The Future of Our Meat-Based Diets
Imagine a world where everyone eats as much meat as Americans do today. Imagine a world where plates are full of burgers, overflowing with steaks. Imagine a world covered in hog farms and vast chicken houses. A world without land to grow much else, without enough water. Add to that image another Earth-like planet where we could ship some of the cows and pigs and chickens, or at least where we could harvest the grains needed to fill their stomachs. Without that extra planet, we simply won’t be able to pull off a meaty future. Already, 33 percent of the world’s arable land is being used to grow feed for livestock. If the 9.3 billion people that will likely be here in 2050 all want an American diet, we would need almost 4.5 times more meat than we produced in 2014 and about as much more milk for all the cheese and butter and ice cream. Although it’s an oversimplification, try multiplying 33 percent by 4.5 and see how much arable land we would require to satisfy our hunger for animal protein. Yes, we are a bit of a planet short here. Of course, long before we run out of earth to grow meat, prices will have skyrocketed and we will have damaged our environment and our health.
Although in all likelihood by 2050 developing countries won’t be able to afford as much meat as Westerners wolf down today, the fact is that appetites across the globe are growing. Even in many rich countries, per capita consumption of meat is still going up. In the early nineteenth century, the average person ate 22 pounds of meat per year. In 2013 it was 95 pounds. If the current growth rate continues, by 2050 it’s likely going to be 115 pounds. Add population growth to that picture, and we will have to somehow double our meat production. In general, to feed the world in 2050, we need to increase our food production by 70 percent. Investing in meat is not the way to do it. Animals are not efficient converters of feed into food; they waste it on living. To grow a pound of flesh, a cow has to eat about thirteen pounds of cereal. In the US, livestock already gobbles 60 percent of all harvested grain.
Water is a problem, too. Animal agriculture is very water intensive. A pound of beef requires about 1,860 gallons of the precious liquid to produce. Meanwhile, the planet is drying up. We are overpumping to irrigate the fields and depleting aquifers. It’s happening everywhere, including the US. In about a decade, over half of Earth’s population will have to deal with water shortages. As taps go dry, wars may start over dams on international rivers, and governments may collapse.
To make matters worse, meat production is closely intertwined with climate change. Of all greenhouse gases released by humans, 14.5 percent comes from livestock. If this number doesn’t seem that large, consider this: it’s about the same as emissions from all of transportation combined—passenger cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, and so on. And yet we are so worried about fuel economy and miles per year traveled, about eating local and flying too much. We should worry about the meat on our plates at least as much.
According to a recent report by Chatham House, the British think tank, if we want to prevent catastrophic global warming, we need to curb our meat consumption. If we do nothing about global warming, mean temperatures could rise as much as 7 degrees Celsius before the end of this century (compared to preindustrial levels). That’s bad for agriculture—more deserts, less arable land, less water. In general, higher temperatures around the planet would translate into less food, including meat. More people would go hungry.
Boosting efficiency would not be enough to solve this problem. To have a good chance at preventing temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius—already a significant change—we have to cut our meat consumption. Scientists suggest we should replace at least 75 percent of calories from meat and dairy with those from cereals and pulses. We must go flexitarian—or, as some call it, “reducetarian”—and fast. But the problem is that people around the planet are not particularly willing to do so. They don’t want lentils; they want steaks. To help solve the problem, the search for a perfect meat replacement has begun.
In the bluish hue of Riverside Studios in London, perched on a stool by a simple counter, Hanni Rützler is chewing a burger. She chews slowly, self-consciously. Finally, she looks up at the chef, nods in approval. “It’s very close to meat,” she says. “I was expecting the texture to be more soft. And it’s not that juicy. But it’s meat to me.”
Rützler, an Austrian nutritional scientist and food trend expert, was one of three people chosen to taste the world’s first lab-grown beef in the summer of 2013. As they ate, I and the other invited journalists strained our noses to catch a whiff of the in vitro meat (it smelled like any other burger). The whole event was widely publicized by the media across the globe. After all, it was not just the first burger grown in a petri dish but probably the most expensive one, too—it cost a staggering $330,000 per five ounces to produce.
