Why you shouldn’t eat meat if you hate factory farming
Crosspost from my substack.
The title of this post may seem obvious, but this is mostly a rebuttal to “Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming” by Kat Woods, which you should read first.
While I’m at it, I’ll also present a critique FarmKind’s vegan impact estimate.
From their site:
Donating is more accessible and scalable: Just $23/month to effective charities can do as much good as going completely vegan. Unlike diet change, there’s no upper limit to how much good you can do through donations. Instead of focusing on harming as little as possible, we focus on preventing as much harm as possible — it’s both a bigger and easier opportunity.
This number is wrong. I think it’s so wrong they should seriously consider changing it. See, this stat conflates the impact of eating plant-based and being vegan. Let me explain
#1: Ideas are contagious
Remember the pandemic? I hope you do!
There was lots of talk about epidemiology back then and I think most people reading this blog will have learned about the Basic Reproduction Number back then (also known as the “R number”).
The R number is the expected value of how many people you will spread your disease to. In this case: spreading the vegan mind-virus.
Now, I don’t know what the exact r number is of spreading veganism when you’re vegan for a lifetime, but I conjecture that if you’re smart about it, you can easily get it up to 1. (I personally have played a big role in getting 3 people to go vegan, and I’m only 23!)
You have to realize that even if we put the average number at a quite conservative 0.6, this applies recursively (because your expected value of people will also go infect the expected amount of people until all of us are grass-eaters).
Which would work out to 1.5. Naturally, the closer your number gets to 1, the more this blows up. (but it doesn’t really, immediately, since this stat is over your entire life, but I digress)2
I think there are good arguments for an R value closer to 1 or even exceeding 1. Now you’re getting into very serious longtermist impact territory. especially if you do a good job at instilling a certain kind of veganism that makes people want to spread it.
This is not built into the farmkind estimate that everyone cites.
#2: We’re probably all going to need to go vegan to end factory farming
This one is extremely obvious yet not mentioned in the post. You can offset all you want and try to avoid the most harmful industries all you want but unless we get a breakthrough in cultivated meat, (which is probably way harder than you think) we will have to stop eating animal products to meaningfully halt factory farming. It’s kind of that simple.
#3: Price opportunity cost
Some aspects of the reducetarian diet are more expensive than their vegan counterparts. For example: the most ethical beef will also be the most expensive. This money could be spent donating. This is not insignificant at all. The average American spends 425 dollars on beef a year. More ethical beef is significantly more expensive than average-american-consumer-beef. Habits add up. That’s 595000 shrimp you could help!
#4: Friction
When you’re vegan, you have a thing to say to people when you get offered animal products that instantly makes them go “ah, sorry, won’t bother you with that”. Furthermore you get them to reflect on their own consumption habits.
Going “I am a lacto-bovitarian for the animals because of the inherent uncertainty of nutritional science I’ve calculated that this is the best way to maximize my impact” sounds more like a ACX bay area house party story than something that will make the average person question their own impact.
Communicating “I’m vegan” is way lower friction. This matters because you have to do this a lot. People don’t even understand what veganism is half the time and I personally find it to be the most tiresome aspect of being a vegan.
It’s also just way higher effort to debate whether to get beef at all and weigh if “it is ethical enough”. Optimizing for something is always more cognitive load than following a deontology.3
#5: Health effects are overblown
You can be vegan and healthy. Since we all need to go vegan anyway to end the worst injustice on earth, this should suffice, even if you are less healthy.4
#6: Value drift
I don’t have studies to back this up but I strongly suspect that if you eat the animals you advocate for you’re way more likely to value drift away from effective giving for vegan causes. I conjecture you’re more likely to stick to a thing when you tie it to your self-image. “I’m a marginal reducetarian” probably won’t stick as well as “I’m vegan for the animals”. Complicated narratives easier to forget than simple ones and you’re way more vulnerable to confirmation bias than you think.
There’s a crisis of people becoming vegan and quitting. 84% of vegans quit!5 We should take this very seriously. 84% of quitters were not actively involved in a vegetarian/vegan group or organization. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to conjecture a lot of them wouldn’t have quit if they did. You likely won’t find community as a marginal reduceterian.6
Conclusion
When it comes to the FarmKind estimate, I think they should raise the number to adjust for the expected impact being vegan has on turning other people vegan or they should change the phrasing to “impact of eating a plant-based diet” instead of using the word vegan.
I really wanted to cite and do more research for this piece but this is part of my 30-day writing challenge and I got lectures in the morning. I hope you got a rough idea of my case against the ovo-bovinian marginal reducetarian hordes (probably 3 people) 7.
For the record: I love these guys and I think you should give them infinite money
You might rebut: “You can do all of this while being a marginal reducetarian”. For the reasons that come later in this article I think this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I think veganism will have a significantly higher R number, mainly due to argument 4 and 6.
