The future of animal welfare:  Resisting 'nominative determinism'

Julius Olavarria

Nominative determinism is the "the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate toward areas of work or interest that fit their names." ^[1] When applied to animal welfare, the names, labels, or general references we choose to give cultivated meat, in my opinion, will determine the fates of billions of animals.

When animals are brutally killed in factory farms, they are sold under the guise of labels that are unregulated by the FDA or USDA. These labels appear on the packages for goods at the supermarket. For example, these are all meaningless labels:

"Pasture raised" has no standard or verification.^[2]
"Antibiotic free" and "no added hormones" are baseline standards included on packages as a redundancy.^[3]
"Natural" only applies to what is done to the food after the animals are slaughtered.^[3]
"Pesticide free" has no legal definition.^[4]
Etc. Many of the labels that go out to consumers are meaningless, and are carefully construed to bypass the minimal laws that do exist.

If the innovation scales for cultivated meats, we may start to see competition in the markets as early as this decade. Since it takes an average of three to seven seconds for consumers to make a decision on a product, optics are going to be incredibly important for selling cultivated meat to the public.^[5]

I don't know if there is a lot of EA work on this topic, since these regulations are determined by state / federal governments and agencies (federalism). But this may be too quick in dismissing this as a potential cause area. Before we can discuss this, I think it's important briefly to look at my predicted three paths the future of animal welfare - selling cultivated meat to the public - will have:

1) More regulation, more hypocrisy

Agribusinesses are pushing for regulations on cultivated meat. Recently, the NCBA backed the bipartisan FAIR Labels Act,^[6] which would mandate that "cell-cultivated and plant-based" protein products carry a disclaimer stating they weren't derived from a live animal. NCBA's president argued lab-grown protein companies have exploited terms like "meat" and "beef," creating consumer confusion, because apparently the two aren't the same. ((In fact, we know cultivated meat is genetically identical to factory farmed meat; cultivated meat is almost certainly healthier (less risk of salmonella and E.coli - 85% of chicken has salmonella, so they must be cooked to 165°F - a quarter of food borne illnesses are attributed to meats and seafood, ^[7] transitioning away from live animals could save taxpayers billions in hospital care,^[8] we could be able to reduce saturated fats in cultivated meats, with more innovation cultivated meats will easily beat out factory farming, etc.)).

The NCBA lobbies the USDA (private trips / meetings with officials)^[9] and has resisted both country-of-origin labeling and GIPSA transparency rules,^[10] which would have helped both consumers and smaller producers gain leverage over corporations that own over 80% of the market. ^[11]

Pushing for regulation / honesty on cultivated meat companies' labels and packages may lead for more regulation all around. The public might become more aware, as prices between cultivated and live meat become competitive, that the rules of the "label game" are unfair. One team will have more rules than the other. Cultivated meat would have to abide by more label rules, while the live animal industry will remain largely anarchic.

So this would mean all cultivated meat might have one general label, depending on how the meat innovation goes (depending on if there are different types of CM), whereas factory farmed meat would have different labels dependent on quality. For example, all CM products would carry the label "lab-grown," while beef on farm X would carry the "natural" label and beef on farm Y would carry "no hormones added" on the packages, which would mean nothing but deception.

Hopefully in the future, as we transition away from factory farming, the labels would translate to the quality of life for the farmed animals and not just the quality of meat. (I've always found interesting quality of meat today is set up in a system where the most "humanely" treated animals are also the best for consumers; this could also point to evidence that being ethical results in better overall consequences that are often unforeseen. But this may be nuanced or partly untrue).

So with more regulation might come more hypocrisy - the CM market would have stricter and more accurate labeling for a better product, while factory farming would still use deception.

However, this has to be tolerated by the public. This path rests on CM's competitiveness, as the public is willing to support ethics so long as they can reasonably pay for it. A good critique here follows anti-monopoly lines, in that agri-monopolies are preventing free market; the lobby was so good in Florida and Alabama that these state legislatures outright banned CM from entering the market because of 'consumer health.' Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska followed suit.

*Whether this is constitutional is still an active question. This is important because factory farming may continue in some states long after most of the country shifts.

2) Sheer capitalism

Here capitalism takes hold and CM does the same thing current agri-monopolies do on their packages. This would require CM to participate in the deception game; what sells the best, what best tricks consumers, what sells more on the packages.

This raises an interesting question - is what sells more ultimately what tricks consumers? Companies focused on profits, of course, care little for the consumer or animal welfare above what regulation already mandates. Being ethical and caring for these things may force CM, and EA animal 'welfarists,' to play the capitalist deception game.

3) More regulation, ethics

This path is where, in CM being regulated, CM will spark more regulation and auditing for the meat oligopoly. This is the optimistic view and it will probably happen as CM becomes more competitive.

This is where the EA cause area might sit. We might think it necessary to deliberate which words for the labels and packages are best to describe CM - what words might the FDA, USDA, and state legislatures approve?* What might the consumer approve? Answering what the consumer likes best, and what the government(s) will approve, is a central question animal welfarists need to answer in this decade. I think as a cause area, research in this matter is accessible - and working to answer this question might result in millions of DALYs saved per hour research.^[12]

*The USDA and FDA can preempt state laws, but they both control different parts food enforcement and sometimes disagree on what counts as, say, "natural." One important difference is that the USDA usually pre-approves foods before it goes on the market, while the FDA works after-the-fact.

Tufts' Center for Cellular Agriculture has a recent study finding that terms like "cultivated," "cultured," and "cellular" outperform "lab-grown," while lab-grown outperforms others.^[13]

I would like to propose "engineered" as the go-to phrase for labeling CM on the market. EAs could use this word or test our different phrases in public discourse. I think engineered sounds clean and polished, and it reminds me of Dyson's "Engineered to Last" slogan. Maybe some marketing EAs could look into package designs that would sell; but the competitive market, profit incentives, and federalism will likely solve this.

Succumbing to nominative determinism - where CM is constrained to an unworkable label - may lock-in factory farming for centuries past its expiration date. It is important to resist this lock-in via any possible methods.

I would like to see some ideas that may be (pre)approved by the FDA / USDA in the comments, and other ideas on how EAs should best describe cultured meats to those who aren't convinced.

Based on constitutional precedent involving the Commerce Clause, it is likely that states will lose their power to outright ban the sale of cultivated meat, but they will win the right to strictly regulate how it is labeled and packaged. So states that are heavily lobbied will regulate the label strictly; EA could look into partnerships with organizations that are working to secure attractive labeling, or, as CM companies hit the markets, use the silence from state legislatures to appeal to customers using words that are not yet regulated (path 2).

image - https://boingboing.net/2017/07/31/nominative-determinism.html

image 2 - via DysonBeauty Instagram