TLDR: Meat can be healthy (regardless of its moral status), but it also brings health risks to consumers and to bystanders. Meat is a luxury good for many, often subsidized rather than appropriately taxed. There may be space for some meat in Utopia, and clean meat is on the horizon, but meat is far less common/expected there.
Prerequisites: Personhood
As discussed in the essay on personhood, my conception of Utopia takes a wider-view of who is worthy of moral consideration than the current consensus on Earth. Because animals like dolphins, orangutans, and elephants are granted the rights of any person, Utopia finds it abominable to hunt them or raise them on farms (especially factory farms) to be slaughtered. My guess is that this status probably extends to pigs as well, making our world a moral nightmare from the perspective of Utopia.
But even if we assume that Utopia has no pig farming, might it still have cows, chickens, or fish on farms? Is hunting rabbits, pheasants, or deer permitted? Surely Utopia doesn’t grant personhood status to shrimp and clams!
Unfortunately, I don’t know where the right line is, exactly. I’m pretty sure that humans on 2023 Earth are generally too speciesist, denying rights of orcas but granting them to intellectually disabled humans. But I’m also pretty sure it’s a mistake to grant jellyfish equal rights and protections under the law. That leaves a large, uncertain space in between that I’m not sure I’ll be able to have strong beliefs about before I really understand how minds and brains work. I sure hope that it turns out chickens/fish/shrimp don’t have moral worth, because we sure do torture and kill a lot of them.
But let’s say for the sake of argument (in the scope of this essay) that Utopians don’t think it’s generally repugnant to hurt, kill, or farm some kinds of animals. In other words, let’s address the practices and policies of eating meat, setting aside the direct moral calculus of whether it’s evil to harm the animals in question.
Meat is Healthy and Dangerous
Let’s say you’re stuck on an island and you only get one kind of food. Meat is a good choice, especially if you get to include organs like liver. The logic of this is simple: your body needs to take in certain nutrients to survive, and there’s no easier way to get the molecules for a functioning body than to simply consume another body.
In general, meat is quite healthy. It’s nutrient-rich and those nutrients are bio-available in a way that that they sometimes aren’t in plants. Our ancestors ate meat and thrived, while their cousins ate vegetables and starved. Vegetarianism in history has almost always been associated with ethical and religious views, rather than health. Even in famously vegetarian places like India and parts of China there is quite a lot of meat consumption.
On the flip-side there have been many primarily (or exclusively) carnivorous cultures, such as the Inuit, Chukotka, Maasai, Mongolian nomads, and Sioux. Of course, many of these groups have genetic adaptations to allow for their diets, and/or supplement their diets with vegetables here and there. The point is not that most people can be healthy on an all-meat diet (especially without organ meats), but that meat can be a good and healthy part of most people’s diets. We have some reason to suspect that fish meat is particularly good.
Kurzgesagt has a good, 9-minute video on the topic covering most of the same points:
As the video says, there are some risks to eating meat, as well as benefits. Many of these dangers are to individuals, and can be mitigated by choosing meat sources wisely and being careful in preparation, but some are societal and can only be effectively avoided through collective action (i.e. government).
Let’s go through some of the dangers of meat consumption and production:
Some meat is contaminated, by germs, by parasites, or by toxins. Unlike with vegetables, the sorts of microbes that feast on meat also tend to eat humans. Food inspection and proper cooking is a good solution in many cases, but is expensive to ensure, and also sometimes fails.
More collectively, meat markets and farms are hotbeds of disease. Novel diseases, such as COVID, bird flu, and SARS, have all been traced to meat markets in Asia.
To combat the rampant disease in factory farms, many animals are fed a regular supply of antibiotics. This is fueling the global antibiotic resistance crisis — evolving potent, drug-resistant bacteria.
Meats are often treated with preservatives or chemicals that are dangerous in themselves. Consumption of processed meat tends to go hand-in-hand with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
Finally, farming is a major source of pollution, and meat farming is particularly bad. The diseases and antibiotics mentioned above run off into groundwater along with feces and other dangerous chemicals. And let’s not forget that animal farming is one of the primary sources of greenhouse gasses.
