The consumers ultimately will decide the fate of the mean industry. However, I doubt that consumers will change their habits in a way that will be in their best interest.
Consumers can choose to buy meat from local sources that are ethically raised and at a scale that doesn't negatively impact the local environment. Yes, that will probably cost more then what's at the grocery store. But do we need to eat meat every day, week, or month?
To put all the responsibility on the meat industry, policy, and the government is in my opinion the wrong approach. I think we should be educating consumers and influencing change through the scale of economics.
Oh please. Don't try to blame the consumers for this one. Some person at a grocery store or a restaurant has no realistic way of knowing how the meat he's buying was raised and slaughtered. What's he going to do, arrange a farm tour every time he gets something to eat? The best you can get is places like Whole Foods which claim their meat is more ethically treated, but even here you're just relying on their word and their fancy marketing.
Moreover, the middle class in this country is disappearing, so people on the bottom end have less and less money to spend on decent food, so of course they're going to get whatever's cheapest. It's not like the grocery store advertises, "buy this cheaper meat here where the cows have been tortured to death, rather than this more expensive meat where they haven't".
You can only blame consumers when the consumers actually have sufficient information to make an informed choice, and make the wrong choice anyway. Laws like this aim precisely to prevent consumers from having this information. This is why we need decent government to make capitalism and "free markets" work as well as possible: it's the government's job to keep the playing field level and fair, and laws like this are counter to this goal because they tilt the field in favor of the most evil companies who want to hide how they make stuff so that consumers can't make an informed choice.
This reminds me of propaganda from the environmentalism movement of the 70s, which sought to shift the blame for litter (increased use of disposable packaging) from corporations onto consumers. Yes individuals can take responsibility for their own actions by "voting with their wallet" etc. - not denying that. But in a democracy, if you'd rather fight for greater regulations on Big Ag than give up meat in your diet, that should be your choice and don't feel ashamed about it.
The companies' position would only make sense if they weren't spending so much on advertising, lobbying, and other attempts to reinforce the structures that lead to the levels of meat consumption we have now.
I'm saying it is critical for anyone who cares about this to do something. Organizing to get laws changed, subsidies stripped/rerouted, and other structural changes takes effort from everyone who has a stake in this. We just disagree on what it is that is critical to do.
Yeah, that's the main problem I guess, the system is providing people what they want but not what they need. It works like any other market, the consumers want cheap meat so the industry is providing cheap meat. The whole industry is then shaped to solve the wrong problem. They don't even need to fully switch to vegetarianism for it to work but they need to understand that eating meat once in a while is healthier and more reasonable than having a diet based on eating meat every day.
One is to just increase awareness that the autopilot act of going to a supermarket and buying meat has a lot of cruelty behind it and hoping that smart people realize that it's not sustainable or ethical. Eventually, no one can force a decision and a forced decision wouldn't practical in the long-term either.
The HN crowd is not the typical consumer that shops at Walmart. The typical consumer buys things that they can afford and makes compromises on flavor.
The ethical part won't effect demand just like it hasn't effected demand in the past. The price and taste will help consumers afford more meat. And I'm sure that they would agree that is a noble thing.
I think I agree, though personally (not as a counterexample), this only targets the environmental aspect of avoiding meat and leaves behind the ethical decision around animal consumption to some degree. While reducing subsidies and other benefits would go a long way here as well, there are still some animal byproducts that have a relatively low ecological footprint and effecting changes to these through legislation still seems premature and heavy-handed in the current political climate in most any country.
It seems to me that for those considerations, bringing new perspectives to consumers to try and influence their choices at the store is one of the only practical options for now.
I don't see the economic realities stacking up. The price of cheap, processed meat products is pretty low... and not all of the price is ingredients. It's a long way to the bottom.
Meanwhile, the higher end ethical consumers... it's hard to predict their consumer preferences/choices. I suppose some vegans want meat and some omnivores want to be vegan... but as I said, I'm dubious about these groups' real size.
This won't get to $1 per kg overnight. There probably needs to be adequate demand all along the continuum to fuel volume price reductions.
I also think it's naive to assume that environmental (eg energy/carbon savings) benefits will materialize. Its equally naive to assume eco consumers will buy the story otherwise, over the long term.
The main bull case seems to rely on overwhelming cost advantage. Where's the reason to think this will happen.?
IMHO, this sort of thing is not really going to be a consumer-driven change.
If the commercials for meat alternatives are compelling enough even in the face of lobbies and subsidies, capitalism will drive the big fast food chains to market these more aggressively at more attractive price points and nudge consumer preferences in that direction.
So why are you telling the story with supermarkets and meat producers framed as actors? Looks like it's the consumers who have collectively made this decision, and companies have just been following their wishes.
I think when it comes to meat its more of a tragedy of the commons issue, and the most effective way to get something done is to encourage my representatives to support legislation that helps these animals versus holding my breath and waiting for the world to wake up and choose logic. Keep in mind this is a society that have many who, when shown that smoking causes lung cancer, continues to smoke. After COVID and seeing the worldwide idiot brigade come out of the woodwork from that, I'm even more cynical, and more certain that there are just too many idiots on this planet to just expect consumers to one day wise up and start doing things differently.
I don't think they're in the pocket of the meat industry. As I've said- the meat industry doesn't harm actual humans and regulating it would raise prices for actual humans.
I think a better ask is to create self-sustaining processes that ratchet to improve the system over time. In a word: regulation. You can't be sure you're consuming ethical meat through consumer pressure alone. You need more eyes in the system, with enough force to be able to see through the veils that the profit motive will put up.
The full statement is probably "I would pay X more for animal-friendlier meat if it was sitting next to the animal-unfriendly meat on the supermarket shelf". Not an indictment per se but it usually takes a lot of work on the producer and consumer side of the equation to effect real change in people's habits.
Even Homo Economicus might change behaviour if presented with accurate information like requiring treated meat to be labelled as such. After all how can you make a rational, self interested, decision in the absence of complete and accurate information?
Given the amount of industry resistance to any and all changes in labelling regulations I think both sides are well aware of this.
You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter.
Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping.
If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will.
Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that.
Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.
If everyone quit eating meat, I would assume there would be market research into why that happened. Change would then occur. Now, of course that's never going to happen but on the other hand I don't think buying $20 chickens is in a practical sense going to do much, either.
But one of the reasons I'm a vegetarian is not to effect change (because it probably won't) but to simply not participate. I choose not to pay people to torture animals for me by proxy.
It's all philosophical differences, IMO. Fact remains that there are far more people out there that are concerned about saving fifty cents on their next roaster. But choosing not to play is as valid a reason as any, even if it's just so one can sleep better at night.
You start with not subsidizing the meat industry massively (via direct handouts, subsidized feed and so on) and making them pay for exterrnalities.
That way they'll have vastly less money for advertising and lobbying.
Then you take the trillions you've saved and use it to bring healthy, convenient, tasty options to put in front of them.
It's actually pretty easy to get people to make different choices, you just make the good choice slightly more convenient and stop subjecting them to 24/7 manipulation to make the terrible choice.
Consumers can choose to buy meat from local sources that are ethically raised and at a scale that doesn't negatively impact the local environment. Yes, that will probably cost more then what's at the grocery store. But do we need to eat meat every day, week, or month?
To put all the responsibility on the meat industry, policy, and the government is in my opinion the wrong approach. I think we should be educating consumers and influencing change through the scale of economics.
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