I’ve recently been taken with many arguments of Effective Altruism (EA) and longtermism.
An early observation: the majority of (incredibly smart) people in this movement are vegetarian or vegan.
Throughout my late teens, I too was vegetarian and vegan (about 18 months each), until I came across the work of Robb Wolf, whose arguments persuaded me that abstaining from meat-eating is not the best approach for one’s health, the environment, or even ethics.
Newly encountering EA, I decided to read Robb’s latest book, co-authored with Diana Rodgers, Sacred Cow, to revisit these arguments and check my assumptions.
How robustly has the effective altruism community’s seeming near-uniformity in opposing animal husbandry been challenged?
At the end of the recent (extremely good) New Yorker profile on Will MacAskill, Will noted: ‘It’s very, very easy to be totally mistaken.’ Echoed here by Will discussing the new FTX Fund.
Sacred Cow is not anti-vegetarian or anti-vegan, but asks for a more nuanced debate around environmental and ethical effects from pasture-raised meat versus vegetarianism: impacts on soil fertility, biodiversity, and energy concerns with ‘cultured’ or ‘clean’ (lab-grown) meat. All things that ought to concern an EA/longtermist.
Here are some of the book’s standout passages:
Many people will readily agree that the goal for all of us should be to cause the least harm to the natural world through our lifestyle practices. Human activity can be incredibly destructive, and those who attempt to reduce their impact through their food choices should be applauded. However, regardless of one’s good intentions, avoiding meat is not ultimately consistent with a food system generating the “least harm.”
…when we make room for a field of crops, we destroy habitat (killing things in the process), and indirectly, when we annihilate an animal’s food source to make way for more soy fields, we kill the native animals. If we eliminate animals from pastureland, we’ll destroy that land, too.
Let’s look at the actual process of farming vegetables and grains. First, the farmer tills the soil, killing worms, mice, and any other animals that have made a home there over the winter months. During the growing of the crops, pesticides kill insects and poison the animals that eat them. Then there’s the exposed soil and runoff of these chemicals that lands in local rivers and streams, killing fish and other aquatic life. When it comes time to harvest, the tractors kill any small mammals like rabbits that are in the way. Even organic farmers kill pests on their farms; they just do it differently than conventional farmers—namely, through beneficial insects, organic pesticides, and with guns or traps.
Animal death is a by-product of plant production. It’s inescapable. There have been several attempts to calculate how many critters die in field harvest. How many deaths are you causing per calorie you eat? At forty rodent deaths per acre, and six million calories per acre of wheat, that’s 150,000 calories per rodent life. Let’s be generous and assume only one head of cattle per acre yields approximately five hundred pounds of beef. At approximately 1,100 calories per pound, that’s 550,000 calories per cow life! So perhaps, if you want to save more animal lives, eat beef, not wheat. Not to mention, beef is far more nutritious than wheat. The difference would be even more astounding if we looked at deaths per nutrient.
Meat alternatives are ways of further processing raw ingredients and making larger profits from highly destructive agricultural practices… a system that requires so many chemical inputs, ruins soil health… more energy is needed to turn soy and corn into meat than what can be done in nature with an animal.
I supplement this with 2 minutes of audio from Robb’s most recent podcast; link here for 2 minutes.
Then back to book highlights...
…well-managed cattle increase wildlife populations, improve ecosystem health, increase the water-holding capacity of the soil (making rainfall less likely to run off), and sequester carbon. There are no monocrop fields of irrigated and chemically sprayed soy in nature. We have done this to the native grasslands and forests that once were there, and in the process we have eliminated the natural habitat for all the living creatures that once lived there.
When considering the mortality rate of every opossum, sparrow, starling, rat, mouse, partridge, turkey, rabbit, vole, and the many species of amphibians that die through plowing, disking, harrowing, cultivating, and through the chemicals used to kill insects and weeds, one can clearly see that one large ruminant (like a cow) on a diet of grass is causing much less harm than a diet rich in field crops.
