Vegans

"One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England....The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity."

That's George Orwell on vegetarians in 1937, as quoted in Steve Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature.  Pinker was citing this as an example of the image problem of vegetarianism throughout the ages, even with great moral voices like Orwell.

That's the question I asked myself today while having a drink with a former vegan girl (who now eats paleo).  She loves visiting New York City because she can buy natural fats, like leaf lard, which are unavailable in Connecticut.  Unavailable because there aren't enough people who want to buy it.  Translation: there isn't enough market demand.  Which begs the question -- what if vegetarians stopped drinking self-righteous tea, rolled up their yoga mats, and started to help build an alternative to the factory farm system?  Not by lobbying.  Not by working on farms.  But by buying and eating animal products from farms that feed and raise their animals right.

Let's do the math.

• Assume the total US population is 300 million

• Conservatively, let's say 1% of the population is vegan/vegetarian

• Assume 8 ounces of meat per day. (This is average for the US, but double the rest of the world. But that's because the rest of the world is poor, and as they get richer, they're eating more meat.)

• Call it $7 per pound

That nets out to $3.8 billion per year.  The revenue for all of Whole Foods in 2009 was $8 billion, so it's half of the turnover at Whole Foods.  I'd like to see a list of the organic farms and food companies that have gotten off the ground because Whole Foods started to stock their product.

Now some of you might say, eh, $3.8 billion isn't actually that much when you look at all the food profits out there.  Cargill 2009 revenue = $116 billion.  Archer Daniels Midland 2009 revenue = $69 billion.  Yes, but when you're getting a new market off the ground, every dollar of demand punches above its weight.  Ask any entrepreneur or small business owner.  Getting that first dollar of revenue is hard.  Finding a product that people will actually buy is hard.  Once you have some consumers, booked a little revenue, and you're not burning through cash, you suddenly have a growth platform.

Consider the shoe market.  Demand for Vibram FiveFingers has exploded.  They've been selling millions of pairs.  But compared to the overall shoe market, VFFs are still a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket.  But it's caused the big guys to all respond -- and they've started R&D into minimalist footwear themselves.  And now we have Merrill, Nike, New Balance, Saucony, and more all angling to get in on the party.  There is more positive innovation happening in the shoe industry right now than in the past few decades combined.  Because a relatively small group of passionate advocates of barefoot and minimalist walking and running LOVED the product.  And started telling their friends.

It's not all that different with meat.  If more meat providers started delivering a higher quality product at an acceptable price, you can sure as hell bet that the big guys will take notice.  And they will start coming up with ways to get in on the action.  Hmm...I can charge more for these chickens if I treat them a little better?  And then you've got the R&D budgets of the big guys working on your problem.  That's the beauty of free enterprise.

But instead, vegetarians withdraw into Vegetarian Land.  Where the optimal health recommendations conveniently match your political beliefs.  And they sit on the sidelines, eating their gourmet vegan cupcakes and spelt crackers, and feeling morally superior.

Well, not all of them.

From time to time, I see articles on the promise of "cultured meat" -- or meat grown in a laboratory from stem cells.  Here is the latest, about a little non-profit called New Harvest:

"Matheny's meat starts in a lab, where scientists extract stem cells from animal muscles. The cells are placed in a nutrient bath to develop and then on plastic scaffolding that allows them to form into strips as they multiply. Mark Post, a professor of tissue engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, may be close to realizing New Harvest's vision. Post's lab is producing 2 mm thick strips that are almost an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. Pack enough together, and you've got a meal."

They're still having some issues though:

"One problem is flavor. Post hasn't tasted his own handiwork because he says he's averse to eating his experiments. But he's been told by those who have that it doesn't taste like the real thing."

No shit.  Look, I'm all for scientific and technological progress that will help 6+ billion people live on this planet.  And the first halting steps of discovery are always easy to ridicule.  But I am enormously skeptical that this type of effort is going to produce anything resembling real food.

• Even grass-fed cattle and factory farm cattle have different nutritional profiles.  Same genetic programming + different food intake = different gene expression.  No wonder lab protein doesn't taste like meat.  
• Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food details the 150-year history of trying to manufacture breast milk with formula.  And it's 150 years of hubris in which we've done everything we could to avoid learning how complex real food actually is.
• These scientists fall prey to nutritionism, or reducing complex food to its constituent parts.  They're just trying to grow muscle protein, plain and simple.  But what about fat?  And all the other amazing vitamins and nutrients found in meat and seafood?  (Oh, the research grant didn't cover fat so we didn't grow it.)
• Look at some of the other "meat substitutes" that they're hailing.   Mostly soy products.  Mostly bad for you.  And being grown using fossil fuels in vast monocultures.  Take a look at  on New Harvest's homepage for their vision of the future.  Vegetarian Utopia:

• Even if you get people to go veg, it's not exactly helping to create a better, alternative food system for the vast majority of people who are never going to give up meat...or even switch to meat substitutes.  The meat-eaters will think it's gross, and the vegetarians and vegans who care are going to be too grossed out by lab meat.

Here's a taste of New Harvest's views on meat:

"Despite its popularity, meat — both in its production and in its consumption — has a number of adverse effects on human health, environmental quality, and animal welfare. These include: diseases associated with the over-consumption of animal fats; meat-borne pathogens and contaminants; antibiotic-resistant bacteria due to the routine use of antibiotics in livestock; inefficient use of resources in cycling grains and water through animals to produce protein; soil, air, and water pollution from farm animal wastes; and inhumane treatment of farm animals. As meat consumption continues to increase, worldwide, these problems are now a global concern."

The environmental and ethical problems are all issues with factory farming, not meat consumption, per se.  Regarding health, I wonder if they saw the recent findings on red meat.

New Harvest's solution to factory farming is to remove the farm and leave the factory.  Blueprints below:

(Thanks to Pablo for the pointer.)