Meeting Meat-Eaters Halfway

My breaded schabowy “pork” cutlet arrives in a cloud of savory aromas. I’m ready to dig in the moment the waitress sets the plate in front of me, yet will myself to wait patiently as she distributes meals to the rest of my family. Soon our table is heavy with kiełbasa, minced pork cutlets, and deep-fried fish. It all smells meaty and delicious.

We are dining at Lokal Vegan Bistro, a small restaurant in the center of Warsaw, Poland, the city of my youth. All the dishes are vegan versions of the traditional Polish fare I grew up eating. Here the kiełbasa is made of soy, “pork” cutlets are, in fact, zucchini and millet, and the “chicken” is seitan. I have to admit: I’m feeling rather impressed by the apparent changes in Poland’s culinary culture. The country of my childhood was a place where the rule of pork was challenged only by beef, veal, and chicken. As a kid, I downed tons of meat. But Warsaw today is considered one of the top cities in the world for vegan eating — in 2018, the HappyCow guide awarded it seventh place, right after Tel Aviv and Los Angeles. These days, wherever you go in Warsaw, you stumble upon vegan restaurants serving cheap and mouthwatering fares, and supermarket shelves are packed with creative meat and dairy substitutes.

I was all but convinced that, in Poland, the tide was changing in favor of plant-based eating. In fact, Warsaw (with a population of almost 1.8 million) boasts 47 vegan restaurants to New York’s 64. But meat consumption in Poland is actually climbing, not falling.¹ Between 2012 and 2018, the average Pole added over 17 extra pounds of meat to their yearly diet, and beef consumption shot up by 37 percent. Somehow, despite the vegan abundance, Poland is sinking more deeply into its meat-hooked culture.

Poland may be an extreme case, but it’s certainly not unique. Even though we seem inundated with vegan everything — vegan memes, vegan cookbooks, vegan celebrities — meat consumption is going up all over the world. Global meat consumption is expected to increase 73 percent over 2010 levels by 2050.² A large part of this upward trend is driven by developing countries, such as China and India, but western appetites for steaks and sausages are also on the rise. While data is still forthcoming, experts expect 2018 to have been a historic year for American meat-eating, exceeding 222 pounds per person per year.³ Appetites are high even in progressive Scandinavia: between 1990 and 2017, the average consumption of meat in Sweden went up by 41 percent.⁴

That’s all bad news. On the one hand, there are the health issues. Dozens of studies have revealed that a penchant for animal protein, and for red and processed meats in particular, may lead to cardiovascular problems, cancer, diabetes, and shortened life spans.⁵ A 2017 study from the University of Oxford showed that if all humans went vegan, each year a staggering 8.1 million deaths could be avoided⁶ — equivalent to most of the population of Switzerland being spared by the Grim Reaper.

On the other hand, there is the ethical side of meat-eating. Just go to YouTube, check out “If Slaughterhouses Had Glass Walls,” narrated by Paul McCartney, and you will see what I mean (I admit I myself can’t manage to watch this video to the very end). Each year about nine billion animals are slaughtered for food in US alone (the vast majority of them chickens)⁷ — that’s 367 times the human population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas combined.

Last but not least, our appetites for sausages and burgers spell trouble for the environment. If we were truly serious about preventing climate change, we should all go vegetarian as of yesterday — or, even better, vegan. That move, in theory rather simple (just choose a hummus sandwich instead of a pastrami one, and so on), would have massive consequences for greenhouse gas emissions; it would be the equivalent of having global transportation disappear in an instant.⁸ Animals (especially ruminants) are simply not good converters of feed into human food — they “waste” the energy on living. One acre of legumes can provide us with 20 times more protein than one acre devoted to beef production.⁹ The list of environmental woes connected to our love for meat is devastatingly long. From 2000 to 2010, more than three-quarters of the world’s deforestation was associated with the needs of agriculture.¹⁰ A large share of biodiversity loss can be traced to livestock. You get the picture.

Despite all this data, and despite the mounting calls from NGOs, governments, and the Leonardo DiCaprios of the world, humanity is not going vegan. Not in Warsaw, not in New York, and not in London.

