If no one builds it, trillions die

Unless plant-based or cultivated meat reaches taste and price parity with conventional meat, the amount of farm animal suffering will grow, with no end in sight.

If we succeed with plant-based meat, we can significantly decrease conventional meat production and the suffering it causes. If we succeed with cultivated meat, we have a real shot at eliminating industrial animal agriculture.^[1] 

Even if we fall short of that goal, every 10 percent of conventional meat that we displace spares about 22 billion vertebrate animals a year, cuts about 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, spares roughly 130 million hectares of land from grazing animals or growing animal feed, pulls about 10,000 metric tons of medically relevant antibiotics out of the food chain, slashes naturally occurring pandemic risk, and more.

For anyone who wants to make the world better, this is a chance to help solve some of its biggest problems. The obstacles are real. So is the cost of waiting.

Since I'm writing for the EA Forum, I'll focus on animals.

The number of animals farmed and slaughtered for human food is staggering, and it keeps growing.

Every year, humanity farms and slaughters roughly 220 billion vertebrate animals for food: about 88 billion land animals (90 percent of them chickens) and another 130 billion farmed fish.^[2] That’s more animals every year than the total number of humans who have ever lived.

And those numbers keep climbing, setting new global records almost every year since 1961, when the UN FAO started keeping track (there's been exactly one down year for farmed fish, and not a single down year for land animals).^[3] 

In the four decades since I adopted a vegan diet, global land animal meat production has more than doubled, and the number of slaughtered land animals has more than tripled (because of the small-body problem: disproportionate increases in chicken consumption, and chickens are small). The number of farmed fish has grown roughly tenfold over a slightly shorter timeframe.

It’s impossible for the human mind to grasp numbers this big or suffering at this scale. But it’s worth trying, because every single one of these 220 billion animals matters as much as any cat or dog we know personally, and almost all of them are leading lives of misery and then dying horribly. 

Alternative proteins are our best (and perhaps only) hope to reduce the number of animals farmed and slaughtered for food. 

Plant-based and cultivated meat are to animal agriculture what renewable energy and electric vehicles are to fossil fuels and gas-powered cars: market-based solutions that change how we meet demand. The world is going to consume more energy and drive more miles as it gets wealthier. It’s also going to eat more meat. That’s why we need renewable energy, EVs, and alternative meats. 

The goal of these supply-side interventions is to give people what they want, made differently and at a lower price: Instead of (or in addition to) trying to change the human desire to consume more energy, drive more miles, and eat more meat, we can change how energy is produced, cars are powered, and meat is made. The trick is to eliminate what Bill Gates calls "the green premium": the difference in price and experience between the more environmentally friendly product and its conventional counterpart.^[4]

Why diet change advocacy is not enough

For more than half a century, environmentalists, doctors, nutritionists, and animal activists have begged the public to eat less meat. Those efforts have surely slowed the growth of meat consumption, and I would like to see them continue and improve.^[5]

But they have not reversed the long-term rise in global meat production (they have not come anywhere close), and it’s hard to imagine that changing. Even in the United States, the top 10 years for meat production are the most recent 10. And all projections of global meat consumption into the future agree that, barring a global recession or something similar, both per capita and total meat consumption will keep rising through at least 2050.^[6]

So let's take a page from the environmental movement: Let's focus on making meat that consumers love, but less expensive and without the suffering.^[7]

The goal: Plant-based and cultivated meats that taste the same or better and cost the same or less, compared to conventional meats

Study after study finds that deliciousness and affordability are the top factors that drive food choices generally, as well as enthusiasm (or, more accurately right now, lack of enthusiasm) for plant-based and cultivated meat in particular.

The supply-side approach scales in a way nothing else does: Diet-focused progress has to be won over and over and over--person by person, cafeteria by cafeteria, or government by government. A campaign that works in Germany or Denmark has to be rebuilt everywhere else. There's not a market mechanism that will cause success in one area to naturally scale to other areas. 

With alternative proteins, the hard problems are taste and price, and those are science and engineering problems. Solve them once, and industry and governments everywhere have reasons to spread them globally: profits and more robust and resilient supply chains for companies, GDP and food security for countries, as I discuss in chapters 9 and 10 of my recently released book Meat, which Publishers Weekly named a top ten new release in science earlier this year.

We’ve seen this before: The price of solar panels has fallen by 99.7 percent over the past fifty years and by 63.5 percent in the last ten, because the US, Japan, Germany, and China invested in it. Today countries that spent nothing at all on the research are building solar farms at prices very few people predicted just 10 years ago.^[8] The Human Genome Project was funded mainly by the US government and carried out by 20 institutions in 6 countries. Its results were made public and now underpin medicine everywhere.^[9] We can do the same thing for meat, with public investment in open-access research (GFI’s top priority worldwide). 