The in vitro meat lab at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, is very different from what I had imagined. It was here that the London burger was invented and produced by a physiology professor, Mark Post, and his team. In my mind, the lab was grand: a large, industrial-like space, filled with test tubes, microscopes, and flasks, with plenty of scientists working in hushed concentration, shuffling around in their white coats. But on the day of my visit, I follow Anon van Essen, a jeans-clad lab technician, into a small room, maybe 110 square feet in area. There are only a few microscopes around, some empty boxes, and a few abandoned flasks. No people, and no meat in sight. “That’s it?” I can’t help but ask. Van Essen smiles. “We get that a lot,” he says in his lispy Dutch accent. “Many TV crews actually filmed in another lab, pretending it was where we grow the meat, because this room was too tiny to get a decent shot.” My next question is also pretty obvious: “Where is the meat? Can I see it?” Van Essen points at two big fridge-like devices by the back wall. Incubators, he explains. Inside, on fridge-like shelves, are petri dishes filled with reddish goo.
The goo (“growth medium,” as van Essen calls it) is filled with satellite cells, a type of stem cell that is responsible for muscle regeneration after injury (for example, when you cut your finger, that’s what repairs the muscle). Basically, van Essen tells me, the process of growing meat goes like this: Every few weeks a small slab of beef arrives at the Maastricht lab. The technicians fish out satellite cells from the muscle and place them in petri dishes in a mixture of nutrients that helps the cells multiply. Then off they go into the incubator where the cells grow into thin, 0.02-inch strands of muscle fiber. “You see it?” Van Essen lifts up one of the petri dishes and points to a grayish shadow floating inside, so minuscule I’m barely able to spot it. It’s hard to imagine that you need about twenty thousand such fibers—thirty billion cells—to create a single burger. And yet the mastermind behind in vitro beef, Mark Post, believes that in ten to twenty years we may see lab-grown meat in the supermarkets. If the plans pan out, it may be quite a meat, too. Since in the future scientists will be able to obtain satellite cells through biopsy, without killing the animal, and because the process offers lots of flexibility, we could have burgers from almost any species imaginable, including endangered and extinct ones. The recently published The In Vitro Meat Cookbook suggests dodo wings, panda-flavored ice cream, and meat shaped like flowers. Meat could even come in the form of yarn, so that you could knit your own protein scarf—and eat it.
In theory, lab-grown meat could help solve several problems surrounding conventional meat. It could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and water use by 90 percent. Produced in sterile labs instead of bloody slaughterhouses, it would be safer, bacteria-wise. What’s more, it could be designed to have more unsaturated fats and reduced heme-iron content to stave off heart disease. But there are serious challenges, too. First and foremost, $330,000 per five ounces is a bit pricey to compete on the shelves of Walmart. Although scientists like van Essen are working hard to improve the process, cultured meat costs a lot because they still don’t know how to make the cells grow fast enough and because the medium on which the cells feed is expensive. Second, there is the “yuck” factor. Even though cultured meat could be as delicious as any conventional beef or chicken, 80 percent of Americans claim that they could not swallow a piece of meat that was grown in a lab. “Franken-meat,” they call it. But van Essen insists that such concerns are unfounded. “These cells are dead, like in any meat,” he tells me, as he closes the incubators and leads me out of the lab. “Stem cells are everywhere: in your muscles, in your regular food. Nothing to fear.”
Sometimes disgust is hard to overcome, though. I was certainly full of it the first time I put a dead cricket into my mouth. It was grown rather conventionally on an insect farm, not in a lab, but its looks (tiny eyes, blade-like wings) made me anxious. What if it makes me sick? I wondered. What if I spit the thing out and embarrass myself?
I am sitting in a Parisian bar tucked on the slopes of Montmartre with two young entrepreneurs who have launched a successful business selling insects as snacks. Clément Scellier and Bastien Rabastens, the founders of Jimini’s, have no connections to the Montmartre bar—they just wanted to check out the competition. Their company offers products such as garlic-and-herb mealworms and tomato-and-pepper grasshoppers, which are sold through upscale French delis. For now, they tell me, they are trying to attract the Indiana Joneses of the world, adventurous trendsetters who will try eating bugs out of curiosity, learn to like the taste, and sell others on the idea. “I think people are not ready yet for a full dinner of insects,” Scellier says. “But if you introduce bugs as an appetizer, encourage people to just take one or two—that’s much more likely to happen.”
