Before we dive in, I want to ask a couple of questions. First, how many of you are vegetarian or vegan? Okay, a few - around maybe 5%. If we asked all US adults, it would be around 5, maybe 10%. Now, how many of you have seen at least one of the following: a video of animal cruelty on factory farms, a documentary or news report on the environmental harms of animal agriculture, or a scientific article on the public health issues such as the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed? How many? Okay, almost everyone. Probably over 95%. Now, when I see that jump from 5%, I worry that I've made a huge mistake. Full disclosure, I'm a vegan. (Laughter) I'm even a preachy vegan, who tells everyone I meet about the problems of animal farming because I really do think it's one of the most important issues of our time. But my mistake, and the mistake of other food advocates, has been trying to fix these issues solely by telling you personally to go vegan, vegetarian, or to reduce your meat consumption. We need a bigger, better solution for our broken food system. And you might wonder if our country has at least switched from factory farming to more humane practices. I grew up in rural Texas. I spent a lot of time around farmed animals lounging on green pastures. Back then, I thought all farmed animals lived that way. Unfortunately, according to USDA data, over 99% of farmed animals live on factory farms. The situation is dire. There are over 100 billion animals in the global food system. Many of them are confined in tiny cages, barely larger than their own bodies. Their beaks and tails are cut off without anesthetic. They suffer, day and night, from infectious diseases and intense artificial selection that has them growing so much meat that they collapse under their own weight. Animal farming pollutes our land and water, endangering the health and economies of rural Americans. It's responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all planes, cars, trains and other transportation combined. Eighty percent of all US antibiotics are fed to farmed animals, leading to dangerous, incurable human diseases. Finally, animal farming is just incredibly expensive. It receives $38 billion in subsidies every year from the US government, and it sucks up massive amounts of natural resources that should be going to help people in need. I think we can all agree that this is an urgent social issue that we desperately need to fix. And by "we," I don't just mean vegetarians. I mean everyone who cares about these problems. Finding a solution to this seemingly intractable issue is also a fascinating intellectual problem,
one we can tackle with the tools of Effective Altruism ... their growing mindset in charity, business and politics of using evidence-based research to find and implement the most effective solutions to the world's biggest problems. The most powerful tool we have is innovation. The amazing thing is that we don't have to give up meat, dairy, or eggs to end animal farming. Think about it: what's meat? It's fat, protein, water and trace minerals. All these ingredients are readily available in the plant kingdom. They're just not assembled in the architecture of meat. That's what a cow does. But a cow also does a lot of stuff we don't need. She grows hair, teeth, bones. She walks around; she breathes, thinks, and feels. These extra processes mean that for every 10 calories of plant-based food we feed a farmed animal, we get around 1 calorie of meat in return. Even with the nutrient animal products are most known for, protein, for every 10 grams of plant-based, we get, at most, 2 grams of animal-based. So what if we assembled these ingredients ourselves with a more efficient, ethical process? That's the approach of companies like Beyond Meat, Hungry Planet, and Impossible Foods. They've already succeeded in making a beef burger made from plants. Many consumers can't even tell the difference. Today, they're just perfecting that product and scaling up the process to lower costs and widen distribution. In fact, the Beyond Burger pictured here is already available in Mississippi. But let's be cautious. What if consumers are really picky? What if they don't just want something that tastes like animal meat, but something that is actually made from animal cells? Well, there's good news. Scientists and chefs have been working on so-called clean meat, real meat made without the food safety and ethical cost of animal slaughter. To do this, they take a small sample of cells from a living animal and place those cells in a cultivator, which looks like one of the big tanks at a beer brewery. Inside, the cells mix with the nutrients they need to grow in the same process that happens inside an animal's body, and voila! You can have your cow and eat beef too. (Laughter) But you might be thinking, "Not all beneficial technologies are widely adopted, right? So what if something goes wrong? What if the technology is fully developed, but perceived as just another food for vegetarians? Or what if an irresponsible company lets their product get contaminated, leading to a cascade of negative press that cripples the industry?" With conventional meat, we see contamination scandals all the time, but for a young industry like clean meat, it could be fatal. It's like self-driving cars, where the industry needs to be especially careful about collisions, despite having an overall better safety record. So what social change will we see on our way to an animal-free food system? The biggest one is a shift beyond the individual and towards institutional change. Like I said earlier, advocates have thus far focused heavily on one-by-one diet change, but I believe we'll see the biggest changes happen with changes to institutions like businesses, government, nonprofits and society as a whole. There's a lot of evidence that this strategy is more effective. Last year, I was at a protest, calling for a restaurant chain to reform its animal-welfare policies, just basic stuff, like choosing healthier breeds