Eliminating the most egregious abuses is important, but it’s not enough.

One area where advocates are making progress is farm animal welfare. And make no mistake: If you were a hen in a cage or a mother pig in a crate, you would want advocates working hard to get you out. But getting rid of the worst abuses (through welfare campaigns) and reducing the number of animals subjected to any abuse at all (through alternative proteins) accomplish different things.

Welfare improvements are deeply meaningful, but even with them, conditions on industrial farms stay atrocious, both physically and mentally. These improvements matter so much precisely because conditions are the stuff of nightmares, whether for animals on land or in water. 

Welfare wins are also hard to scale globally. Most have come in the United States and the European Union, which account for about one-fifth of land animals slaughtered (17.3 of 87.9 billion) and just north of 1 percent of aquaculture (1.5 of 141 million metric tons).^[10] Winning elsewhere is harder, and a victory in one country does not carry over to the next. 

So we need both: reducing the suffering of animals on farms now through welfare campaigns, and reducing the number of animals farmed through alternative meats that reach taste and price parity with conventional meat. Plant-based meat can substantially decrease the number of animals factory farmed, and cultivated meat has a real shot at cutting that number to zero, as I discuss here.

The Forum’s top two questions: Will it work, and will people eat it? 

Two questions about alternative meats recur most often on the EA Forum: Can plant-based and cultivated meat reach taste and price parity with conventional meat? And if they do, will people eat them? My first two Meat Matters articles tackle these questions. Here are the short versions: 

Scientific viability: More than 100 companies and hundreds of university scientists around the world are working to get cultivated meat to taste and price parity; those numbers are up from one (Upside Foods) and two (Mark Post and Marianne Ellis) just 11 years ago. At that point, Upside had raised just $125,000, which was all the private funding cultivated meat had ever received. Since then, costs have fallen by orders of magnitude, government funding and scientific progress have surged, and cultivated meat has gone from a $330,000 burger to full meals served to hundreds of people. I talk about why that's all quite mind-blowing in my first Meat Matters post. 

This feels a lot like solar and EVs a decade ago, when solar reached one percent of global electricity generation and EVs reached one percent of new car sales. For some cultivated meat companies, the central challenges now are regulatory approvals and securing the financing required to scale production. Those challenges are substantial, and success is far from certain, but the progress is deeply encouraging.^[11]

Consumer acceptance: Consumer research suggests substantial interest in plant-based and cultivated meat, with good reason to expect that interest to grow further once products compete on taste and price (no product comes close right now).^[12] At that point, benefits for food safety, the environment, global health, and animals can become additional reasons to choose them. On top of that, the economic and food security benefits give the meat industry and governments strong incentives to send price- and taste-competitive alt meats shooting up the adoption S-curve. I develop this argument here.

Will AGI or TAI solve cultivated meat? Let's make it happen! 

Some effective altruists expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) or transformative AI (TAI) to solve the taste and price challenges for alternative meats, and so they wonder: What's the point of work on alternative meats now? 

I’d love for that to happen, but I see at least three problems with waiting for it.

First, I’m not at all sure it’s true, absent significant effort from those of us who want to ensure that it happens. And as Lewis Bollard explained to Dwarkesh Patel, AI will also accelerate industrial animal farming. Unsurprisingly, AI is already making factory farming more efficient, and cheaper conventional meat makes competing on price harder.

Second, work we do now can make alternative proteins easier to advance with AI. We need much better data before machine learning can be maximally useful, we need trained scientists, and we need functioning companies. And then technical breakthroughs still have to become products: Facilities need financing, production needs scaling, and products need regulatory approval. They also need political support and the public’s trust. All of that requires an ecosystem, and that requires work right now. 

Third, speed matters. Every month, more than 18 billion vertebrate animals are farmed and slaughtered, each capable of feeling pain in much the same way we do. Animal scientist (and slaughterhouse designer) Temple Grandin has argued that they feel fear much more intensely than we do; in many cases, it’s incapacitatingly bad. And bioethicist Bernard Rollin has argued that pain may be worse for non-human animals, because they don’t know that it will end; in the moment, their suffering is their entire world.

My AI dream: a frontier lab takes on cultivated meat

Rather than wait for AGI to make meat without animals, let’s ask the people building it to help now. The science and engineering have advanced far enough that I think a frontier lab (e.g., the life sciences teams at Anthropic or OpenAI, or Google DeepMind) could solve the core challenges of making cultivated meat affordable, as I discuss here (and in much more depth in Meat). 