‘But, being vegan, my intention is not to kill anything…’ If you’re aware that your actions cause a known effect, then intent is present. If you value the lives of rabbits or chipmunks as much as that of a cow, and are truly looking to kill the least amount of lives to feed your own, then we propose that killing one well-raised cow that lived on pasture is actually causing less death than the number of animal lives that are lost by modern row-cropping techniques. In the last analysis, the principle of least harm may actually require the consumption of large herbivores (red meat).
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Anyone with a modicum of awareness recognizes the horrors of factory farming. Better meat should be the goal for all of us, especially given the ecological and health arguments for well-managed animals. And because a truly sustainable food system requires animal inputs, it’s not helpful to attack those of us who are fighting for better meat. The enemy is industrial agriculture and hyperpalatable infinite-shelf-life junk food, not the family of farmers down the street who wants to raise their animals on grass. Let’s unify the real food community.
Luckily, we know of self-replicating natural bioreactors that upcycle food we can’t eat on land we can’t crop into nutrient-dense protein while increasing biodiversity, improving the water-holding capacity of the soil, and sequestering carbon…
[In the entirety of the book] We believe we have made a sound case that it is difficult to produce optimum human health with a plant-only diet, particularly in the very young, very old, and at-risk populations such as the poor and marginalized minorities. For well-to-do twenty- to thirty-somethings, who have the privilege of pushing away a nutrient-dense food like red meat, a plant-only diet may work during the prime of life. It may offer health benefits relative to hyperpalatable, industrial foods, but it is not the only option and is unlikely to be the best option. We have also made the case that a food system absent animal inputs is unsustainable because it relies upon synthetic fertilizers (and a host of related agrichemicals) that are collectively destroying our topsoil. On the ethics front we have explored the principle of least harm and the fact that all life feeds on life. A vegan diet is not a bloodless diet, and may even destroy more life than a regenerative, pasture-centric model.
The first major shift needs to be from reductionism to a more holistic approach. Even looking at “reduction in emissions” as a goal is… missing the nutritional and overall ecosystem benefits we see from well-managed ruminant animals grazing on uncroppable land. Keep in mind this overemphasis on “reducing emissions” (absent context) leads to goofy ideas like we should have fewer shellfish in the oceans. On the policy level, how about we incentivize farmers who increase ecosystem health? One of the challenges of narrowly focusing on emissions is that we’re losing sight of the larger goals: more biodiversity, healthier environments, better soil that can hold water, and agriculture that is appropriate to the landscape (no flood-irrigated almonds in areas that have water shortages). Governments [and the likes of the Gates Foundation] need to stop incentivizing overproduction of nutrient-poor foods that destroy the environment.
Both parties agree that factory farming is abhorrent (and effective altruists should of course be lauded for the progress they’ve made in reducing it, and encouraged in further efforts).
But I have yet to see a compelling counterargument to the above claims in Sacred Cow from the many vegetarians/vegans in the EA community. (The book has a closing chapter on ‘feeding the world’ which argues that the authors’ suggested approach of regenerative agriculture could manage it. [Update: more on this in the comments below.])
Are Diana and Robb wrong? Or are there compelling arguments for the environmental imperative of better meat that effective altruists ought to be aware of?
I am non-expert, but would love to see a dialectic between the two camps.
Isn't the issue just that approximately all the meat you can actually buy at the store today comes from factory farms (which also wastes more crops) rather than regenerative farms?
Basically, if the only permissible meat is from regenerative farms, that still yields the result that one should be (almost entirely) veg*n in practice.
But sure, I'd also support policies that shift farmers away from factory farming to better ways of farming meat. And if those policies succeeded, it's possible to imagine a future in which the moral case for veg*nism would be much weaker than it is today.
Thanks for commenting, Richard. Yep, I think we're in agreement.