As we talk, a plate of insects arrives from the kitchen. They are brown and shriveled, their bulging eyes staring at me emptily. I swallow hard and pierce one of the crickets with my fork and slide it into my mouth. Once on my tongue, the thing collapses into greasy ash. I chew and chew, the wings scratching the insides of my cheeks. I certainly wouldn’t like to repeat the experience.
To my surprise, Scellier and Rabastens seem as disgusted as I feel. “That’s just bad quality,” Rabastens scoffs. “They are spoiling the market.” The problem is, he explains, that there are not enough insect farms in the West to meet the demand, so most bugs are shipped from Thailand, and for safety, they are dehydrated before export. In the process, all flavor and texture are lost. If you cook a piece of meat like that, it’s going to taste bad. You may never give insects a second chance, even though that’s like giving up on all beef after eating one burnt steak. Westerners don’t allow insects much benefit of the doubt. We find most of them repulsive and would rather swat them with a shoe than sauté them in butter. Yet two billion other humans in 113 countries have no problem eating bugs.
Around the globe as many as two thousand different insect species are eaten, including honeybees, hornets, dung beetles, ants, flies, and silkworms. Many are considered delicacies. In Uganda, a pound of grasshoppers sells for more than a pound of beef. Insects not only can taste good, but also offer great nutrition. Plenty of species have very high iron and zinc content and are superior sources of protein even compared to pork or chicken. The planet could profit from a switch to an insect-based diet, too. For several years now, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been pushing insects as one of the solutions for the looming food crisis. Insects are ultraefficient animal protein makers. Because they are cold blooded, they don’t “waste” energy heating their own bodies—which is a major reason why, for example, to get a pound of protein from beef you need twelve times more feed than for crickets. What’s more, we could grow insects in our own homes, almost like sprouting herbs on a windowsill—in a growth reactor or an insectarium.
So why aren’t Americans and Europeans eating bugs? Arnold van Huis, professor of entomology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a world-class expert on edible insects, believes that the West’s dislike of edible insects is rooted in economics. In temperate climates, he told me, it is more difficult to collect enough bugs to eat than it is in other parts of the planet. Because of their cold bloodedness, in the tropics insects grow bigger (more food per creepy-crawly), and they tend to clump together, such as during locust plagues, making harvests easier. It simply didn’t make much sense for our European ancestors to collect bugs. To boot, industrialization cut the West off from nature—and so we started to demonize insects.
But recently bugs are beginning to crawl into Western cuisines. Cricket energy bars are selling in the US, a British company is developing sushi-like “ento” boxes, and in the Netherlands top chefs create recipes for such dishes as mealworm quiche. Already, one out of five European meat eaters claims to be ready to eat insects. How to convince the rest?
One way would be to hide the bugs—and from a certain perspective, we’ve been eating them this way for years. By law, particles of insects are allowed in other products. In the States, 250 ml of canned citrus juices can contain five or more fly eggs, and peanut butter up to thirty insect fragments. Also, a red dye made from cochineal beetles is used in many foods. To start Westerners on the new diet, we could add insects to regular meat products—for instance, make meatballs that are 30 percent mealworms. We could also use insects as feed for livestock or make insect flour and 3-D print it into visually appealing products—some British scientists are doing this already. But just as with in vitro meat, there are many challenges that face the brave new world of insect eating. The costs are still too high, the laws inadequate, and the research lacking. And as animal rights advocates point out, insects are animals, too, and may perceive pain. However, in the West, insects may soon follow the path of sushi and become a fashion. Will they feed the world? Probably not—at least not by themselves. But they could certainly help wean us off vertebrate meat.
Even though a hornet burger still hails from a rather distant future, there are plenty of fake meats available in the here and now. As opposed to lab-grown meat or edible bugs, these contain no animal protein whatsoever. I’m talking about all the tofurkies, meatless meatballs, and other mock meats of the world. Some of them are horrible—chewy, tasteless, and definitely not “meaty.” Others are so good that even the best of chefs have trouble believing they are not the real thing. To try one of those, I enter a small butcher store in downtown Hague (yes, the Netherlands again—they really are the leaders in the search for meat alternatives). In many ways, that Hague butcher store is quite old school. There is a vintage scale and a manual meat grinder standing on the counter, with a few meat choppers scattered around. The only thing that’s missing is the meat itself. Welcome to the Vegetarian Butcher.
