The Impossible Burger

Burger King has made the plant-based Impossible Whopper available at all its US locations, prompting me to visit a Burger King for the first time (and then, shortly after, the second time) in memory. White Castle and Red Robin are other establishments in which I have sampled Impossible-based burger-like creations. I am among those who wouldn't be able to tell, if I did not know, whether the Impossible versions are meat-based or not. Recently, I had a lunch at an old-school American-style diner that included a plant-based Beyond Burger on its menu, while also emphasizing (via a large sign) that its vegetable soup was vegetarian. Beyond Meat features an impressive array of professional athletes who serve as Beyond Ambassadors.

The revolution is underway. Plant-based pseudo-hamburgers will get tastier and tastier, and eventually, they will be cheaper (perhaps quite a bit cheaper) than meat burgers: feeding bushel after bushel of grain to livestock for many months to produce burgers will have a hard time competing with taking a tiny fraction of that grain and making the burger directly. (We are slowing the transition through policies that subsidize the production of grain.) There are some positive feedback mechanisms built-in, too. Start with a small vegan vanguard of environmentalists, animal welfare activists, and health-conscious consumers, use them to jumpstart an industry, induce quality to rise and prices to fall, and watch as the eating of traditional meat transforms into a practice that becomes socially suspect. No doubt there will still be traditionally-produced meat that is eaten, just as hunting has not disappeared, but it will become a niche behavior, and one that many parents will want to shield their children from.

And then there is the coming clean meat alternative...

Promoting Farm Transparency

The recent New York Times article by Matt Richtel that provoked the previous blog post notes the difficulties that researchers and health officials face in attempting to learn about farm conditions, even when there is evidence that those conditions are exacting a huge human toll in disease and death. There seems a lot to be said for full transparency on large-scale farms (or concentrated animal feeding operations, CAFOs). Why should the public have to rely on undercover footage (the collection of which is often illegal) to know what is happening on farms and slaughterhouses and other elements (e.g., transport) in the meat supply chain?

The recent exposure of activities at Fair Oaks Farms (a dairy) brought a pledge (see the 2:15 point of the founder's video response) to provide full video surveillance (with public access to the videos) of all farm areas where humans and non-human animals interact. A further pledge has been made (4:30 mark) to solicit frequent, unannounced visits to the farm by an animal welfare expert. Fair Oaks Farms is documenting their ongoing response here.

While it is too soon to know the long-term effectiveness of the reforms at Fair Oaks Farms, and while it may be that the dairy industry descends from unpardonable and ongoing original sins, why can't the video and unannounced audit reforms adopted by Fair Oaks become standard? Even if the only motive is to protect human health (as opposed to protecting the welfare of the farm animals themselves), there is a strong case for transparency in CAFOs.

Although a legal requirement for such transparency does not seem to be on the horizon in many places in the US -- witness those ag-gag laws -- private actions might spur the requisite reform (as in the Fair Oaks Farms case). Certification programs can add enhanced transparency requirements into their standards. Foundations or NGOs could subsidize the acquisition and maintenance of monitoring equipment. Other sorts of agricultural subsidies or benefits could be made contingent on farm transparency. Pressure could be brought on major purchasers (fast food outlets, grocery chains) to only deal with transparent suppliers. There's tons of room for a more radicalized transparency in the food system.

No one enjoys seeing the video evidence of cruel treatment of farm animals; but the easier it is to see it, the less there will be to see.

Antibiotic Administration to Farm Animals

Yesterday's New York Times features a superb front-page story by Matt Richtel about antibiotic resistance that passes to humans after originating from large quantities of antibiotics administered to farm animals; when people get ill from the resistant salmonella (or E. coli), multiple types of standard antibiotics are rendered useless. Maryn McKenna's 2017 book Big Chicken (subtitled "The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats") gave prominence to the story, and much detail. I had thought that the routine use of antibiotics on industrial farms came from the need to control disease in the terrible conditions on those farms, together with the breeding of animals with traits (such as fast growth) that are economically valuable but bring a health cost. This does seem to be the case, but I learned from Big Chicken that widespread administration of antibiotics to farm animals originated after it was discovered that the antibiotics themselves served as growth promoters. The use of antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock is now (since 2006) banned in the EU, and contravenes FDA guidelines in the US. (The World Health Organization also has weighed in.) There is some evidence that farm use of antibiotics (or antimicrobials) has been declining in the US and in the EU in recent years, though in the US, purchases of antibiotics for farm animals far exceed quantities purchased for human use.

Richtel's article highlights the difficulties that researchers and public health workers have in accessing farms and farm-level data, even when evidence points to farms as the source of outbreaks of resistant diseases in humans. The lack of access to farms risks prolongation of such outbreaks -- a high price to pay to allay concerns that some farms might have their reputations unfairly besmirched.