I agree that's the best solution, but I think it's unfortunately much less tractable in most places than corporate campaigns. In the one large producer where it is right now, the EU, we're investing heavily in legislative work. 

Thanks! Claude deserves all the credit for the charts :)

I'm not wild about this campaign either. I've shared this feedback privately with Aidan and Thom, but think there's value to doing so publicly to make clear that EA / the animal movement's moderate wing / FarmKind's funders don't uniformly endorse this approach. (To be clear: I'm writing in my personal capacity and haven't discussed the following with anyone else at Coefficient Giving.)

I'm a huge fan of FarmKind's team. I've personally donated to them and directed funding to them via Coefficient Giving. I thought they did an incredible job during the Dwarkesh fundraiser earlier this year and I admire their ingenuity and grit in pursuing the very hard challenge of bringing in counterfactually new funds to effective animal advocacy. I appreciate that they meant well with this campaign, which I think they saw as using a a playful fake-feud with Veganuary to generate media.

But I thing this campaign was a mistake for three reasons: 

1. This feels like an incitement to infighting, which has long plagued the animal movement. In recent years, I've seen the abolitionist / more radical wing of the animal movement take major good faith steps to reduce this infighting (see, e.g., my session with Wayne Hsiung at this year's AVA). Whether Veganuary was in on this or not, I'm seeing vegan activists reasonably interpreting this as an attack on their advocacy. I think we should have a very high bar for deliberately starting a fight in the movement, and I don't think this meets it.
2. This feels like an attack on vegans. I think we should also have a very high bar for attacking well-meaning people doing good in the world, whether vegans, EAs, organ donors, aid workers, or longtermists. I appreciate that attacking vegans wasn't the campaign's intent, but I think it was the predictable result, and certainly how the folks in the Daily Mail's comments sections have (gleefully) interpreted it.
3. This feels dishonest. To be clear: I don't think FarmKind intended it this way and I think the people behind it are deeply ethical people. But I think our movement is at its best when we hold ourselves to high standards and that includes not deliberately misleading people. And creating a fake "meat-eating campaign" feels like it crosses the line for me.

Again, this isn't to question the intent or abilities of FarmKind's team. Instead, I'm sharing how I personally feel about this campaign. I hope we can avoid campaigns like this in future, while continuing to pursue the innovation in tactics that the animal movement and EA needs. 

Thanks David! That's very kind of you :) And TBC: I wouldn't have skipped the whole newsletter -- just weighing on ideal protein consumption, which was a bit of a digression from the main point. (And I had actually considered just saying something like "I don't know how much protein you should eat, but it doesn't matter because we can't influence it much.")

Totally fair feedback. I agree that I should probably have just argued that the general concept of UPFs is nonsense. My sense is that most of the evidence for the harms of UPFs is correlational and based on studies that look at high consumption of fast food and other junk food that we know is based for you based on high sugar, salt, and caloric levels. (I.e. where you don't need to add UPF to explain why they'd be unhealthy.)

My sense is also that the evidence for food additives like emulsifiers, stabilizers, colorings, and artificial sweeteners posing health risks is surprisingly weak given the public uproar. And while I agree that chicken doesn't contain those things, chicken feed typically contains a whole different set of things that would scare people if they had to disclose them, like antibiotics, animal by-products, and lots of artificial ingredients to make up for nutritional deficiencies from a corn/soy-based diet. (Though, to be clear, I think the evidence that those feed additives pose direct health risks is also weak, with the possible exception of antibiotics contributing to antibiotic-resistant Salmonella.)

Thanks David. Yeah I agree that something closer to 1.6 gram per kilogram is probably ideal for gaining muscle mass, per what your ChatGPT answers say. But my guess is that most Americans aren't doing the required weights to actually gain muscle mass. And my guess would be that caloric restriction / GLP-1s are surer ways to loss weight. But I'm also far from an expert on any of this, so on reflection I should have just skipped weighing in on this point at all.

Only a relatively smaller number of breeding hens laying ~275 eggs each per year

Yep that's about right. I think it's roughly 7B new male chicks and 7B new female chicks each year. The population of egg-laying hens (~8B) is a big higher than the number of chicks because they each live for a bit longer than a year on average (though that's partly offset by 5-10% annual mortality on egg farms). 

Thanks Manuel! TED will post this on its YouTube channel in the next few weeks. (They stagger out posting talks across the year, and typically post them for a few weeks just on TED.com before they go on YouTube.)

Thanks for doing and publishing this study! It's so helpful to get a clearer picture on this, even if we don't like the answers. As a validation of your findings, in 2015, Chipotle told Vox that sofritas were 3.5% of sales, very close to your 3.8%.