With their budgets, expertise, and connections, they could build the science and engineering roadmap for cheap cultivated meat and hand it to the world. With a bit more investment, they could speed up today’s startups or launch new ones, creating a thriving cultivated meat industry.

Most of the labs’ life sciences work focuses on medicine, and that work matters. But cultivated meat is a biology problem too, and solving it would end more suffering than almost anything else they could take on: hundreds of billions of vertebrate animals a year. 

And think about how cool it would be to change the very nature of nature by removing the need for live animals as a precursor to the production of animal meat.^[13]

If you’re at a frontier lab and want to talk about making this happen, please get in touch. 

There is no plan B for reducing farm animal numbers, so let’s go all-in on alternative proteins.

If alternative meats fail, trillions more vertebrate animals will live miserable lives and die painful, terrifying deaths. Even if success were inevitable eventually (and I don't think it is), speed is a moral imperative: Every second, the world slaughters 2,800 land animals and 4,100 farmed finfish.

I believe that cultivated meat could eventually replace all industrial animal meat. But we don’t have to get anywhere near that goal to make an enormous difference. Displacing even 1 percent of conventional meat production means 2.2 billion fewer vertebrate animals each year living and dying in misery. 

I think a lot about the history of science and engineering, and how much progress has depended on hundreds of people each making specific choices at specific moments. In retrospect, breakthroughs can look inevitable. But behind them are people who chose to work on a difficult problem, fund an uncertain idea, or champion a technology before its promise was obvious.

In 2015, the International Energy Agency expected electric vehicles to remain a small share of the global car fleet through at least 2040. Why? In the IEA’s words, “the cost of batteries, consumer caution and limited recharging infrastructure.” Yet in 2025, electric cars made up 25 percent of new car sales worldwide and almost 55 percent in China, up from less than 1 percent a decade earlier.

How did that happen? Government policies in Europe, China, and the United States drove down battery costs, improved range, and paid for charging networks. Since 2015, battery prices have fallen about 75 percent, typical range has more than tripled, and the world has built more than 7 million public chargers. And companies, starting with Tesla, built cars good enough to shatter stereotypes about EVs and the people who drive them. 

Follow the chain back and you’ll find that dozens of people were instrumental, starting with Elon Musk, but also: the engineers at a tiny California company who showed Musk an electric sports car built on laptop batteries, the California regulators whose mandate gave Tesla billions in credits, everyone behind the controversial federal loan program that lent Tesla $465 million and saved the company from bankruptcy, the Chinese officials who helped Musk build a massive Tesla factory in 11 months (at a fraction of what it would have cost almost anywhere else), the three Nobel-winning chemists who made lithium-ion batteries possible, and so many more. 

The same is true for solar energy, mRNA vaccines, penicillin, and the Human Genome Project, stories I tell in chapter 8 of Meat, which Rachel Bronson, former president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote in the Bulletin "should be required reading for anyone interested in scientific progress." 

In each case, hundreds of people (or more) took actions they easily could have skipped, and history would have turned out worse. And in the version of history where they failed, everyone would simply assume the naysayers had been right: that these breakthroughs were never possible. 

Alternative proteins are at that stage now: promising but uncertain. If you’re an effective altruist deciding where to work or give, this field needs you: scientists and engineers, program managers, legislative staffers, policymakers, journalists, global health experts, philanthropists, and investors. Whoever decides to make this their life’s work could be the reason it succeeds.^[14]

If no one builds it, trillions die. 

Let’s build it.^[15]

For your monthly dose of alt meats urgency and optimism, please subscribe to my substack: Meat Matters. 

It's free and always will be.

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1. ^{^}

   When asked which current practice future generations will see as deplorable, even committed meat eaters often name industrial animal farming. Examples include the late conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and podcast host Sam Harris. It’s hard to imagine ending that practice unless we can produce the meat people love without farming and slaughtering animals.

2. ^{^}

   I focus on land animals and finfish in this essay because the evidence that they can suffer, both physically and psychologically, is incontrovertible. Far more invertebrates are killed for food each year and, as Bentham’s Bulldog argues convincingly, there is plenty of reason to be concerned about them, too.

3. ^{^}

   There have been three slight dips in the volume of land animal meat produced; those came in response to Mad Cow Disease, African Swine Fever, and Covid-19. Even in those years, the number of land animals slaughtered went up, as consumers shifted some of their consumption from beef or pork to poultry. 

