Hi Jenny, very interesting, thank you. What was the response of CG to your report, and do you know if they are planning to invest more resources towards this potential cause area? 

I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that. There was a lot of media buzz about whether the events of the show could really happen at the time of its airing. This piece by Yale is supposed to sound reassuring, but it just... doesn't. :/ 

Ok, you’ve convinced me on the theoretical button-pushing. In reality those aren’t the options we’re presented with. 

Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.

I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.

And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.

I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now. 

I think that should depend on what the bets are. 

Because a large proportion of vegans revert to eating animals at some point in their lives. Moreover, it isn't going to happen in any timeframe, unfortunately. 

Re: your poll, I'd say neither. Veganism and offsetting are both 'rearranging furniture on the Titanic'. The button I'd press wouldn't be to make everyone vegan in an instant, but to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point, in an instant. 

Nothing else (bar x-risks for humans) is going to end factory farming. As you say, meat consumption is skyrocketing, yet in animal advocacy we act like there isn't a viable alternative that is, or rather could be, on the table. 

So strong is my view on this that I'd go as far as to say that the way funding is allocated in animal advocacy is extremely ineffective. It should basically all be going towards scale-up grants or policy advocacy or whatever cultivated meat businesses need. 

But yeah the findings of the Pulse survey you mentioned don't surprise me. In the end I think this campaign was a load of hot air, probably not particularly helpful nor damaging either way. 

 

Note: This comment was copy-pasted from my recent LinkedIn post for speed. Toby kindly flagged that it read a bit out of context, so just to clarify for other readers: this is not AI slop. It's human-authored LinkedIn slop 🙂

TLDR: I’d love to see more debates. 

A good debate does something campaigns tend to avoid, but ought to do more of: it makes trade-offs explicit. Participants must define assumptions, defend priorities, and confront where values or strategies genuinely diverge. 

For an audience, this can be far more informative - and 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 - than polished messaging.

The value of debates is diagnostic. They surface where a movement is aligned, and which questions still need answering.