Dr. Tom Cohen Ben-Arye is a post-doc researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an Adjunct Prof. at Shantou University Medical college and a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University.
He is one of the founders of the alternative protein field in Israel. He was a founding team member and Chief Scientist at The Good Food Institute Israel and the Modern Agriculture Foundation, and was an advisor to government bodies, corporations, startups, and academia. He developed an academic course on alternative proteins, taught at universities in Israel and internationally.
His PhD research focused on bovine skeletal muscle tissue engineering that was published in Nature Food and formed Aleph Farms. He holds degrees in molecular biochemistry, nanoscience, and nanotechnology, with specialization in tissue engineering and high-throughput single-cell analysis.
He recently relocated to China, where he is developing breakthrough technologies for breeding meat-like yeast strains, with the goal of reducing costs and improving the mimicry of meat alternatives.
I agree advocacy is valuable, especially for creating activists and people who care enough to push for systemic change. I'm just not convinced lack of moral motivation is the main barrier to veganism. Faunalytics famously found that 84% of people who had tried vegetarian/vegan diets eventually abandoned them.
Couldn’t agree more.
First, the amount and diversity of suffering produced by animal agriculture is inconceivable. Cage size is only the tip of the iceberg. Welfare campaigns usually target one problem at a time, but farmed animals face countless harms: extreme selective breeding, separation from parents, overcrowding, behavioral deprivation, painful procedures, transport, slaughter, and probably many forms of physical and psychological suffering we do not even understand.
There is also a basic economic constraint behind it. Keeping a companion cat or dog in good welfare conditions over their lifetime cost around $10K–$100K. A chicken raised for food has to cost only a few dollars. Animal agriculture cannot provide anything close to the conditions we would normally consider humane. In contrast, reducing the number of farmed animals addresses all of these harms simultaneously.
It's true that a moderate campaign attract more audience. But welfare reform lacks a clear trajectory. Suppose we move from conventional eggs to cage-free eggs. It is still just as difficult for the consumer to move from cage-free eggs to plant-based food. Compare this with Meatless Monday. It is also moderate, but it also changes behavior: people learn what to order, what to cook, which plant-based foods they enjoy, and how to eat without meat. Each reduction can make the next one easier.
The underlying problem is that people have an interest in eating animal products. This is why we should focus heavily on PTC (price, taste, and convenience) of plant-based alternatives. A common response is that PTC is not enough because meat consumption is deeply cultural and therefore difficult to change. Of course it is cultural. But where does culture come from?
We sometimes reverse the causal story around "culture". Meat culture didn't emerge out of no where. It stems from the fact Meat is a good product. Because it's a good product, it affect individual incentives and shapes behavior. Repeated behavior then helps generate social norms, identities, and eventually culture. Culture also feeds back into behavior, but it is not independent of the material environment.
This matters because most people who try vegetarian or vegan diets eventually give them up. The common experience is expensive, inconvenient, socially difficult, or less enjoyable, so quitting is unsurprising, and the failed attempt may strengthen the belief that veganism is unrealistic.
The theory of change I find most plausible is make avoiding animal products increasingly easy, cheap, tasty, convenient.
Interests and norms reinforce each other. If eating animals remains overwhelmingly convenient and attractive, people have a strong psychological incentive to rationalize it. If alternatives become better and easier, the cost of accepting the animal-liberation argument falls dramatically.
We should invest far more in interventions that make animal agriculture easier to leave: better and cheaper AP (alternative proteins), plant-based defaults and nudges, institutional meat reduction, and repeated exposure to good plant-based food.
The dietary shift dwarfs transportation effects. Animal agriculture is dramatically more emissions-intensive than transport associated with grocery shopping.
This is a thoughtful suggestion, and technically it’s quite feasible. The key issue, though, is effortlessness, which is the main behavioral bottleneck we’re trying to solve.
A Chrome extension (or app) is, by definition, an opt-in solution. It only helps people who are already motivated enough to discover it, install it, and keep using it. In practice, that means it mainly serves committed vegans - not the much larger group of new vegans, flexitarians, or people trying to reduce animal products, where most of the impact lies.
By contrast, a native vegan filter inside the supermarket UI is default-available, works on mobile, and requires zero setup. That difference matters a lot: friction at the point of purchase is one of the strongest predictors of vegan dropout.
We agree that LLMs, crowdsourcing, and user corrections are promising for data generation. In fact, those approaches are likely part of the backend solution. But as a delivery mechanism, browser extensions don’t scale to mainstream users in the way platform-level features do.
In short: the proposed extension could be a useful prototype or data-gathering tool, but it doesn’t solve the core problem - making vegan shopping effortless for everyone, by default.
Great point—thank you for raising it.
Yes, Ocado is one of the few strong real-world examples of what we’re proposing. Similarly, Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, offers a comparable vegan filter and is often cited as a key contributor to the country’s high adoption of plant-based diets.
We summarized the Albert Heijn case here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sc1Yun2HXjPx-7jJVrs-lKDzTrlI10Rk4k_5q4ZOs9M/edit
The key point, though, is that cases like Ocado and Albert Heijn are exceptions, not the norm. Most online supermarkets lack the resources and incentives to systematically review and continuously update tens of thousands of SKUs for vegan status.
Because this intervention has high potential impact but is rarely implemented, it’s exactly where an external, mission-driven actor can add the most value. The goal is to make what works in a few frontrunners common everywhere.
Hi， great to hear of your direction. my recommendation is to learn as much as possible about meat science, measurement and texturization tools. I'd try to get into a meat-alternative lab, especially in Wageningen university. Later on, I would try to make an impact in less-developed ecosystems, such as the Chinese ecosystem.