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For EVs, that's the cost of the car, the car's overall appeal, and the convenience of driving it (mostly an issue of charging infrastructure and battery range). For solar and wind energy, that's cost and intermittency (the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow). For alternative meats, that's taste and price. 
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I support education and diet change campaigns, just like I support efforts to improve energy efficiency and decrease car use. More efficient appliances, better-insulated buildings, and efforts to encourage people to use less air conditioning can temper energy demand. Better public transit, safer bike lanes, and efforts to encourage walking and carpooling can reduce demand for driving. All are worthwhile, but even combined, they haven’t bent the upward curves of energy demand and cars on the road. So we also need renewable energy and vehicles that don’t burn fossil fuels. Alternative proteins offer the same opportunity: meeting the world's undeniable and growing demand for meat by changing how we produce it.
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I dive into humanity's love of meat in chapter 5 of Meat.
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And also without the contribution to antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk, and with a tiny fraction of the contribution to climate change, biodiversity loss, and a host of other environmental harms. I discuss these topics in chapters 2 (climate change/our environment), 3 (AMR), and 4 (pandemic risk) of Meat.
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Since 2015, solar prices have fallen from 74 cents/watt to less than 27 cents/watt. As a result, installed capacity has grown more than 10-fold in just 10 years, from 227 to 2,397 gigawatts. Solar is now the cheapest way to produce electricity, which is why installed capacity has crushed the IEA's 2016 projections (it passed the agency's 24-year projection in just 8 years), as I discuss in Meat. In 2014, the Economist declared solar energy to be "by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions.” Just 10 years later, an Economist cover story declared the “Dawn of the Solar Age.” Even the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that “the clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop.”
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I dive into these and other examples of Wright's Law and Amara's Law in chapter 9 of Meat, which makes the economic case for alternative meats. 
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That 141 million tons includes molluscs, crustaceans, and aquatic plants. Counting only finfish, the world farmed about 66.26 million metric tons in 2024, according to the most recent FAO figures. The United States farmed 207,813 metric tons and the EU 558,797, a combined 1.16 percent of the total.
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I’m less optimistic about plant-based meat, mostly because I don’t think nearly enough effort is going toward achieving taste and price parity, both of which remain real challenges. In Meat, I make the point that you can’t solve problems you’re not trying to solve. In chapters 7 (on plant-based meat) and 11 (on timeframes), I discuss how few companies and scientists are focused on these challenges. Food Tank ran an excerpt from chapter 7 that covers some of this.
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Electric vehicles could not meaningfully displace gas-powered car sales until they came down in price, gained battery range, and had charging infrastructure to support them. All three were required. 
Solar energy could not meaningfully replace fossil fuels until prices fell and grids were integrated; both were required. 
Similarly, plant-based and cultivated meat will not reach meaningful market penetration until they reach taste and price parity with conventional meat. Again, both are required. 
To be clear, these are basic requirements, but that doesn't mean that solving these challenges is the end of the work. These requirements are necessary but not sufficient, as I discuss here. Meeting them creates the conditions for meaningful displacement; it doesn't finish the job.
According to results from the sensory testing initiative NECTAR (under the nonprofit Food System Innovations), no product has reached taste parity (a small handful come close). The beef products that come closest cost twice as much as their conventional counterparts at retail. The pork and chicken products cost even more.
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Each agricultural revolution has moved farming away from nature: Roughly 12,000 years ago, farming animals moved them out of their natural state in the wild. Roughly 80 years ago, industrial animal farming moved them into mass confinement. Now, industrial chickens (99 percent of the flock in developed countries) are growing 6 times as quickly as they would naturally, and animals are fed massive amounts of drugs to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise cause mass die-offs. In the US, regulations allow residues from 100 different drugs in meat (including ivermectin and ractopamine), as long as they don't go above a certain level. Alternative meats could eliminate all of that, creating much healthier and cleaner end products. 
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The conclusion to Meat reflects on some of the ways people can help accelerate the alternative meats trajectory. If you email me at brucef(at)gfi.org, I'm happy to send a PDF.
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A few quick clarifications about what this article does and does not say:
• What I am saying: Unless plant-based or cultivated meat reaches taste and price parity with conventional meat, the amount of farm animal suffering will grow, with no end in sight.
• What I am not saying: This will definitely work. (If I thought it would definitely work, I wouldn't feel such a sense of urgency; whether it works our not is, I think, up to us.)
• What I am also not saying: Alternative meats are the most important thing to work on. For all the reasons spelled out above, I think they're in the top tier. But there are quite a few cause areas and projects that share that top tier with them, including the range of farm animal welfare work. 
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