How should we interpret plant-based food sales as ethical vegans?
Several industry reports released in the last fortnight, concerning the onward march of the plant-based food sector, have generated some truly attention-grabbing headlines. There is no denying that the increase in products is great news for consumers who choose not to eat animal products some of the time, but as ethical vegans, are we celebrating a little too much?
“Europe and US could reach 'peak meat’ in 2025,” said the Guardian last month, while just this week Plant Based News ran with “Plant-Based Food Sales In US Exceeded $7 Billion In 2020, Finds New Report” and Vegconomist reported “The Vegetarian Butcher Launches TV Campaign, Says 80 Percent of Meat Could be Plant-Based by 2045”. All fantastic headlines and certainly cause for optimism when it comes to indicative market trends. Clearly, consumers are sending a message with their wallets that producers are hearing and responding to with enthusiasm.
The Guardian was reporting on a study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Blue Horizon Corporation, which has interests in many of the biggest names in alternative protein and plant-based meat substitutes, including Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and LiveKindly Co. The study, which looked at among other things market trends, feedback from industry experts and previous consumer surveys, forecast that Europe and North America would reach “peak meat” by 2025 at which point people would also start to consume less animal flesh. If this turns out to be true, it is hugely important because to date, and despite the growing popularity of veganism and plant-based lifestyles on social media and all the new vegan-friendly ranges being brought out by retailers, the number of animals killed per year has yet to reflect these trends.
The BCG / Blue Horizon report also predicted that based on advances in food technologies, the price of alternative meats would reach parity with animal protein in 2023, crossing another important hurdle on the road to widespread, mainstream adoption, while ‘nine out of 10 of the world’s favourite dishes – from pepperoni pizza to sushi – will have realistic alternatives by 2035’. Taste, texture and price were singled out as crucial for these predictions to come true, being the most important factors for consumers interested in shifting away from animal products.
We have to understand though that the report is a practical one concerning an industry founded on taste, aroma, texture, in other words, sensory experiences rather than intellectual ones. It is no secret that alternative proteins are specifically aimed at people who are transitioning away from eating animals every day, and as such should be viewed as important tools to make the change to full veganism quite literally more palatable.
Expense can be genuinely prohibitive depending on one’s situation, but ethically speaking it should not matter what our food tastes like, only that it is nutritionally complete - conversely, consider that we often say that killing animals to consume them is morally unjustifiable when we don’t need to do it to survive and thrive, and that people only do so for tradition and their taste buds. Therefore by our own argument, we don’t actually need food to taste subjectively ‘nice’, we only need to thrive on it, but it is naive to think that having horrible food would help the vegan cause at all and by extension non-human animals. It can also take a while to adjust to finding pleasure in lentils and tofu when we have been conditioned to desire animal products thanks to psychologically manipulative advertising and cultural normalisation.
As ethical vegans we shouldn’t feel too bad about encouraging consumption of plant-based protein as long as we are aware that we exist within a paradigm of green capitalism, which might have a very different agenda to ours as abolitionist vegans. The perfect example of this is KFC and other fast-food chains that have brought out vegan-friendly options in the last few years. KFC, which first launched its ‘Imposter burger’ in June 2019 and more recently brought it back for this year’s Veganuary, has been open about targeting flexitarians as well as tapping into the vegan buzz. Ira Dubinsky, innovation director at KFC UK and Ireland, said at the time of the 2019 launch:
"The Colonel was all about welcoming everyone to his table – now vegans, flexitarians and our fried chicken fans can all enjoy the taste of our Original Recipe together. We’ve worked hard to perfect the flavour and make a Vegan Burger the Colonel would be proud of. It’s the flavour of KFC, just with zero chicken."
Burger King has been more explicit about targeting flexitarians when denying that its Rebel Whopper, launched last year but cooked on the same grill as its other burgers, was ever marketed as suitable for vegans. According to the Independent, “Burger King has not advertised its Rebel Whopper as a vegan product, and says the dish is aimed at flexitarians – people who primarily eat a vegetarian diet but still sometimes consume meat and fish”. Interestingly, commenting on the impending launch of its truly vegan chicken ‘Royale’, Burger King’s CEO Alasdair Murdoch last month predicted that within ten years, half of its menu would be plant-based due to what he described as an “equal and opposite reaction” as more vegan-friendly options are added and the traditional animal-unfriendly alternatives are removed. Murdoch also revealed that “over time the amount of beef that we are selling as a proportion of our total sales is reducing.”
Flexitarians as we know are people who understand somewhat that the way in which we consume animals today is detrimental to the environment and to our personal and public health, with some awareness of the zoonotic origin of the current Covid-19 pandemic. They do not however hold the same ethical views as full-time, animal rights minded vegans - at best they are concerned about animal welfare. But can we really expect everyone to get there immediately? Very few of us were born vegan with a connection to the sentience of non-human animals.
None of this is to play down the importance of a changing food industry, only to say that we should never be complacent. We should enjoy the fruits of our work in changing hearts and minds, and point to alternatives as tools of transition especially when introducing friends and family to a life of causing less harm and fewer unnecessary deaths. But never stop there, our work is not done until people see beyond their culturally programmed speciesism. We all arrive at veganism in different ways, but to remain takes a combination of accepting all the positives and the overwhelming truth that it is the best way to reduce our impact on the planet and all the sentient beings with whom we share it.
It is incredibly exciting that we’re even talking about “peak meat” as being within our grasp, a huge milestone that was unthinkable even just a few years ago, and that 80 per cent of ‘meat’ could be plant-based within our lifetimes when before we would have expected later generations to see these goals achieved. And while we must never lose our focus while work remains to be done, regardless of whether or not people buying these products have made the ethical connection and accepted the abolitionist viewpoint or not, the key takeaway for us as advocates is that they are not just open to trying new things, but are actively choosing alternatives in the pursuit of change. Whether that’s for personal health, the prevention of future pandemics, to address the disproportionate impact of animal agriculture on our world, or indeed a growing unease at the way we treat animals.
As activists and advocates, the consumption of plant-based alternatives alone does not address cultural speciesism, so it falls to us to run with all the positivity and that desire for change of some kind and extend it to create conscious conversations about our broader relationship with animals. By all means, recommend food options and connect on how great they taste, but move the message along - imagine how powerful it would be to say that for however amazing something tastes, it doesn’t really matter because when all is said and done, and tasted, veganism is about ending of all forms of animal exploitation.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager at Surge.
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