Jaap Korteweg, big, bald, and smiley, greets me at the door. Korteweg, the “butcher” himself, used to be a meat-loving farmer but became disillusioned by modern livestock production and turned vegetarian. He had a problem, though. He still loved meat. He started dreaming of building a stainless-steel cow into which one could pour grain and get meat in return, and so he founded the Vegetarian Butcher.
Of course, the process in which Korteweg’s fake meat is produced is far more complicated and less romantic than a stainless-steel cow churning out steaks. Like other fake meats of the so-called third generation (new, better), Korteweg’s sausages and burgers are made by breaking and reassembling protein molecules taken from plants such as soybeans, peas, or lupin (a type of legume). The actual forming of fake meat happens in machines similar to those used to make spaghetti and breakfast cereal. Basically, you apply heat and moisture to a protein mix, knead it into a dough, then push it through a special die—and out come chunks of “chicken” or “tuna.” What’s tricky is getting the flavor right. How do you imitate, for instance, the taste of canned tuna? Korteweg tells me that you need fermented yeast, some seaweed, and three different plants (one of them is wheat, but he doesn’t want to give up the others—it’s a trade secret). For beef, on the other hand, you need onions, carrots, and yellow peas. “You make beef out of carrots?” I ask, doubt resonating in my voice. “Come and taste it for yourself,” Korteweg replies and calls me to the back of his store to the kitchen: a place of sizzling pans and clattering pots, with charred, fatty smells hanging in the air.
To tell you the truth, I still can’t quite believe that what I ate in Korteweg’s kitchen was not meat. I tried his chicken, his beef, his canned tuna, and the illusion was perfect. I’m sure in the past I dined on real chicken that was less chickeny than that mock-vegetarian one. It was succulent, resistant to the teeth just enough, and rich in flavors. And I wasn’t the only one who had trouble telling the real from the fake. When Ferran Adrià, one of the best chefs in the world, took a bite of the Vegetarian Butcher’s chicken, he couldn’t believe it was made of plants. He guessed it to be a chicken thigh from the south of France.
It was only very recently that the improved availability of vegetable proteins, as well as other technological advancements, has made it possible to truly imitate meat. It’s not just the Vegetarian Butcher that excels at this. Other companies, like Beyond Meat in the US, are doing a great job, too. When in 2013 one Whole Foods store mistakenly switched labels on salads containing real chicken and Beyond Meat’s fake one, no customers noticed the difference and complained. What’s more, nutritionally veggie meats can be as complete in protein as meat, yet much leaner. So why don’t we all just dig in?
The problem is fake meats still have a reputation for tasting horrible. In one episode of the popular TV show Breaking Bad, one of the characters, Walter Junior, doesn’t want to eat the veggie bacon his mother has cooked. “This smells like Band-Aids,” he says. “I want real bacon. Not this fake crap.” Just as with eating insects, one bad experience with no-chicken wings can scar one for life. But the good news for the planet and for the future of our food supply is that fake meat consumption is going up. The global meat substitutes market, which was worth over $3 billion in 2013, is expected to grow 45 percent by 2019. Compared to real meat, though, these numbers are still very small. In 2011, sales of meat substitutes in the US totaled just 0.2 percent of what Americans paid to get their meat. Meanwhile, scientists and marketers alike are coming up with ways to convince Westerners to swap hot dogs for “not dogs.” Saying it tastes and cooks “just like meat” works pretty well. So does suggesting easy recipes. According to Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, the single best way to convince people to eat fake meat is to have them try it. “We make vegan ham sandwiches and give them away,” she told me. “People are amazed. They say: ‘This tastes really good. Are you sure this is made from plants?’”
If the idea of dining on fake chicken or beef repels you, think about it: most of us eat meat substitutes already. If you consume sausages and other processed meats, meat-lover pizzas and ready-to-eat meals, you consume quite a lot of soy protein, which is often used to extend the meat in such products. In the States, up to 30 percent of meat served in the National School Lunch Program is actually soy protein. Some scientists suggest that simply extending most of our meat could help reach climate change goals. Just mix more soy and lentils into burgers, and we will all be better off. Yet the conquest of supermarket shelves by meat replacements likely won’t turn the whole planet vegetarian all by itself. It could help tremendously, of course, but if humanity is to significantly reduce meat consumption—and it should—more incentives and solutions are needed.
