Hide table of contents

The meat and dairy industries’ war on alternatives to their products is underway. In May, meat lobbyists got US House lawmakers to insert language into a spending bill directing the USDA to regulate all meat and poultry grown from cells. After the FDA held a surprisingly balanced forum on such “clean meat,” which it indicated its intention to regulate, the American Farm Bureau joined with all the major animal ag groups to lobby President Trump to put the USDA in charge. This may seem like an obscure jurisdictional dispute. But the stakes could be high: one FDA and USDA law expert told a gathering that if the animal ag-friendly USDA regulates clean meat it “will not see the market in the lifetime of anyone in this room."

Plant-based meat and dairy are also under attack. In May, Missouri mandated that only “harvested production livestock or poultry” can call itself “meat.” In June, North Carolina directed its bureaucrats to “prohibit the sale of plant-based products mislabeled as milk.” And in July, the FDA signaled interest in policing the use of “milk” on plant-based milks — something the dairy industry has lobbied for since 2000. When Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced an amendment earlier this month to stop the FDA’s action, it was defeated 84-14 in the full Senate.

This is part of a global trend. The European Court of Justice ruled last year, in the well-titled Verband Sozialer Wettbewerb eV v TofuTown.com, that plant-based products could not use terms like “milk,” “cream,” or “cheese.” French cattle farmer and MP Jean-Baptiste Moreau followed up this April with a law that forbids the use of “names associated with products of animal origin” to market foods “containing a significant proportion of plant-based materials.” Dutch authorities even forced the Vegetarian Butcher to rename its “fish-free tuna” late last year, to the benefit of apparently deeply confused Dutch carnivores.

The dairy industry’s power is bipartisan. This chart shows how senators, ordered by ideology, voted on the Lee-Booker amendment to prevent the FDA’s crackdown on plant-based milks. The darker blue and red boxes are the 4 Democrats and 10 Republicans who voted for the amendment. Source: Govtrack.us.

Why now?

The meat and dairy industries’ newfound interest in accurate labeling is partly a credit to the success of alternatives. In the 1980s, a Los Angeles Times poll named tofu the second-most hated food in the nation, while soymilk was sold in unappealing cartons that Silk’s founder called "Armageddon food.” Today, the Impossible burger is sold in >1,000 restaurants, including some White Castles; Beyond Meat is in >27,000 supermarkets and restaurants, including TGI Fridays; and clean meat startups are producing impressive prototypes. US plant-based startups raised $296M last year, according to Pitchbook Data, and clean meat startups scored the support of big-name investors like Bill Gates and Richard Branson. (Disclosure: we invested in Impossible Foods and support the Good Food Institute.)

Market researchers are forecasting 7-8% annual compound growth in the $4B global meat substitute market. In the US, plant-based meat sales grew by 24% over the last year, while plant-based milks grew 9% to account for 15% of total US milk sales. About half of US food retailers now sell plant-based meat, and almost half of US consumers say they sometimes choose meat alternatives over chicken. In the UK, meat alternatives already make up 3% of the nation’s meat market, while Germany’s sector is expected to grow at 12% annually, aided by German meat giants launching new vegetarian versions of their meats.

But the move against meat substitutes isn’t exactly the last gasp of a dying industry: while US dairy sales have collapsed, US meat and poultry sales remain higher than ever. US plant-based meats still total just $670M in sales, or 0.3% of the roughly $200B in total sales of US meat. Instead, the meat industry seems to be seizing a window of opportunity. They know it’s easier to keep a product off the market than to remove it once it’s already there. And they know that the Trump Administration’s USDA is friendlier to animal ag than any future administration’s is likely to be — see its scrapping of rules to boost organic animal welfare standards and rights for contract poultry growers.

Plant-based dairy is booming in the US market, while plant-based meats are growing fast from a low base. Source: Nielsen retail scanner data for the 52 weeks to June 16, 2018, as summarized by PBFA. The Nielsen data covers “more than half the total sales volume of US grocery and drug stores and more than 30 percent of all US mass merchandiser sales volume”.

Should we worry?

So how bad is this? Some of the industry’s requests seem absurd enough to be rejected. The USDA likely won’t grant the cattlemen’s petition defining “beef” as “product from cattle born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner,” since it would struggle to explain how artificial insemination and feedlots are traditional, while mock meats, which date to at least Song Dynasty China, are not. The FDA is more likely to issue new regulations than to enforce its current standard of identity for milk — “the lacteal secretion ... of one or more healthy cows” —  if only because of those last two words: the latest USDA survey found a quarter of US dairy cows experienced clinical mastitis, a disease of the udder, during 2013, and the milk of these unhealthy cows still goes to market (unless they receive antibiotics). The USDA might even think twice before requiring the “lab produced” labels that industry wants on clean meat; chicken nuggets were likely first produced in a food science lab too.

