and the highest "don't throw it on the ground immediately" rate. 

PETA's veg starter kit also had 2 full pages of celeb images and quotes (pages 2-3) and celebs on the cover.  I think they moved to food on the cover b/c "free recipes" was even more successful in terms of take-rate than celebs. 

Thanks Elizabeth - Interesting. That's not my impression at all. I'm curious why you think that and also what you disagree with about my response and here (in the section that is directly on point, flagged in my previous comment). 

Actually, I'll go ahead and paste the relevant section:

 For people who love meat and care about animals, i.e., almost everyone

In Meat, I tell the story of my friend Gene Weingarten, a two-time Pulitzer prize winner for the Washington Post, who (in addition to his award-winning features for the Post’s Sunday Magazine) wrote a weekly humor column for decades. A few of his columns had to do with how much he would love to stop eating meat, but how hard that is for someone who really loves the taste (which describes nearly everyone).

If you are a vegetarian, you almost certainly know dozens of people like this.

Other notable thinkers who feel (or felt) that eating meat is deeply immoral but also impossible to give up: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Charles Krauthammer, all of whom have made the case that industrial animal farming is a moral atrocity that future generations will view with the same sort of incredulous outrage we now feel about slavery.

Dawkins and Harris have both spoken about how enthusiastic they would be to switch to cultivated meat, even if it came with a hefty price premium, and Gene has said precisely that to me directly on multiple occasions.

The general public may not consider factory farming to be our generation’s moral scourge that is on par with slavery, but they do care about farm animal welfare. When farm animal protection measures land on state ballots, they pass by wide margins, even in conservative states like Arizona and Florida, both of which voted to ban gestation crates.

Anti-cruelty is so bipartisan that across ideologies, people will even vote against their financial interests in order to protect farm animals: When California banned cages and crates in 2008, the opposition flooded the airwaves with the message that voting yes would raise the price of eggs and pork. That won over the state’s two most important newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the state capital’s daily paper, the Sacramento Bee, and others—all of which ran “vote no” editorials, with a focus on food prices.

Both liberals and conservatives voted overwhelmingly to ban crates and cages anyway; they saw confinement practices as simply indefensible, regardless of the cost of bacon and eggs. The vote was a landslide: 63.5-36.5%. Notably, conservatives turned out in droves that year to ban gay marriage (in the most LGBTQ-friendly state in the country): 52%-48%.

Those results are backed up by consumer research across the US and globally: Across a 14-country study that included the US and China, 87% of respondents said farm-animal welfare was important to them and 80% expressed support for strong anti-cruelty laws for farm animals. See also here, here, and here.

If an animal-free option matched meat on taste and price, I think you’d see meaningful adoption from people who would be relieved to stop participating in something they already dislike but don’t feel they can give up.

Thank you for your comment, Elizabeth. 

You’re right that legumes are cheaper and can be delicious. I’ve eaten that way since 1987. But advocates have been making exactly this case for more than 50 years, and meat consumption is at record highs in the US and globally.

We're farming and slaughtering ~108 billion more vertebrate animals today than we were just 20 years ago, and that number just keeps going up. So I think we should reconsider whether just telling people to eat beans is our best course of action. 

In chapter five of Meat, I hypothesize that food choices mostly happen in what Daniel Kahneman called system 1 thinking: fast and instinctive. Our values live in system 2. That’s why people tell pollsters they’re eating less meat and then order the chicken sandwich. 

If you haven't read it yet, I hope you'll check out this essay, which explains why I think plant-based and cultivated meat can replace industrial animal meat. Please look, in particular, at the section on animal protection: "For people who love meat and care about animals, i.e., almost everyone." I think you'll have some of your preconceptions challenged. 

Thank you very much for engaging. 

Great comment - thank you. I agree with you. 

Plant-based meat: In the book, I note that plant-based meat is already much healthier on the issues that are most important for people in developed countries: heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, etc. All of the products that did well on NECTAR’s palatability tests are lower in fat and saturated fat, higher in fiber, lower in caloric density, and higher in protein (protein/energy). 

My guess is that these benefits will be sufficient to keep people in developed economies coming back (once the products are at taste and price parity), though I agree that fortification with B12, zinc, and iron would be a great idea. It’s also a very easy thing to do, and Impossible already does it. As the products get better and come down in price (or even sooner), I could see a voluntary standard for this put in place (and I would add protein to that).

Cultivated meat: The two pioneers are both medical doctors (Uma Valeti, who founded the first cultivated meat company, Upside Foods; and Mark Post, who produced the first cultivated burger, back in 2013, with a $1 million grant from Sergey Brin); they’re also both committed to ensuring nutritional superiority for cultivated meat. I think that’s a universal view. 

Developing economies: Your point is even more important in, e.g., India and other developing countries, where micronutrient deficiency is a big problem. In chapter 1 of Meat, I share my conversations with Sarah LaHaye from the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition about this precise issue. I think fortified plant protein and mycoprotein could be a key tool in the toolkit of global development agencies and similar. There’s some great work happening in this regard, and I’ve had some excellent conversations with people at Harvest Plus (the folks that put biofortification on the map) and others about it. This is also central to GFI India’s strategy. 

Thanks for commenting!