The first would be to simply waste less. In North America and Europe, over 20 percent of meat is thrown out—either because it wasn’t up to the meat producer’s standards, it didn’t sell at the market, or it didn’t get eaten at home. Half of unused meat is tossed into the garbage by consumers themselves. This means many people can cut down their meat consumption without even changing their diet simply by improving shopping habits, planning meals better, and learning how to use leftovers or freezing them for future use. This would also save money—money that may be needed for a growing butcher’s bill, if a meat tax is introduced.
The meat tax is a second solution that may push the Western world toward the fifth stage of nutrition transition (behavioral change) and a more vegetarian future. Scientists, journalists, and politicians alike are already calling both for a halt on meat industry subsidies and for a tax (similar to the cigarette tax), which would increase the price of beef, pork, and chicken. Studies confirm that this could be an effective way of discouraging the consumption of animal protein. In Europe, it has been calculated that turning the tap off on agriculture subsidies for dairy and meat would save at least thirteen thousand people a year from dying of stroke and heart disease. And that’s a conservative estimate. It may be a challenge, though, to introduce meat taxation. Just look at what happened recently in Denmark. A “fat tax” was proposed there, amounting to 0.77 euro per pound of saturated fat found in food products, including meat. The livestock industry was not happy. They wrote letters to the government, threatened lawsuits, and basically did everything they could to stop the tax. In the end, they succeeded—the fat tax idea was abandoned.
The third important solution, a cultural shift that holds the potential to significantly curb our meat consumption, is promoting and rewarding flexitarianism or, perhaps more accurately, “reducetarianism.” Many devout vegetarians probably won’t like what I’m going to write next, but I’m not alone in thinking that giving more kudos to people for even slightly changing their eating habits is important. One who concurs is Peter Singer, considered by many “the most influential living philosopher”—famous for challenging traditional notions of applied ethics and for his best-selling book Animal Liberation.
I called Singer to ask him about his views on the likelihood that humanity will ever go vegetarian and what would need to change for that to happen. In a soft voice that made him sound much younger than he really is, Singer told me that besides a meat tax, of which he is a big proponent, deradicalizing vegetarianism would encourage more people to try it, even just part-time. “We should stop abusing people if they are not completely vegan or vegetarian,” he explains. “If you announce that once you become vegetarian you must starve to death rather than have any meat pass your lips, people are going to say: ‘That’s crazy, I’m not going to do that.’ If we want the majority to reduce meat consumption, I don’t think insisting on absolute dietary purity is the way to get there.” This approach allows people to try vegetarianism or veganism without needing to jump headfirst into a huge well of ideology and restrictions. Singer himself says he is a “flexible vegan”: he tries to avoid animal products, but when a situation makes it too difficult (visiting friends, travel), he won’t always turn down a dish just because it contains cheese or eggs.
The risk, of course, is that encouraging reducetarianism instead of outright vegetarianism or veganism will mean effectively letting people continue business as usual. Maybe even some of the current vegetarians would go back to eating meat. Maybe. Most likely, though, making a plant-based diet less of an all-or-nothing proposition and less attached to a whole set of lifestyle choices will encourage people to try it. As Paul Rozin once told me: “People get credit for sorting their recycling even if they don’t always do it 100 percent. But we don’t get any credit from either vegetarians or nonvegetarians for cutting down on meat.” Maybe it’s time we should. You could try Meatless Mondays, VB6 (vegan before 6:00 p.m.), or Veganuary (going vegan in January), or you could basically make up your own scheme—even “vegetarian on every second Wednesday of the month, as long as it’s not raining.” At the time of writing, Meatless Mondays were happening in twenty-nine countries across the globe. In the States, 39 percent of people were cutting down on meat (mostly for health reasons). In Germany that number was 41 percent. It would be good if reducetarians got more recognition for their efforts, a badge to wear, either literal (“I reduced 10 percent!”) or simply figurative. Something to be proud of.