Some of the new regulations are also likely illegal, while others may be irrelevant. Missouri’s law is likely preempted by the Federal Meat Inspection Act and Poultry Products Inspection Act, both of which forbid states from imposing additional requirements on meat labeling — a prohibition that courts have interpreted broadly. North Carolina’s law is likely preempted by the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which four federal courts have already found preempts state lawsuits claiming that plant-based milks are mislabeled. And even if the FDA can forbid the use of “soymilk” — which is not a legal certainty — it may not have much impact. In Canada, where plant-based milks have never been able to use the term “milk”, plant-based milk sales have risen while dairy milk sales have fallen, just as in the US.

But there’s also reason to worry. Meat lobbyists want the USDA in charge of clean and plant-based meats because they think it will stop these products from being called “meat.” They have good reason to think this: USDA officials have been meeting with meat industry lobbyists (and not clean meat startups) about labeling for clean meat since at least last August, and USDA top officials have long had a revolving door with animal product industries. (The irony is that the USDA only has regulatory authority over meat, poultry, and egg products; if it agrees with the lobbyists that clean meat is not meat, the USDA may lose its authority to regulate.) The USDA could keep new products off the market by rejecting them as misbranded, or by requiring endless pre-market safety testing, which could delay product launches for years.

And even if the FDA keeps primary jurisdiction over clean meat, the current attacks on clean meat could do lasting harm. The attacks of anti-GMO groups have likely caused clean meat startups to forswear technological tools that would accelerate research, and forced plant-based startups to do more animal testing (which has in turn earned them PETA’s scorn). And if the FDA accedes to the request of these groups and the meat industry to label clean meat as “lab-grown meat,” it’s a fair bet this will hurt consumer acceptance, given surveys show that framing heavily influences public acceptance of clean meat.

As usual, PETA has the most aggressive take on the issue. Source: PETA.

What can we do?

So what can you do to help stem the assault? The first thing is to tell regulators how you feel. The FDA is accepting comments on “Foods Produced Using Animal Cell Culture Technology” here through September 25. Opponents are already posting insightful comments like: “It is my hope that FDA doesn't call this meet [sic]. At best it is a food like product like American cheese.” The FDA will soon also open a comment period on milk labeling — watch this space.

Next, you can reach out to legislators. Animal agriculture’s influence is bipartisan: it got Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-MN) to introduce the Dairy Pride Act, which would ban the use of dairy terms on products not “obtained by the complete milking of one or more hooved mammals” (the bill’s authors wisely dropped the “healthy cows” requirement in the FDA language). Liberal luminaries Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) have since co-sponsored the bill, and all but four Democratic senators voted against the Booker-Lee amendment to stop the FDA’s action. (29 Democratic Senators, including Warren and Murphy, did, however, recently write in opposition to the King Amendment.) Animal advocates need to be equally bipartisan in their lobbying.

It may also be worth reaching out to agribusinesses with a stake in this fight. Last year Cargill and Tyson Foods made high-profile investments in clean meat startup Memphis Meats. Other agribusinesses have larger stakes in alternative proteins: meat giant Maple Leaf Foods owns Field Roast and Lightlife; dairy giant Danone owns Silk, So Delicious, and Vega; Kellogg owns Morningstar Farms and Gardenburger; and ConAgra is about to buy the owner of Gardein. Even animal feed giants like Archers Daniels Midland, DowDupont, and Roquette have invested in pea protein production. So far these agribusinesses have been silent in this fight — perhaps because alternatives remain a fraction of their total businesses, or because they fear offending their farmers. If they were to engage on behalf of their clean or plant-based investments, it could be significant in muting their trade associations and countering other industry lobbying.

Finally, you can follow or support the work of the Good Food Institute, the Plant-Based Foods Association, and New Harvest, which are all engaging with regulators on clean or plant-based meats.

