The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System

The history of humankind is a story of moral progress. The most notable proponents of this position are Steven Pinker (2011) and Michael Shermer (2015). Factory farming might look like a counterexample to this, but people are very concerned about animal ethics and have been for at least the last 40 years. Part of the reason why such an inconsistency can exist between moral consciousness and action is a certain wilful ignorance: 75% of Americans, for example, believe that they only eat meat, dairy, and eggs from humane sources, but more than 99% of animals in the United States live on concentrated animal feeding operations, or factory farms. As well as denial, David Livingstone Smith (2012) tells us that a common prerequisite to atrocities is dehumanization and the refusal of moral status.The notion of humane factory farming presents numerous challenges, particularly in terms of its practical implementation and scalability. To maintain a consistently high level of animal welfare across the industry, extensive regulations and enforcement mechanisms would be required, including regular independent inspections, livestreamed security footage, and increased allocation of space per animal. Moreover, the system would necessitate a substantial investment in veterinary care and medical supplies as well as the reversal of artificial breeding practices that prioritize rapid production of meat, milk and eggs. Presently, even the most conscientious farms fail to meet these welfare standards, implying that the costs associated with truly humane farming are prohibitively high. Given the projected global population of 10 billion by 2050, it is doubtful that humane animal farming can be feasibly scaled to meet the demands of such a populous world. Consequently, the complete abolition of factory farming seems to be the only viable solution.In The End of Animal Farming, Jacy Reese concerns himself with what to do about animal farming. He does not spend any real effort on making the moral case against it, which he assumes is fairly self-evident, but instead concentrates on solutions.Vegetarianism is one such solution with vegetarian alternatives multiplying rapidly. Plant-based agriculture focuses on producing protein-rich, nutrient-dense foods derived entirely from plants. This approach involves the development of novel food products that replicate the taste, texture, and nutritional profile of animal products without the need for animal farming. Hampton Creek, for example, has created an eggless egg; a reporter for Business Insider said that he was “blown away” and that its taste was “distinctly egg” (Brodwin, 2017). Meat alternatives are improving all the time, but one might be concerned about what improvement actually means. As a writer for Current Affairs also says, “plant-based burgers no longer taste like plants” (Robinson, 2018), suggesting that the determinant of progress is taste, just like the eggless egg was lauded for its tasting of egg. However, correspondence with taste is not a reliable measure of the quality of food. This should be quite evident: In fact, everything that tastes good is bad for us, and everything good for us tastes bad. It would be bizarre to say that energy drinks, filled with sugar and all sorts of clever chemicals designed to emulate flavors, represent improvement in every sense of the term.Other alternatives to animal products are innovative food technologies like cellular agriculture. “A big reason we're going to see the end of animal farming is that it doesn't have to mean the end of meat,” says Reese (p. xii). This is because we are increasingly capable of producing animal products without raising and slaughtering animals. This cutting-edge technology utilizes cell cultures to grow animal tissues, such as muscle and fat, in controlled laboratory environments. The process typically involves extracting a small sample of animal cells, placing them in a nutrient-rich culture medium, and allowing them to multiply and develop into the desired product, such as meat or milk. The resulting product, often referred to as “cultured” or “cell-based” meat, is virtually identical to its conventional counterpart in terms of taste, texture, and nutritional composition but is produced without the need for large-scale animal farming. Mass implementation of cellular agriculture might be too optimistic for now though, with numerous technical challenges, regulatory hurdles, and production costs. Likewise, there is a lack of infrastructure in place to support it on a scale large enough to seriously contend with animal farming. Nor is consumer acceptance anywhere on the horizon.To overcome hesitancy about emerging technologies that provide alternatives to animal farming, activism will be essential. Reese takes quite a militant attitude toward animal activism. He advocates, for one, a focus on trigger events such as food safety scandals, disease outbreaks, or environmental disasters linked to animal farming. These can capture public attention and provide opportunities for activists to raise awareness about the negative impacts of traditional animal agriculture. Furthermore, by leveraging these events, activists can highlight the benefits of alternative food technologies and emphasize the urgent need for change. In conjunction with this, he also recommends utilizing stories before citing statistics about animal agriculture. This is a strategy to appeal to one's emotional rather than rational sensibilities. Haunting tales bring out the gravity of an issue but might leave room for dismissal under the assumption that it is not widespread enough to be a priority. Statistics are what illustrate the scale of a problem, but it is true that it is difficult to motivate with them alone.The issue of animal farming is not an isolated one, however. Reese argues that advocates should engender a broad moral understanding rather than addressing moral issues one by one. This broad understanding, it would seem, is effective altruism. To be an effective altruist is to take a scientific approach to ethics and, specifically, to philanthropy, as William MacAskill explains in Doing Good Better (2015), one of the movement's foundational texts. What effective altruism centers around is the utilitarian principle of doing the greatest good for the greatest number and combines this with a quantificational approach to morality. In practice, this means earning more to give more, then living modestly to give even more and, lastly, choosing the best causes and organizations that will do the most good with your money.It is perhaps his effective altruist motivation that causes Reese to conflate too many issues together as part of his call to take a holistic attitude toward activism. For example, he says that grass-fed cow farming is potentially worse than grain-fed cow farming because it leads to between two and four times more production of methane, a major greenhouse gas. It also takes more land, water, and fossil fuels to produce grass-fed beef. One of the strengths of the animal rights movement is the focus on animal suffering and, as Reese rightly points out, to bring attention this, rather than to mere statistics and other abstract arguments, is perhaps the most effective way of causing systemic change. Turning to environmental concerns like this is an abnegation of the best qualities of his book.