Moreover, polls show that once we start banishing animal products from our plates, we keep adding to the list of things we don’t eat: first goes red meat, then chicken, then fish, then milk and eggs. Does this mean that by following the flexitarian/reducetarian path one day the world will actually end up vegetarian? The answer depends on whom you ask. When I posed this question to Newkirk, she said yes. So did Singer and Korteweg. Lord Stern, former vice president of the World Bank and adviser to the UK government, believes that in the future eating meat will become as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving. But Morgaine Gaye, a British food futurologist, thinks that humanity won’t give up meat completely in the foreseeable time.
I’m meeting Gaye in a rather nonfuturistic venue: Charlotte Street Hotel in London, a boutique place with a lot of old-school charm. Gaye herself, though, looks quite the part. She has a short, pointy hairstyle that suggests her “futuristic” outlook (although to be fair, based on looks alone, a quarter of London’s population could be considered futurologists). Gaye’s job involves consulting food companies on the future of our eating habits. When it comes to food, she knows what’s “in,” what’s “out,” and where we are heading. And she doesn’t think meat is destined to be “out” quite yet, at least not completely. “I don’t think we will necessarily go vegetarian, but I think people will eat a lot less meat,” she says. “As meat becomes less affordable, we will go back to considering it a treat. I think people will value meat even more than they do now. What makes things fashionable is unavailability, and meat will be hard to get. It will be expensive. We will see high-end butcher shops appearing—it’s already happening.” Gaye tells me about Victor Churchill, a luxury meat “boutique” that opened recently in Sydney, where cuts of beef and pork are displayed as if they were Louis Vuitton handbags. She also tells me that in the future, there will likely be more meat snacks. Things to grab and go. Basically, it’s bye-bye twelve-ounce steaks, hello tiny morsels of very expensive meats.
What’s more, such meat snacks could be lab grown, too. Or “cultured,” as Andras Forgacs prefers to call them. Forgacs’s company, Modern Meadow, which is backed by PayPal’s billionaire Peter Thiel, is working on creating “cultured” concept meats rather than growing burgers in petri dishes. As Forgacs once told me: “Why focus so much on the ‘I can’t believe it’s not slaughtered meat,’ if we can have something delicious, healthier, safer, more nutritious, more convenient?” That’s why Modern Meadow is now developing cultured “steak chips”—something between a potato chip and beef jerky that’s “superhealthy and has lots of protein” (in Forgacs’s words). Modern Meadow’s “steak chips” could be on the supermarket shelves in a few years. And if the trend for meat snacks sets in, they may be quite a hit.
Now let’s imagine that the world will, at some point, actually go completely vegetarian. What would happen then? According to some, that future would be quite bleak. Think unemployment, economy in ruins. Cows extinct. Pigs extinct. Bland cuisine. Is that a likely scenario? Thankfully not. How would, then, a meatless Earth differ from the one we have now?
To begin with, we could well spend less time on the toilet—struggling with food poisoning—and live longer. A recent USDA study showed, for example, that a quarter of chicken breasts have Salmonella bacteria on them, and 21 percent are positive for Campylobacter. Yes, proper handling and cooking help prevent food poisoning, but “proper” is often not what happens in the reality of our kitchens. According to the CDC, meat and poultry are the most common food sources of fatal infections—a lot of them caused by Salmonella and Listeria bacteria. Of course, in a vegetarian scenario, we would also likely live longer because, as studies show, eating meat may increase the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes, and so on. As authors of one study concluded, “red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, CVD, and cancer mortality.”
In a meatless world, we would also have fewer reasons to worry about antibiotic resistance. In the US, 80 percent of the total volume of antibiotics are used in livestock production. At the same time, twenty-three thousand Americans die every year from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There may be a connection between the overuse of antibiotics in animal production and bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Studies have found, for example, that in experimental swine herds regularly exposed to antibiotics, E. coli bacteria were much more resistant than in herds that had not been exposed to antibiotics for a long time.
It could be easier to breathe, too. In Europe scientists calculated that cutting meat consumption by half would lower total nitrogen emissions by 40 percent, which, as a 2014 study predicts, would “result in a significant improvement in both air and water quality in the EU.” Though pastures would disappear, wildlife would return. In Europe, 23 percent less cropland per person would be needed to produce food. A similar thing would happen in the States. Yes, we would have far fewer cows, pigs, and chickens, but instead we would have space for more wild animals. As Jeremy Rifkin wrote in Beyond Beef: “Millions of creatures, many of whom have inhabited this earth for millennia, will regroup, reproduce, and repopulate the forests.” Sure, not all of the new acres would be returned to a natural state. Some of the postlivestock land would be likely used to grow bioenergy crops, such as switchgrass and willow. Again, the skies would be cleaner for that.