This is also why I think flexitarian or “just eat less meat“ arguments are really bad.
I can hear you going “but in the meantime” in the back, I consider it covered ground by the other arguments
yes I realise this hurts my R number argument from beforehand. This is hard okay? I get a day for this.
Again, schelling point!!!
in all seriousness: I think it’s very important no vegan gets convinced away from veganism
I grew up on a farm. We had (my parents still have) dairy goats, chickens for meat, and rabbits for meat (we also killed the male goats and some of the females which we couldn’t keep for dairy). The animals weren’t for the business (the only thing we sold was low bush blueberries), they were just for my family, and by raising them we didn’t need to buy meat or dairy elsewhere.
I took care of the animals. I got to see how they lived and how they died, see them when they were in states of joy and of suffering. I also had a hand in killing them, especially the chickens.
I am very grateful that I was able to experience the reality of this firsthand. It gave me a good sense of what it means to eat meat.
I think that most people in my wealthy western society don’t share the same experiences I do. Their primary experiences with domesticated animals are either with house pets, through digital media, or as an occasional visitor to farms for sightseeing purposes. A small percentage of real animal enthusiasts might work at an animal shelter or as a veterinarian, still mostly interacting with pets.
That leaves most people’s moral intuitions extremely uncalibrated when it comes to eating meat. They know animals are adorable, nice to pet. They have emotional connections with their pets and feel that their pets dying would be a horrible tragedy. They know that cows and pigs and chickens aren’t so different from their pets, just less practical to live with indoors.
And they know that most meat comes from factory farms where animals live in horrible conditions and are suffering intensely for most of the time of their existence.
Most people, then, try to forget about the facts of where their meat comes from, or suppress whatever feelings they have about it, so that they can bear to go on doing what everyone else does and eating meat which tastes good. Some other people, less willing to selectively ignore parts of reality, decide they don’t want to eat meat anymore, and in fact they are willing to put some resources into trying to help some of the poor suffering animals.
Most people reach whatever behavior they wind up with regarding meat without firsthand knowledge of what it feels like to raise and kill an animal for food.
I don’t think there’s a way, at least not in this comment, to explain why I feel the way I do. But I do think that my feeling is shared by the vast majority of humans throughout history, and insofar as that is true, I am describing as real of a moral truth as any another.
Raising animals for meat can be good for those animals. They can have joyful lives. Killing them is sad. It’s something worth crying about sometimes. But it’s okay. Eventually, their time to live comes to an end, and their bodies provide the sustenance for others to go on living.
There’s no reason why someone who does not want to kill animals for food is wrong, if they do not feel the way I do. But what I am trying to drive home with this comment is that many people can feel morally good about eating meat without hiding from the reality of it one bit, and that I believe I am more directly familiar with the reality of eating meat than most people who choose to become vegan.
Now I’m going to apply the moral belief that killing animals for meat can be okay to thinking about the top level post (points are out of order).
Question: If you hate factory farming, should you stop eating meat?
Factory farming: OP thinks humanity will have to stop eating animal products to meaningfully halt factory farming. This is a major crux. I don’t believe this is true, although I do agree we will have to reduce the quantity of consumption. Short argument for why OP is wrong is that there are lots of really great agricultural practices that could scale but have never caught on at scale due to financial incentives.
Health: OP says even if being vegan make you less healthy than you would otherwise be, you can be vegan and be healthy enough. You can really get into the weeds here, but since I believe killing animals for meat is good as long as they live good lives, there’s no reason not to eat meat to improve your health if you can source it well.
Value drift: I think about this the opposite way. I think 84% of vegans quitting is evidence that being vegan is hard. Improving access to meat from good sources might be a much more effective way to reduce animal suffering than trying to convince more people to first become vegan and then stay vegan.
Price opportunity cost: If you want to forgo the most expensive parts of your diet in order to be able to donate more money in high leverage ways, by all means do so. Just note that you can apply this logic to all parts of your life, and that by buying ethically sourced meat you are creating demand for the thing you hope to increase access to.
You don’t really have to explain in this much detail. I was vegan with some exceptions for a while and mostly didn’t bother explaining the exceptions to people (for example, if my mom got eggs from one of her friends’ back yards to make Thanksgiving pie). A friend still tells people he’s vegetarian because it’s not really worth the effort to explain all of the weird edge cases.
This makes sense honestly. I guess you would still run the risk of a non-vegan seeing you do these things and going “ha! hypocrite!” but I don’t know how real that risk is honestly.
Yeah, my friends who knew about the exceptions didn’t care at all. The only case where I think it would be a problem is hiding your exceptions from someone you’re trying to convert. If you don’t actually eat a fully vegan diet, convincing other people to do that based on your example is misleading. But that’s presumably a less common thing where explaining the details and why is worth it (and will likely help you convince people since it shows you’ve actually thought it through).