But despite all this data, and despite the mounting calls from NGOs, governments, and the Leonardo DiCaprios of the world, humanity is not going vegan. Not in Warsaw, not in New York, and not in London. In the UK, just slightly over three percent of people are vegetarian, and about one percent are vegan.¹¹ In the United States, the number of meat avoiders is so tiny that the executive director of the Harris Interactive Service Bureau called vegans and vegetarians “a blip on the demographic radar.” We may talk about ditching meat, but we rarely follow through. Almost one-third of Germans have considered reducing their meat consumption but done nothing about it. Our current strategies to turn the world away from meat are obviously not working well, if at all. Telling people to simply give up their steaks, hams, and Sichuan chickens has not led to any major changes in our diets. Meat-eating is not like cigarette smoking or sunscreen use — two health issues in which public awareness campaigns had favorable outcomes. Consumption of animal protein is an ethical problem with deep roots in both biology and culture, and if you mishandle it, it can easily backfire. To succeed — and for the sake of our health and our planet, we must succeed — we should reverse-engineer why we love meat so much and then use that knowledge to draft a new meat-reduction strategy that would make people feel included and proud, not alienated and judged.

1.

One commonly cited reason for why humans can’t let go of meat is that we’ve evolved to crave it. There is a lot of truth to this statement, but people are not carnivores. Certain animals, like lions, need meat to survive because their bodies can’t obtain some vitamins from plants. But humans are omnivores, meaning we can digest meat, but can also function well without it. Our canine teeth are not proof that we need to dig into animal flesh on a regular basis. Most mammals have canine teeth, including many herbivorous ones; the true meat-eating teeth are carnassials, and we simply don’t have them.

And yet we do have biological reasons to lust after meat. When our ancestors first started eating animals about 2.5 million years ago, their diets were poor in calories and protein. By comparison, meat was essentially a wonder food: loaded with fat, amino acids, and vitamins — and so our taste buds evolved to long for it: the texture of fat, the taste of salt, the complexity of umami. It was a survival technique: stuffing stomachs with chunks of zebra (or particularly sweet fruits) meant staving off starvation. But as with sugar, our penchant for animal protein is no longer an advantage. Our priorities have changed. We don’t just want to avoid hunger; we want to live healthy lives that extend deep into retirement. Meat can lead to health problems later in life, problems that didn’t concern our ancestors, like diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

But the fact is, for better or worse, we have evolved to crave meat. A necessary first step, then, on the road to global reducetarianism — to reduce consumption of animal protein rather than cutting it out completely — is to increase the availability of products to replace the pork sausages and chicken wings our taste buds yearn for. That’s the part Poland got right. In 2017, the global meat substitute market was worth $4 billion, and it’s expected to balloon to $6.5 billion by 2026.¹² New products pop up wherever you look, and it’s not just the old standbys soy and seitan. Scientists and producers alike are constantly on the lookout for new sources of protein to replace the animal ones. Duckweed, pea protein, lupin, and oyster mushrooms are just a few of the newcomers. Several companies have even taken up genetically modifying yeast to “brew” gelatin, eggs, and milk. In a process similar to making beer, they feed sugar to yeast so that the microbes secrete desired proteins into the growth medium. In a few years, we may start seeing such yeast-made eggs and milk on supermarket shelves.

Then there is “clean meat,” previously known as “lab-grown meat” (and possibly soon to be renamed again as “craft meat”). This substitute is made up of muscle and fat cells grown outside the animal; from a biological perspective, it’s identical to the cells inside the average cow or chicken. Although it’s been just five years since scientists from Maastricht University revealed the first cultured beef burger (I was lucky to catch a whiff as it cooked in London, which was mouthwatering), the technology has already come a long way. In 2016, the first cultured meatballs cost $18,000 per pound¹³; the 2013 burger cost over $1 million per pound.¹⁴ And in 2018, New Age Meats, a Silicon Valley startup, let journalists taste the first cultured pork sausage. Cost? $216 each. That may still be a lot, but the company managed to bring the price tag down from $2,500 per sausage in just a month,¹⁵ and hopes to soon achieve $23 per pound. In the near future, our pets, too, may expect their treats to be lab-grown: a company called Wild Earth is working on cultured mice for cats. With many wealthy of the world, from Sergey Brin to Peter Thiel, investing in clean meat, the products may hit the market in just a couple of years. Even traditional meat processors have started to invest in cultured meat, recognizing that it could make a great alternative to conventionally raised burgers or steaks.

But even if we do get perfect meat substitutes within the next few years, that doesn’t mean that people will automatically switch, or even that most of us will. In Germany, a country with an impressive abundance of delicious meat alternatives, only 11 percent of people have ever purchased any of those options.¹⁶ Simply put, conventional meat is about far more than our taste buds: it’s deeply rooted in our culture too.

2.