Meat is Inefficient
While I’m on the topic of pointing out how bad meat is, let’s spend some time talking about efficiency. As it turns out, raising animals is usually harder than growing crops. This makes logical sense, as animals themselves need to eat. In some cases a herd of cattle or whatever may be able to live off of land that would otherwise be unable to grow crops that humans could eat. But in most cases we’re feeding livestock food that’s grown on land that could be used for direct-to-consumer crops. It’s simply less efficient to grow plants, feed those plants to animals, then eat the animals rather than eating the plants directly.
In other words: meat is a luxury. Historically it’s been associated with wealth; poorer people simply couldn’t afford to eat meat very often. And as a result of the immense gains in wealth over the span of the industrial revolution, the world has been producing more and more meat with time. If we collectively decided to eat much less meat, we’d be able to reclaim a massive amount of land, water, time, and calories.
Just look at that graph! Almost 40% of the planet’s habitable land is spent on animal farming (compared to ~1% spent on cities)! And yet, most of the food (whether measured in calories or protein) is coming from plants.
Plant-based agriculture isn’t as much of a winner when it comes to water use, with some farms/crops taking stupid amounts. But I think it’s still the case that animal-based foods are less efficient when it comes to water.
Meat Could be Efficient
If animals are so much more costly to farm than plants, why do we have domesticated livestock at all? Like, historically people were very poor. In the ancient past was it the case that farm animals were a luxury that basically nobody could afford because of material scarcity? Was meat exceedingly rare?
Not at all.
As mentioned earlier, animals like sheep and cows can live off of grassland. This includes natural prairie and other lands that would take an investment of effort to turn into farmland that grows meaningful quantities of crops. Absent that capital, food from herd animals can be cheaper per calorie than food from crops. Likewise, wild animals require no capital investment, and it’s far more efficient (per calorie) to hunt than to gather wild plants.
We can therefore model a U-shape in meat production per capita, then, as societies increase in wealth per capita. Poor societies (like those of our ancestors) had to rely on hunting and shepherding because they didn’t have the technology and/or labor to convert natural spaces into productive farms. Once the society is wealthier and has converted the land into farms, crops become the most efficient thing, making meat into a luxury. And then, if per-capita wealth gets high enough, people naturally demand enough meat that an increasing amount of land is devoted to livestock, despite the price.
Interestingly, this curve might be about to invert again, thanks to the development of high-quality meat substitutes. In just the last few years vegetarian protein options went from shaped tofu and mushroom burgers to actually delicious food in a variety of forms. Impossible burgers come with heme, the same protein that shows up in blood, thanks to a technology that’s under patent until 2032. Large fast-food chains such as Burger King, Dunkin’, Panda Express, Carl's Jr./Hardee's, KFC, and White Castle now feature vegetarian meals with faux-meat. And more products are coming down the pipe at increasingly affordable prices. There’s a good chance that 2023 will be the year of price-parity between meat and meat-substitutes, and prices will likely continue to fall after that.
Meanwhile, various labs around the world have been working towards “clean meat” — meat that’s grown by culturing cells in vitro. In theory this has the promise to be even more disruptive than plant-based products. Clean meat is real meat, after all, and could theoretically be made in a very efficient way that matches the taste and texture of traditional animal meat.
“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished… The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.”
- Winston Churchill
The main hurdle with lab-grown meat is that the stem cells that are used to grow the tissue are finicky and require a very precise growth medium. As it turns out, the best growth medium (basically regardless of species) involves a lot of Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), which is typically obtained when pregnant cows go to slaughter. This substance is prohibitively expensive, and good substitutes must be found before clean meat has a serious chance of being competitive.
Utopian Meat
The USA and most western governments heavily subsidize the meat industry. This is insane, as meat carries many negative externalities. In addition to much wider protections for non-human animals, I expect that insofar as Utopia does any livestock farming, those farms are taxed to compensate for pollution and disease risk.
Some farms may use permaculture, or other strategies to weave animals into farmland to reduce pests (and pesticides) and increase yields. Some of these methods may even be compatible with treating the animals compassionately.
Without being able to lean as much on cheap land and subsidies, meat (and eggs/dairy) is much scarcer in Utopia (and maybe non-existent). As a result, more emphasis is put on delicious vegetarian fare, often with meat-substitutes that bleed and share much of the same texture as real meat. Those with dietary restrictions that make meat especially healthy have products tailored to them, sometimes subsidized by public research and funding.
The average citizen of Utopia is healthier, as a result of having less processed meat in their diet and being exposed to fewer diseases like COVID and salmonella. More of the planet is covered by wild spaces like forests, and there are certainly no factory farms.