Comments


No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 11m read
 · 
Does a food carbon tax increase animal deaths and/or the total time of suffering of cows, pigs, chickens, and fish? Theoretically, this is possible, as a carbon tax could lead consumers to substitute, for example, beef with chicken. However, this is not per se the case, as animal products are not perfect substitutes.  I'm presenting the results of my master's thesis in Environmental Economics, which I re-worked and published on SSRN as a pre-print. My thesis develops a model of animal product substitution after a carbon tax, slaughter tax, and a meat tax. When I calibrate[1] this model for the U.S., there is a decrease in animal deaths and duration of suffering following a carbon tax. This suggests that a carbon tax can reduce animal suffering. Key points * Some animal products are carbon-intensive, like beef, but causes relatively few animal deaths or total time of suffering because the animals are large. Other animal products, like chicken, causes relatively many animal deaths or total time of suffering because the animals are small, but cause relatively low greenhouse gas emissions. * A carbon tax will make some animal products, like beef, much more expensive. As a result, people may buy more chicken. This would increase animal suffering, assuming that farm animals suffer. However, this is not per se the case. It is also possible that the direct negative effect of a carbon tax on chicken consumption is stronger than the indirect (positive) substitution effect from carbon-intensive products to chicken. * I developed a non-linear market model to predict the consumption of different animal products after a tax, based on own-price and cross-price elasticities. * When calibrated for the United States, this model predicts a decrease in the consumption of all animal products considered (beef, chicken, pork, and farmed fish). Therefore, the modelled carbon tax is actually good for animal welfare, assuming that animals live net-negative lives. * A slaughter tax (a
MarieF🔸
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Summary * After >2 years at Hi-Med, I have decided to step down from my role. * This allows me to complete my medical residency for long-term career resilience, whilst still allowing part-time flexibility for direct charity work. It also allows me to donate more again. * Hi-Med is now looking to appoint its next Executive Director; the application deadline is 26 January 2025. * I will join Hi-Med’s governing board once we have appointed the next Executive Director. Before the role When I graduated from medical school in 2017, I had already started to give 10% of my income to effective charities, but I was unsure as to how I could best use my medical degree to make this world a better place. After dipping my toe into nonprofit fundraising (with Doctors Without Borders) and working in a medical career-related start-up to upskill, a talk given by Dixon Chibanda at EAG London 2018 deeply inspired me. I formed a rough plan to later found an organisation that would teach Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-specific psychotherapeutic techniques to lay people to make evidence-based treatment of PTSD scalable. I started my medical residency in psychosomatic medicine in 2019, working for a specialised clinic for PTSD treatment until 2021, then rotated to child and adolescent psychiatry for a year and was half a year into the continuation of my specialisation training at a third hospital, when Akhil Bansal, whom I met at a recent EAG in London, reached out and encouraged me to apply for the ED position at Hi-Med - an organisation that I knew through my participation in their introductory fellowship (an academic paper about the outcomes of this first cohort can be found here). I seized the opportunity, applied, was offered the position, and started working full-time in November 2022.  During the role I feel truly privileged to have had the opportunity to lead High Impact Medicine for the past two years. My learning curve was steep - there were so many new things to
 ·  · 2m read
 · 
I can’t recall the last time I read a book in one sitting, but that’s what happened with Moral Ambition by bestselling author Rutger Bregman. I read the German edition, though it’s also available in Dutch (see James Herbert's Quick Take). An English release is slated for May. The book opens with the statement: “The greatest waste of our times is the waste of talent.” From there, Bregman builds a compelling case for privileged individuals to leave their “bullshit jobs” and tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. He weaves together narratives spanning historical movements like abolitionism, suffrage, and civil rights through to contemporary initiatives such as Against Malaria Foundation, Charity Entrepreneurship, LEEP, and the Shrimp Welfare Project. If you’ve been engaged with EA ideas, much of this will sound familiar, but I initially didn’t expect to enjoy the book as much as I did. However, Bregman’s skill as a storyteller and his knack for balancing theory and narrative make Moral Ambition a fascinating read. He reframes EA concepts in a more accessible way, such as replacing “counterfactuals” with the sports acronym “VORP” (Value Over Replacement Player). His use of stories and examples, paired with over 500 footnotes for details, makes the book approachable without sacrificing depth. I had some initial reservations. The book draws heavily on examples from the EA community but rarely engages directly with the movement, mentioning EA mainly in the context of FTX. The final chapter also promotes Bregman’s own initiative, The School for Moral Ambition. However, the school’s values closely align with core EA principles. The ITN framework and pitches for major EA cause areas are in the book, albeit with varying levels of depth. Having finished the book, I can appreciate its approach. Moral Ambition feels like a more pragmatic, less theory-heavy version of EA. The School for Moral Ambition has attracted better-known figures in Germany, such as the political e