There might be a bit of a Catch-22 situation with clean meat. Anthropologist Nick Fiddes argues, quite convincingly, that we value conventional meat precisely because it involves hunting animals, not in spite of it. To get a steak, you need to kill a living being, which shows your power, your might. You, human, are the king of the jungle. Getting a piece of zebra requires more courage and strength than does gathering a handful of berries, so hunting can function as costly signaling — showing off your bravery to the others in your tribe. Even the blood itself matters. Across the globe, many cultures believe that drinking the blood of another creature gives us its powers. In the West, champion boxers used to be fed rare steaks before their prize fights in the hope that doing so would boost their performance; the bloodier the steak, the better. Producers of meat alternatives are slowly catching on to the idea that the bloodiness of meat may be part of its allure. That’s why we now have the bleeding Impossible Burger, for which genetically engineered yeast churn out plant-based heme molecules.

Until very recently, most of us had to kill the animal ourselves, whether it meant hunting a boar in the forest or wringing the neck of a backyard chicken. And even despite the convenience of plastic-wrapped supermarket meat, many people still hunt. In France (my current home country), as many as 1.2 million people are active hunters¹⁷ — that’s more than one in every 50 inhabitants over the age of 15. In the fall, I can hear the shots from my village house almost every day.

The attraction of hunting, and of meat itself, also stems from its connection to wealth. English law used to define hunting as an activity reserved for landowners. If a destitute peasant attempted to kill a hare, he could have been accused of poaching. Throughout much of human history, meat was a food for the rich, with the poor rarely seeing it on their plates. In the Middle Ages, only right after the Black Death did the suddenly sparse population have more access to beef and pork. This connection, meat equals wealth, got so entrenched in our collective human mind that it also became part of the American Dream. Back in 1781, the Journal of the House of Lords reported that even American prisoners ate more meat than the king’s troops¹⁸ — half a pound more a week, to be precise. And when immigrants settled on US soil, eating a steak breakfast each and every day was a way to honor one’s newfound wealth.

Meat is, to a large extent, about identity and belonging; it has been for millennia.

From the time our ancestors were scavenging and hunting on the African savanna, eating animals was linked not only to wealth and power, but also to masculinity. It wasn’t the women who chased the prey — it was the men. They came home with the energy-dense, scarce, and oh-so-craved food. This association between meat and manliness is still powerful today. In one experiment, researchers asked a group of college students to match food words such as beef, pork, hamburger, corn, peas, and broccoli with either male names (John, Robert, Paul) or female ones (Joan, Claire, Mary) and measured to the millisecond how fast they managed the task. As you may have guessed, when meat was paired with a male name, the volunteers reacted faster than when it was paired with a female one.

Hegel once wrote: “The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid.”¹⁹ Nowadays this message is still prevalent everywhere from advertising to magazine articles to comedy shows. In one episode of Seinfeld, Jerry goes on a date to a steakhouse, but for health reasons orders a salad — a decision he seems to instantly regret. He worries about being taken for a wimp.

Yet the meat-identity link reaches even beyond masculinity, power, and wealth. Throughout history, meat was also the food for celebrations and sharing. Since it usually came in large packages that spoiled fast, it was perfect for divvying up with family and friends. And since it was a rare treat, meat-eating came to be associated with festivities — hence the Thanksgiving turkey and the Sunday roast. “We feed not only our appetite but also our desire to belong. Foods express social values, and by consuming them we acknowledge a shared set of meanings,” Fiddes wrote.²⁰ No food is more potent in this regard than meat.

3.

Since meat is so powerfully linked with identity, giving it up means renouncing membership in the meat-eating group. That’s one reason vegetarians and vegans might rub people the wrong way. It’s as though they were rejecting the tribe itself. When someone gives up meat, it seems to irk us far more than when someone gives up sugar or gluten. This phenomenon even got a name in scientific circles: “vegaphobia.” In one study, vegans scored a lower overall evaluation from omnivores than did homosexuals, atheists, and immigrants.²¹ Only drug addicts fared worse. As many as one-quarter of vegans reported that their friends decreased contact with them after they came out as vegan. Admittedly, things have improved for vegetarians in recent years. Over 70 years ago, Hyman Barahal, the chief of the Psychiatry Section of Mason General Hospital, wrote an article for Psychiatric Quarterly he aptly titled “The Cruel Vegetarian,” claiming that meat avoiders were secretly sadistic.²²

A central reason behind the annoyance with meat-avoiders has to do with cognitive dissonance — an unpleasant state we experience when we hold dear mutually inconsistent beliefs like “I love animals” and “I love meat,” for instance. Facing a vegetarian can remind us of this inconsistency, activating cognitive dissonance. Take the reactions of passers-by to the ads placed by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in subway stations across Toronto in the summer of 2018. The posters featured a cow, a pig, a chicken, and a lobster, all portrayed with the words: “I’m me, not meat. See the individual. Go vegan.”²³ The ads were gore-free and quite cute, yet many commuters still got angry. They called the campaign “guilt shaming” and brought up the right to “personal choice.” One said: “I think it’s forcing other people’s opinions on others. I don’t agree with it.” Somehow, though, when watchmakers or juice producers display their ads and “force their opinions” on the urbanites, no one comments. Orange juice ads simply don’t activate our cognitive dissonance.