What about unemployment, though? Worldwide, the livestock industry amounts to about 1.3 billion jobs. If the whole planet went vegan, all those jobs would be gone. If we went vegetarian, quite a few would be left, of course, but the impact would still be large. The majority of Earth’s farmers live in poor countries, grazing animals near their homes. Yet the livelihood of these people is also at risk if the rich of the world overindulge in meat—because of climate change and because of the multinational meat corporations pushing out small producers. To take just one example: the European broiler industry has just about destroyed local chicken production in parts of West Africa. At least in the vegetarian scenario, we have a much higher chance of winning the climate-change battle, saving land in developing countries from flooding and desertification, and reducing heat, which destroys crops. Vegetarian humanity would need less livestock, yes, but it would need more veggie burgers, tofu, lentils, and greens. After all, Jaap Korteweg used to be a livestock farmer and now successfully makes his living producing mock meat.
It is true, though, that for some people going vegetarian, or even cutting their meat consumption, may be against their best interests. I’m talking about those inhabitants of Earth who live in poverty, grazing their animals on roadsides and on city garbage (in Havana, sixty-three thousand pigs live on the streets), and those who live on land that is too dry, steep, or hot for growing crops. These people can’t afford a plant-based diet. If you live in Uganda and all you have is plantain, exchanging it for a scrawny chicken to satisfy your protein hunger may be, after all, a very good idea.
But even if there were no lack of meat alternatives and no worries about unemployment in a postmeat world, it would still be hard for humanity to completely let go of meat. The challenge facing makers and marketers of edible insects, lab-grown meat, and veggie burgers alike is that they have to replace not only the taste of animal flesh and its nutrition but also all the symbolism that it carries. We crave meat because it stands for wealth and for power over other humans and nature. We relish meat because history has taught us to think of vegetarians as weaklings, weirdos, and prudes and because the meat industry knows how to sell its products. We die for meat (sometimes literally) because the mistakes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science led us to believe in the protein myth. That’s a lot of hooks to let go of if humanity is ever to go vegetarian or even just significantly reduce its meat consumption.
This isn’t to say that giving up meat is impossible for humanity, but the road will be long and bumpy. Meat substitutes have to become prestigious (celebrity endorsement helps); they have to be cheap but not too cheap, so they can still stand for “I’ve made it in life”; they have to become equated with masculinity (ads featuring bodybuilders, perhaps?); and they have to become visible and omnipresent, so that we get used to them and develop new habits. History has shown that people do acquire appetites for foods that were long considered disgusting or inferior. Potatoes used to be thought of as pig food in Europe, dangerous to human health. It took the French court a lot of effort to convince people to eat them, in order to improve diets and fight hunger. Marie Antoinette wore potato flowers in her corsage, and a potato field by the palace was ostensibly guarded to spur curiosity (it worked—the moment the guards were called off, peasants stole the whole crop). Tomatoes were looked upon with suspicion well into the eighteenth century, lobster used to be poor people’s grub, and even pizza didn’t catch on right away in the States. Communist fare, people called it. Meanwhile, foods can lose their prestige, too. Take what happened with white bread. For centuries it used to mean status and wealth; nowadays it’s considered inferior to whole grain.
It’s hard to imagine humanity going full veg in the very near future. Thousands of years of our long love affair with meat must be undone. If meat becomes unavailable again, people will crave it. That’s simply the way we operate. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopia Oryx and Crake, the world survives on lab-grown meat, while the real stuff is as rare as diamonds and so ferociously desired. That is one possible future.
What is likely to happen, though, is that meat substitutes will sneak up on us, the way potatoes and pizzas did. As long as they taste good (and some of them truly do), and as long as they gain popularity and status, mock meats may eventually replace quite a lot of “real” meat. So far, plant-based “veggie” meats are the cheapest and the least disgust inducing of meat substitutes, and the process of their production is the most advanced. Still, edible insects and cultured meat may also play a role in reducing our meat consumption in the future, and once the idea catches on, it may quickly gain traction.