Our grandchildren will look back at the way we treat animals today with horror. The concept of confining sentient beings in filthy, cramped conditions before leading them to slaughter en-masse - or individually cutting their throats - purely for the momentary pleasure of eating a piece of meat, will be so abhorrent and alien to them and they will call into question how we could let it happen and why we didn’t act sooner.
Since the Agrarian Age, society has bred and kept animals for its own purposes - purposes that have slowly been eroded, such as using horses to pull carts and cock fighting for entertainment, or that have become detached from society at large, as slaughter and dairy production now happens largely behind closed doors.
After the war, access to meat increased and real costs have come down as factory farming has become the overwhelming norm. Producers are always looking to bear down on costs in order to sell more, resulting in ever-greater intensity - multi-storey pig farming in China, super farms in the USA and increasingly the UK and huge factory ships plying the seas, catching and processing thousands of tonnes of fish to land a finished product.
These advances, funded by international banks and operated by a handful of mega companies are a world away from the small holdings that were common in the West 100 years ago. Family farms struggle to compete and are bought up by conglomerates that have little interest in serving the local communities in which they are based.
The Internet has done a lot to dispense with the myth of the happy animals pictured on packaging and in the US and Australia, so called Ag-gag laws make it increasingly difficult for concerned individuals to report on the true scale of the suffering of animals that end up on supermarket shelves and restaurant plates.
It has also exposed the connections between meat production and climate change - particularly the vast environmental costs of felling rainforest to make way for animal feed production in South America. Animal agriculture is as important a factor in climate change as the entirety of transportation. Consumers are also now more aware of the pollution that animal agriculture causes, the water poverty into which communities around the world are plunged as a result and the shrinking ability for humans to rely on antibiotics while almost three-quarters globally are used preventatively in farm animals. Antibiotic resistance could cause 10m deaths and cost the world economy $100 trillion by 2050. And not forgetting that almost all of the world’s most deadly diseases, including Covid, originate in animal agriculture.
Governments around the world are aware of the legion problems of factory farming, but they face internal and external pressures to do maintain the status quo.
Perhaps most importantly, the meat and dairy lobbies are powerful. With huge budgets and professional outfits close to the corridors of power, they work on legislators individually to further their cause, supported by misleading information about the sector - for example, that pasture sequesters more carbon than forest, or that meat and dairy are actually healthy (whereas The Lancet’s Planetary Health Diet advises Europeans consume 77% less red meat). Traditionally, these tactics have been tremendously successful, even to the point of including these food groups on national diet charts and in minimum standards in schools.
Secondly, there’s a misconception that the sector benefits the economy. Industrial animal agriculture employs fewer people in Britain than cigarette production did at its height and, unlike the cigarette factories, abattoirs and factory farms are utterly miserable places to work, where accidents are common and, unsurprisingly, mental health issues are rife.
Thirdly, consumers don’t want to be told what to do. Many see meat and dairy as essential and convenient elements to their meals, keen to provide food quickly to their families, cosy in their collective bubbles of cognitive dissonance. Governments have no business coming into living rooms and kitchens to change that.
But for many, meat is increasingly a luxury product and vegetarian or vegan meals are common fixtures in the household menu. The cost of living crisis has forced people to rethink their shopping habits and it’s not hard to relate to how a plant-based diet is on average £645 cheaper per year per person.
Celebrities, musicians and sports stars are urging people to swap out animal products for a variety of reasons - environment, health, or animal and human welfare. Even the great David Attenborough points out that there simply isn’t enough viable land on the planet to feed enough animals if the middle classes of the East grow as they have in the West. Pet owners are beginning to ask themselves how they can pay for someone to kill a pig for them to eat, when they wouldn’t see any harm come to their family dog - a less intelligent species - thanks to advertising campaigns by PETA and others.
Sales of meat replacement products such as Quorn have dramatically increased in recent years and all supermarkets now have their own versions - alternative proteins that cook and taste just like meat without the cruelty, which cost less, won’t give you food poisoning and last better. The same is true of plant milks, yoghurt, cream, custard and cheese.
Meanwhile, Western governments are scrambling to invest in cellular meat - that is, real meat but grown without the need for a living creature. Boris Johnson's government funded a £12m research centre run by the University of Bath, for just this purpose. A recent study published in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment showed that cultivated meat can reduce the carbon footprint of meat by 92%, air pollution by 94% and land use by 90%.
Consulting firm Kearney predicts that by 2040, cultured meat will have a market penetration of 35% while plant-based alternatives will represent a further 25%. According to the AHDB, half of meat alternative sales in 2018 were to meat eaters.
As well as governments racing to secure a slice of these multi-billion-dollar future industries, capital investment in the sector has also grown at an unprecedented rate. According to the Good Food Institute, sustainable protein companies in Europe raised 24% more funding in 2022 than in 2021.
If this trend continues, then Western countries will lead the way in the tech that will eventually replace factory farming. Supermarkets, which already have ambitious targets for meat replacement products, are on board, but ultimately dominated by market forces.
Governments are also mulling the short-term electoral implications of ignoring the powerful animal-ag lobbies and pressing on with higher taxes on products that are bad for people, animals, the environment and food sovereignty, perhaps applying VAT to foods that were once considered staple and are now known to be less favourable, and maybe instructing their nudge units to sow seeds in the national psyches about the benefits of eating less meat.
There are no sinister forces behind these developments - the youthful alt-foods sector is nowhere near as powerful, well-organised or well-connected as animal-ag, but their message rings with common sense, compassion and smart finance.
While no government will take meat or dairy off the shelves or tell people to eat less of them, change is inevitable.
