Why the Meat Industry Does Not Need My Praise for Plant Alternatives

As an activist, I’m most interested in the hard work of transformative activism that I believe is vitally important to our movement and yet so often overlooked. This approach is beautifully realized in such books as Mark and Paul Engler’s This Is an Uprising. Transformative activism is the hard work of changing hearts and minds through mass movement building to impact entire systems and societies, not necessarily on the level of the individual. It’s unlikely you’ll find me trying to convert individuals to go vegan or adopt an animal rights position unless they are a specific person I am targeting: a person in a position of power to influence a whole system or a whole community. I’m also heavily interested in making allies in the media as they have the power to reach so many.

As a regular person, I’m happy anytime I see other people happy. Lately, I’ve seen many social media friends express their excitement and enthusiasm over the introduction of plant-based meat offerings at fast food chains and giant big box supermarkets. The rise in this plant-based sector is a sign that our activism is finally having an impact on society at large. I know that the activists are the unsung heroes here, even as I watch meat corporations take credit for it and the media characterize a few meat industry elites as the champions of this movement, perhaps because our consumer culture is so conditioned to making heroes out of the vapidly rich and powerful. The less GQ reality is that meat industry giants are just doing what they need to do to survive. They are making strategic business decisions to capitalize on the growing plant-based meat market, not out of some altruistic or moral desire to help animals, marginalized communities or the planet.

It makes for a dramatic media story to present a meat industry executive as having a change of heart and embracing the plant–based meat market. For some it also fulfills a fantasy that it is possible to convert even the most diehard animal exploiters to see the errors of their ways and redeem themselves. But the fact is that the same corporations that claim to be the champions of the plant-based meat movement are also hard at work trying to reverse even the most modest animal welfare protections. Much like the oil and gas industry spin doctors, they think they’re smarter than us, that they can deceive us with a greenwashing or humanewashing campaign here or there while they continue to force a miserable existence upon billions of animals and destroy millions of acres of rainforest at the same time. In my mind, trusting animal exploiters and planet destroyers is the worst mistake we could make.

This does not mean I cannot share in the celebration over the growth of plant-based meats. It just means that I maintain a healthy skepticism about the intentions of an industry that defends such common practices as the grinding up of millions of baby chicks as perfectly humane. Their pathological apathy and dehumanization of other species is still as disturbing as ever. While they are not praising their new sustainable plant–based meat offerings, they can be found in some remote part of the globe where industrialized animal products were never a part of the indigenous diet setting up animal factories and trying to get poor populations hooked on the Western diet. 

All this to state what is perhaps the obvious to some: their ambitions and practices are for the most part wildly out of step with our values and goals. However, it appears to be a lot less obvious that we need never be their cheerleaders. Instead we have far more important activism work to do. We must escalate our activities even more and get even more strategic to sustain this momentum. Meanwhile the market will do what it does, and we will influence it by doing the transformative work that only we the people have the power and vision to do. A huge thanks to every activist out there doing their thing, especially those who never get the recognition they deserve.