And why alternative proteins feel like a much easier sell
Note: a bit of experimental writing, mostly about feelings.
I hate animal suffering, and especially factory farming. I feel it deeply, like in other people’s plates. I often imagine my own cat, Vega, suffering as other animals do in those farms, and I feel a mixture of deep sadness and powerlessness. Even a bit of anger.
Yet, I often don’t feel attracted by the idea of donating to animal welfare charities. The reason is not that this is my second favourite cause: there certainly are other important causes too, but I usually gravitate towards a portfolio approach: since I am not solving any “problem” on my own anyway, there is some cold comfort in helping solve many.
Still, I struggle to donate to animal welfare charities. It’s also not about lack of evidence or rigour, despite it generally being much more handwavy than for global health interventions: my heart does not crave rigour, even when my head does.
I think the reason I struggle is that advocacy and lobbying – the main activity for most animal welfare organisations – is a particularly hard sell for my heart. Don’t get me wrong: I know how much good corporate campaigns for caged egg-laying hens have achieved. I also think a similar success could be achieved with other animals, and would be delighted to see so.
However, animal advocacy is a tough sell. When you think of what each donation achieves, you can consider dozens or hundreds of innocent animals. But really, what we are funding is more protests, or boycotts, or negotiations with the companies or government agencies involved in factory farming. It is already complicated to feel satisfied with preventing malaria in people we will probably never know. It is even more complicated to extend the circle of empathy to non-human animals, especially when the vast majority of people around you think you are somewhat naive, weird and perhaps even radical. But we are asked even further: to dedicate scarce resources – resources that could prevent children dying – to pressure and protest campaigns instead.
It also takes a significant dose of imagination to see how advocacy achieves full victory. The path for malaria is clearer: a combination of vaccines, nets, chemotherapy and perhaps gene drives that will obliterate the terrible Plasmodium disease. Our ancestors eliminated smallpox, and now it is our time to follow through with malaria. That is the sort of heroic story that energises my efforts.
Unfortunately, my heart complains that the vision for factory farming is much weaker. Some argue that if humanity could end slavery, it should also be able to end factory farming. Ending factory farming could echo the story of civil rights or the end of slavery: moral courage hammering the decision makers until meat eating is socially unacceptable. Unfortunately, humans have a strong preference for never admitting their behaviour so far has been deeply mistaken. Instead, it’s easier to provide lip service against animal suffering, but pick a socially acceptable excuse to change nothing in the behaviour.
Fortunately, I see some convoluted and torturous path to victory: I think most of the reason for people finding it acceptable to eat meat is that they and everyone they know do it. In other words, it is a rationalisation for behaviour. For example, omnivores who buy cruelty-free cosmetics are among the most receptive groups to behaviour change in light of animal welfare information (post here). This suggests alternative proteins might become significantly powerful in changing behaviour: once people stop eating meat for some time because they are satisfied with the alternative, they won’t look back.
It is for this reason that I believe it will be so important to make alternative proteins the socially acceptable, cool and fun way of eating. Not a sacrifice at all, but quite the contrary: a social plus instead of a sacrifice. I feel we need to give people an excuse to feel they are actually good guys. Fun, meatless food is the perfect one.
But alternative proteins have failed, haven’t they? I suspect that not really. Part of the issue that I currently see is that we are framing alternative proteins as direct substitutes for animal products. That is the wrong approach: disruptive innovation sparks when new products address a different market from the mainstream, see “The Innovator's Dilemma”. That means that initially alternative proteins will not displace – but complement – animal products. This feels disappointing, and there is a chance they will progress no further than that. However, a small initial market, distinct from the mainstream, will give alternative proteins the beachhead necessary to keep innovating and improving, progressively eroding and undermining the animal-product mainstream “advantages”. Thus, I suspect that rather than tracking substitution metrics, for now it will be more informative to track the technical progress in alternative proteins, both in experience and in price, the two key factors.
Finally, in contrast to advocacy campaigns, alternative proteins have a great pitch: it’s not just about the animals, but also about the climate, the increased risk of famines, pandemics, and antimicrobial resistance, which already kills more people than malaria.
For this reason, I have started donating to The Good Food Institute, and I am excited about their work.
Can you perhaps explain how this is different from say, AMF where what we are actually funding is pyrethroid production, manufacturing plants that create polyethylene nets people to hand out the nets?
In these campaigns the meat producing companies could engage in similar advertising that would lead to a negative sum game. More generally, in malaria there’s no human adversary. Perhaps I don’t like playing bad cop, even when I know it’s necessary.
Let me clarify that I totally get why this is important and necessary, and I take parts in THL campaigns, but it’s not something that I feel attracted to.
I don't think they could and I don't think that is what is happening. I don't think any meat producing companies could... engage in some kind of similar advertising.
I think they already do it, under the premise of supporting local and rural farmers.
Random datapoint from Italy, when I started googling things on animal welfare/veganism years ago, this website was often one of the top Google results, and it seems it's still going strong
Here are some recent articles:
And here is an article from last year specifically against the European Chicken Commitment, which is a major focus of a lot of EA-funded campaigns, and has been a massive win in France and other countries.
That project seems to be supported by the "National Association of Meat and Livestock Industry and Trade", "Association of Meat and Cured Meat Industry", and a "National Union of Meat and Egg Agri-Food Supply Chains."
I would be surprised if there wouldn't be similar initiatives in other countries with a stronger animal rights movement, and if there weren't social media influencers running similar campaigns at much greater scale.
In general I think it's fairly easy make campaigns supporting all sorts of things, from factory farms, to tobacco, to datacenters[1]
e.g. I found this recent Asterisk article against a datacenter moratorium similar to the meat-industry articles above. Here's a section on environmental concerns: "Data centers aren’t the only new loads coming onto the grid – electric vehicles and electrified manufacturing are also driving demand that requires more generation, more transmission, and long-overdue grid modernization. Many data centers are leaning on gas for near-term power, but data centers could serve as anchor tenants for new clean generation, fiber, battery storage, and transmission. Many companies are moving in that direction.
Industrial projects like these are also prompting pragmatic shifts on decarbonization from environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), for instance, just supported its first nuclear project ever, to power a data center.
A moratorium forecloses exactly the kind of creative thinking these projects are beginning to generate."
Can you explain how they're the same?
It's always possible to describe things in a very unflattering way, where you talk about some inputs as opposed to your goal or just describe it in a pessimistic light (eg, cheap/stingy vs. frugal). The OP describes "protests, or boycotts, or negotiations" as not something he wants to fund, but I think if you talked about funding pyrethroid production, that would also not be something he wants to fund, though that's another way of describing insecticide-treated bednets. You could also go even worse and talk about "mass genocide of insects" or something.
To put it another way, I think global health people (who I have deep respect for) would be pretty upset and rightly call out someone writing a post where someone said they didn't donate to global health charities since they don't want to fund the chemical manufacturing industry, which is what we are actually purchasing.
I think I did not do a good job of framing this post. My goal was not to criticise the people working in animal welfare organisations, quite the contrary! I think they are doing very necessary work, and I am really grateful to them, especially given how weird this looks to most people. In other words, I am not claiming that these feelings are right, only that they exist.
The goal of the post was instead to reflect on something I feel (and presumably others feel too), which may be dragging donations to those organisations. In my case, this applies to politics too.
I think that's fair. I appreciate that you engage with this problem that I think most people ignore.
Understood. I was responding to what I assumed OP was getting at, regardless of how poorly framed, and your specific naming of chemicals threw me off. Thanks for clarifying.