We want to believe we are ethical people. If anything even implicitly suggests that our moral stance is not perfect, we bristle. To protect ourselves from the irksome feeling of cognitive dissonance, we employ a variety of psychological techniques. Experiments show that eating meat makes us think of animals as stupid and emotionally limited: it’s enough to place beef in front of people to make them change their perception of a cow for the worse.²⁴

Cognitive dissonance and the techniques we employ to deactivate it are the reason why ads like those posted by PETA in Toronto don’t cause a massive influx into the vegetarian ranks. It’s also the reason vegan propaganda rarely works.²⁵ Instead, it can actually backfire, making people commit more deeply to meat-eating. Psychologists call this phenomenon “the spreading of alternatives.” Imagine you’re in the market for a car. You can’t decide between an SUV and a sporty two-seater. You keep analyzing all the pros and cons, hesitating, until one day you finally make up your mind: you buy the sports car. Now, if your neighbor comes home the next day with a new SUV, you are likely to try to undermine their choice because you’ve already committed to the two-seater, so you want to feel good about your own decision. You make the alternative appear less viable: you tell yourself how much more gas the SUV burns, you congratulate yourself on a more pro-climate choice, and you think how much fun sports cars are. You become quite anti-SUV, in fact.

A particularly interesting (if a bit disconcerting) example of such spreading of alternatives in action came from a study on bug-killing. People who thought they had thrown insects into a grinder went on to kill even more bugs, becoming desensitized to killing.²⁶ Brock Bastian, a University of Melbourne psychologist who has conducted multiple experiments on cognitive dissonance in meat-eating, believes that the pressure to make a different choice also applies to our love of steaks and sausages: the more vegans and vegetarians insist that we ditch meat, the more we dig in our heels and stick with our initial decision.²⁷

Simply thinking of vegans or vegetarians may be enough to threaten our egos and our belief that we are ethical people, activating cognitive dissonance. In one experiment conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, over 250 students were divided into two groups. The first group was asked to reflect on how they would be seen by vegetarians.²⁸ They were told, for instance, to complete a phrase: “If they saw what I normally eat, most vegetarians would think I am. . . .’’ Afterward, they were told to rate vegetarians on traits such as: kind–mean, dirty–clean, humble–conceited. The other student group, meanwhile, did the tasks in reverse: they started with ratings, and then reflected on what vegetarians might think of them. And as the researchers had predicted, being randomly assigned to first muse about vegetarians’ judgments inclined meat-eaters to dislike vegetarians and even to see them as dirty, judgmental, and stupid.

This cognitive dissonance–induced vegaphobia could explain what happened with veganism in Poland, and in general why many current strategies to reduce global meat consumption are not working. Having a plethora of vegan products and restaurants is not enough. In fact, it likely creates a dichotomy of us versus them, urbanite hipsters against “normal” people, entrenching the “normal” people even more in their carnivorous ways.

Reducing the amount of meat in our diets is necessary for the sake of our planet. But cognitive dissonance surrounding the consumption of animals means we must tread carefully when telling people to change their ways. We need to stop thinking in black-and-white terms of morals and ethics, and give omnivores a safe alternative.

4.

Some NGOs are now moving away from their previous calls for strict vegetarianism and starting to encourage flexitarianism or reducetarianism instead. The logic is convincing: if you persuade 10,000 people to go meatless, say, one day per week, the overall effects on animals and the environment will be larger than if you persuaded 10 people to go plant-based all the time — and it’s so much easier to do than taking the plunge into veganism. The departure from the previous polarization of viewpoints on meat-eating and vegetarianism is laudable. Yet even this strategy, in its current form, may not be enough.

Meat is, to a large extent, about identity and belonging; it has been for millennia. Right now, only two opposing identities are related to the consumption of meat: you either eat it and are an omnivore, or you don’t eat it and are a vegetarian. Even research psychologists tend to throw all steak-and-burger lovers into one basket. But meat-eaters are not all equal: some cram beef or chicken at almost every meal; others just peck at a few ounces of animal protein per week. The latter are either overlooked or treated with suspicion. They are not real vegetarians, but are not real meat-lovers either. If you reduce your meat consumption, don’t expect to get applauded — most likely you will get judged by both vegetarians and carnivores. That must change.