of chickens, or having windows in the chicken sheds. A pedestrian walked up and thanked me profusely for helping these poor animals. I told him he was welcome to join us, as bystanders sometimes do, and he said, "Oh no, no, no. I can't. I'm not a vegetarian." I insisted that he was welcome to join us without being vegetarian. We were just calling for better treatment for these animals. But he was unconvinced. He saw vegetarianism as a prerequisite to helping farmed animals because advocates have conflated the two for so long. If we had, instead, used an institutional framing, that bystander might have joined us and maybe become vegetarian along the way. This strategy also helps people avoid what psychologists call "the collapse of compassion," the feeling of apathy that comes when we encounter a big problem without clearly seeing the big solution. The institutional framing puts that solution, changing society as a whole, front and center in our messaging. This strategy is also well-evidenced by historical social movements, which is what I spend most of my time researching. Virtually no movements - from environmentalism, children's rights, antislavery, feminism to antiwar movements - have succeeded with the heavy, individual focus that we see in the farmed-animal movement. Consumer advocacy like boycotts have succeeded when used as tools for institutional change, but failed when treated as an end goal. We need to learn from the past. The second big change is a shift beyond opposition to factory farming alone and towards opposition to animal farming as whole. There's a lot of evidence for this strategy too. First, numerous investigations have shown that so-called humane farms are rarely humane in practice. The most picturesque farm I've ever been on was an award-winning California egg farm. But because of the farm's natural and organic policies, they didn't vaccinate the birds or give them antibiotics, like factory farms do. This led to atrocious health. I saw many cases of Marek's, a highly contagious disease that often leads to blindness and missing eyes; fluid belly, some birds with over a pound of fluid buildup inside their less than five-pound bodies; fungal infections; lice on almost all of them; and many birds crippled by eggs that had gotten stuck inside them on the way out. I've been dismayed that the reality of these farms is nearly as bad as factory farming. While reduction in suffering is something we should applaud, and it can be a step towards abolition, the unmitigated suffering is still a moral catastrophe. Second, simply the idea that there are humane ways to raise and kill animals for food is a huge roadblock, even if you just oppose factory farming. Seventy-five percent of people think they usually eat meat from animals who were treated humanely, but as we saw earlier, less than 1% of farmed animals actually live on non-factory farms. That's crazy, right? Why are consumers so confused? Well, when we eat animals, there's a cognitive dissonance that claws at us because deep down, we care about animals too. What seems to happen is that our subconscious protects us from this dissonance by creating a psychological refuge. It tells us that, actually, everything is okay, that farmed animals are treated well, even when the facts point in the opposite direction. This mistaken belief protects us from the conflict between our values and our behavior. And the misleading labels on animal products, like pictures of green pastures on cartons of factory farm eggs, exacerbate this issue. Finally, these farms are just too expensive to feed this hungry planet. So-called humane animal products are already several times the normal price. Many of us just can't afford that. And the demand on natural resources is just too much for this planet to bear, especially when we can get the same foods from more sustainable sources. Fortunately, the future is bright. Today, we're at an inflection point, where the moral reasons to change our food system are very compelling. Technology is on its way and excellent alternatives are already here, and advocates are wising up to more impactful strategies. It's incredibly empowering to have this wealth of evidence available, from history, psychology and elsewhere, to analyze using the effective altruism perspective. Ultimately, that evidence suggests that we can achieve a truly humane food system if we strive towards the end of animal farming. And public opinion is already a lot further along on this than you might think. Forty-seven percent of US adults already say they support a ban on slaughter houses. As we transition, as we align our food system with our values, we're going to see a sweeping change in the relationship between humans and the other inhabitants of this planet. Once we're no longer eating animals three times a day, we'll see a huge relief in cognitive dissonance that frees our conscience to expand our moral circle to not just farmed animals, but other populations like dogs and cats in shelters, animals used in circuses and entertainment, and the vast number of wild animals who also need our help. Today, we're laying the foundation for future social movements just as social movements of the past laid the bedrock we now stand on. Richard Branson predicted that the food system will be animal-free in just 30 years. It might take a little longer than that, but it's clear that huge change is coming. You can stand on the right side of history and play a role in this exciting movement, whether it's by starting a business like a local restaurant or a clean-meat company, becoming an activist, making a donation, or simply sharing content on social media. You can, of course, also participate as a conscious consumer, but keep in mind that your own diet choice is just one of many ways to have an impact. This is a time of unbridled excitement and opportunity, as we look ahead at one of the next great social movements. Humanity's moral circle will continue to expand, but only if people like you and me take hold. Thank you. (Applause)
