Why Alternative Proteins Needs a Strong Animal Rights Movement

URGENT: if you live in a state in this document, please call your Senator(s) about the Farm Bill. You can follow the directions in this doc. You can read more about why this is so important here.

Disclaimer: I am not an alternative proteins expert, nor an energy/climate expert, so if you are one of those, please correct anything I say that is wrong or misleading.

In my previous article, I wrote about the need for a stronger animal rights movement, and I indicated my focus would be primarily on people. If you are more of a techno-optimist than I am, you may have been wondering why I ignored alternative proteins. After all, they are a technology that could vastly expand the animal advocacy PPF by providing an attractive out for people who want to have their clean meat and eat it too. If we can scale up cultivated meat and get it to price parity with slaughter-based meat, then why do we need a movement at all?

It is a character fault of mine that I systematically underweight the potential of alternative proteins. I’m pretty against techno-optimism, so I have an allergic reaction any time someone implies that technology will be the solution to something, and I thus routinely forget to include alternative proteins in my calculus for animal well-being. Nevertheless, it may be the case that I need to eat vegan crow here. Getting alternative proteins above parity in terms of price and taste will, in all likelihood, drastically decrease the amount of animal suffering. I agree it is the single most promising intervention in this regard, and we should definitely invest more in it, both as a society and as a movement. What I’d like to caution against is this idea that alternative proteins are some kind of deus ex machina. Even if alternative proteins are a silver bullet, we will need to put explosive force behind it if it is to break through the resistance of inertia, special interests, and society at large.

First, we need to get alternative proteins off the ground. The good news is that we canalready create cultivated meat, including lab-grown meat from animal cells, so the blueprint is there. The bad news is that scaling up production is proving to be a challenge, and cultivated meat is still quite costly to manufacture. Plant-based alternative proteins are already relatively widespread, but they aren’t anywhere close to taste/texture parity with slaughter-based meat (at least, that’s what a lot of non-vegans tell us). I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that plant-based alternative proteins are sufficiently substitutable for most people.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of investment that has gone into alternative proteins, with about $881 million invested in 2025 alone (for reference, annual investment in farmed animal welfare is about $200 million globally). It’s hard to estimate the amount of spending on R&D in slaughter-based meat (some estimates put it as high as $38 billion per year, but those have been questioned), but the Environmental Working Group estimates that the US government spent $7.5 billion on subsidies to livestock and seafood producers in 2023—still about an order of magnitude more money than the spending on alternative proteins from the public and private sectors combined.

This leads into the second point, which is that transitioning from slaughter-based meat to cultivated meat will be a gargantuan task. Contrary to pop-economic belief, a great product popping up is not immediately known by everyone in perfect detail and its means of production are not magically conjured out of thin air. It will take an army of concerted and sustained effort to redirect public and private funds from slaughter-based meat to cultivated meat, to build and scale up facilities that produce cultivated meat, to market cultivated meat to the public and assuage fears about unnaturalness, etc. It will take an even greater army to defeat and/or co-opt the powerful interests which currently run the meat-grinders; who are already pushing for bans and labeling restrictions on alternative proteins as I write this.

I think the current transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is a good lesson. According to this Our World In Data article, the price of electricity from renewable sources has declined precipitously since their introduction in the 1950s, and within the last 15 years, has fallen below the price of electricity from coal and gas. The reason is that increased demand → increased supply → improvements in the production process → falling prices → competitiveness in a wider range of markets → increased demand—a virtuous cycle. It might be quite optimistic to expect alternative proteins to go as well as renewable technologies; unlike wind, which literally draws energy out of thin air, cultivated meat still requires some kind of raw material/medium to create. But the lesson remains: new technologies, even those with great potential, don’t just automatically replace old ones. Rather, there needs to be a concerted effort to kickstart and maintain a virtuous cycle of development, deployment, and improvement.

We cannot afford to be complacent, nor to assume that a concerted effort will automatically arise and sustain itself. As Frederick Douglass put it, “men in earnest don’t fight with one hand, when they might fight with two.” The animals need us to fight with all the hands we are given and all the hands we can get.

A cautionary foil for this is nuclear energy. Since 2009, the price of energy from nuclear power plants has increased, despite nuclear energy being one of the safest and lowest-carbon energy sources. This is because of increased regulation for safety reasons and because not many nuclear power plants have been built. Lack of demand → lack of supply → lack of opportunities to improve/economies of scale → rising prices → decreased competitiveness → lack of demand. This is very sad because nuclear energy was genuinely promising—perhaps not as much as solar and wind in some ways, but still promising.

I think the public will bears a lot of the responsibility for the success of solar/wind. At least in the educated and liberal circles I grew up in, everyone was concerned about climate change. Teachers told us that we would have to be the generation to save the planet from global warming. Presidential candidates debated the issue on national television. Corporations, governments, and international bodies have taken it upon themselves to hold summits and make commitments about combating climate change. Undoubtedly, that drove a lot of investment from both the private and public spheres into climate change.

I think it’s also clear the public will also bears much of the responsibility for the failure of nuclear power. Accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima linger in peoples’ minds, giving us the sense that nuclear power is unsafe when it’s really not. That probably led to greatly increased regulation and hesitancy to support new nuclear power plants, which led to stagnation in the industry, which led to the increased prices we see today.

People might think that cultivated meat doesn’t suffer from the same vulnerabilities as nuclear power, but I think it does to a great extent. It’s an inherently unnatural technology which slaughter-based interests are already intent on demonizing. Nuclear power shows that the actual risks and benefits don’t matter much—what really matters is what the public perception of the risks and benefits are. So we cannot afford to be complacent because cultivated meat is actually better in every way—we need to win the PR and regulatory campaigns that will convince people to see it that way. And once again, we need to mobilize a movement to do that.

Tl;dr: is that alternative proteins have incredible potential to reduce animal suffering, but they need a strong movement to back them up, to kick off and maintain the virtuous cycle of progress.