Pride is a better motivator than guilt.

We need to create a strong reducetarian identity so that people can feel like they belong to a community of like-minded people. Many Americans may already be reducetarians, albeit perhaps unaware of the label. In a recent survey, two out of three people claimed to be eating less beef, poultry, or pork.²⁹ In the United Kingdom, 29 percent of respondents said they had reduced their meat consumption.³⁰

Reducetarians should feel proud of their efforts — not ashamed of being neither here nor there, neither vegetarian nor meat-lover. Psychology proves that pride is a better motivator than guilt. And so reducetarians should come out of their closets, and this includes self-proclaimed vegetarians who actually snack on meat from time to time (some studies show that 60 percent of vegetarians may belong in this category). They could show others that meat-eating is not a black-and-white issue, that it’s okay to still crave it from time to time, while encouraging people to try more plant-based foods. Describing your struggles can make it easier for other people to identify with you, to learn from your experience. It prompts conversations, not fights. What’s more, psychology teaches us that such self-disclosure actually improves relationships and helps people get closer.

Reducetarians should also feel proud that their approach is a thoughtful, open-minded one. You don’t just jump onto the vegetarian bandwagon of “never” or the carnivorous one of “because that’s the way things are.” You have to actually give meat-eating a thought, consider the implications, and evaluate each meal individually. My husband, a reducetarian who has cut down his beef, pork, and chicken consumption by about 99 percent, still eats meat on special occasions. He does so wherever he thinks that the benefits are so great that he is okay with the costs (like trying Kobe beef when visiting Japan) — but he never eats mindlessly.

By emphasizing habits and turning the focus away from ethical issues, a reducetarian philosophy would also help us avoid the “kill more bugs” effect of spreading alternatives — there would just be less cognitive dissonance involved in general. What’s more, as Brock Bastian believes, reducetarianism has a chance to work because it’s more about “coulds” than “shoulds.” He argues: “In psychology we always say: never use the word ‘should.’ It’s a basic principle of the cognitive-behavioral therapy. Instead, replace it with ‘could.’ Reducetarianism is a bit like saying: ‘you could reduce your meat consumption’ versus ‘you should stop eating meat.’ It opens up that possibility for people to make up their own minds.”

There are many ways in which to go reducetarian, yet research shows that it’s cognitively easier if you are quite specific about your attempts. Say yes to “I won’t eat chicken” or “I’ll skip meat on weekday lunches” and no to a vague “I’ll try.” It doesn’t really matter, though, what approach you choose. You can try Meatless Mondays, Meatless Sundays, or Meatless rainy Tuesday afternoons. You can also simply make your portions smaller (that’s what sociologists call “sustainability by stealth”). Use a smaller plate for your meaty dishes and bigger ones for your veggies. Portion reduction could also work as a general strategy for more climate-friendly restaurants and cafeterias. In one experiment conducted in three locations of a major restaurant chain in the Netherlands, unbeknownst to the customers, portion sizes of meat were reduced by about 12 percent while the servings of vegetables were doubled. And no one noticed.³¹ Not only were there no complaints whatsoever, but customer satisfaction with the restaurant didn’t stray from normal.

Would reducetarianism be enough, though? For now, yes. Not only would the environmental impacts of our diets be instantly lowered, but our health would benefit too. A recent study has shown that going vegan for as little as 48 hours already improves metabolism, lowers triglycerides, and boosts blood sugar regulation. And then there is the financial benefit. In the United States alone, the economic benefits of reducetarianism would mean $200 billion more in the state coffers.³²

Bastian believes that once a new ethical normal — such as reducetarianism — becomes ingrained in the culture, and once people open their minds to talking about meat in the first place, things may start snowballing, leading to a large, sudden change. In other words: once most of us are reducetarians, a mass switch to vegetarianism can actually happen. Research confirms that people tend to radicalize their diets, inching from semi-vegetarianism to vegetarianism to veganism. But we have to start the conversation somewhere.

So let’s start talking. Let’s be open about both our efforts to reduce consumption and our cravings for meat that sometimes even the best substitutes may not be able to satisfy. Let’s take judgments and black-and-white thinking out of the discussion. Let’s honor the history and biology of why humans want to eat meat. And let’s allow ourselves to feel proud for reducing our meat consumption, even if the first steps are small.