Veganism, Year Sixteen: We're Now Important Enough for the Culture Warriors to Attack Us
Sixteen years and six days ago, I published a Dorf on Law column announcing that I had become a vegan. Since that day, I have faithfully published my yearly veganniversary columns (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 plus followup, 2019 plus followup, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, and the original announcement in 2008 plus followup). What to say this year?
I begin by giving myself permission to take a victory lap. I will lay out the context of this quote below, but I cannot wait any longer to copy and paste these words from last year's veganniversary post: "Besides, do we really think that the right-wing culture warriors will leave lab-grown meat alone?" Is it immodest to say: "Nailed it"? If so, who cares? Nailed it!! Even better, one of the culture warriors spearheading the anti-lab-grown meat attack is none other than my own former governor and (indirect) boss, Meatball Ron DeSantis. Some things are just soooo delicious (like vegan food).
Again, I will fill in those details and add more discussion about lab-grown meat later in this column. Before getting there, however, I will offer a political observation. The flailing response from Donald Trump and his Republican minions to Vice President Kamala Harris's emergence as the prohibitively likely Democratic presidential nominee has run the gamut from bluntly racist ("She's DEI!!") to predictably sexist ("Her laff is off-putting!" "She slept her way to the top!") to blatantly false ("She's never done anything!" "The border crisis is her fault!") to simply lazy ("She's more of a socialist than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren combined"). None of that has dented a suddenly joyful Democratic campaign, it appears. But what was less predictable (not as odd as the "she hates plastic straws" line, but close) was the right's claim that Harris is going to ban red meat!!
To be clear, that is false. To be even more clear, I have to add: If only!! But alas, as one news report put it: "The vice president has previously signaled her support for changing dietary guidelines to recommend decreasing consumption" of red meat. Guidelines. This simply aligns Harris with decades of near unanimity among cardiologists, among others, but that hardly makes her one of my crowd. Of course, now that Republicans view medical expertise itself as disqualifying, there is no point in making that argument.
On a positive note, I feel reasonably safe in predicting that Harris is highly unlikely to be pulled into "neutralizing" these attacks by, say, holding a fundraiser at the biggest rib joint in Georgia. After all, when Michael Dukakis responded to the "soft on defense" attacks from Republicans in 1988 by setting up a photo op in a tank, that did not go well (understatement). Similarly, John Kerry's 2004 effort to seem macho by being pro-gun led him to stage a hunting trip, with similar embarrassing results. I could be wrong, but Harris seems too smart to let Ted Cruz and Sean Hannity set her agenda.
And it certainly makes sense that Cruz is the one who decided to make this his attack line. Admittedly, he is doing better than his fellow fake-folksy Republican colleague, the Oxford educated Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, who did his own bit of flailing this week when he said on Fox News that Harris is a "ding-dong" and a "loon." (Kennedy even claimed that polling proved that voters think she's a ding-dong.) In any case, Cruz is so used to lying and slandering people without evidence that he could not help but repeat the litany of baseless attacks on Harris for supposedly wanting to take away people's gasoline powered cars and their guns, to say nothing of banning their "steaks and cheeseburgers."
Cruz took a drubbing online for those comments. I do not engage with social media, but the news article that I found after searching for this fake controversy included a list of responses to Texas's most infamous flight risk. My favorite was this:
One of the most amusing things about Ted is that he is completely and fully aware that virtually every word he utters in a public setting is total bullshit, and he knows deep down that his own people despise him, but he still thinks somehow, someway, he will be president someday.
Again, the attacks by Cruz and others are lazy stuff. And although I do think that it is another sign of progress that vegans are apparently deemed to be important enough to come up in the political conversation, I am not fooling myself that things have changed all that much. As Professor Dorf noted in a recent column:
So long as veganism is regarded as kooky by people who have been indoctrinated to believe that eating animal products is morally unobjectionable and even necessary to human thriving, it is rational for someone who cares about their reputation to avoid advocating veganism or even practicing veganism, lest they be seen as a kook. ...
Only after there has been sufficient progress for the movement to fall within the range of socially acceptable views or conduct will more establishment--less kooky-seeming--people publicly join it.
We do not in fact know what Harris thinks of veganism, not because she is unique but because no ambitious politician (not that there are any other kinds) in the current environment would come close to saying out loud that they are a vegan and that others should consider making the same choice. (Senator Cory Booker or New Jersey is the notable exception.) Still, even as the number of vegans and vegan-respecting people grows, trolls like Ted Cruz think that it makes sense to try to link Harris to what he views as the equivalent of satanism. Am I proud and happy that we vegans are evidently important enough to be part of a guilt-by-association political attack? For now, yes I am.
Having surveyed the immediate political environment, let me now return to my comment from last year regarding lab-grown meat. By coincidence, an alternative term is "cultured meat," which is on-the-nose amusing in that the culture warriors on the right are all over this. For simplicity, I will use the acronym LGM for the remainder of this column. In any event, what gives with culture-warmongering conservatives and LGM?
In last year's veganniversary column, I had a lot of fun mocking an essay signed by the editorial board of The Washington Post. That essay took a very premature victory lap after declaring that Americans had rejected "the fake meat fad." One can get a sense of the epic cleverness fail in that column simply by noting that the headline claimed that the so-called fad had "sizzled out." As I wrote at the time: "My sides are still aching from the convulsive laughter." That pun is exactly as funny today as it was back then. Exactly.
The tldr on the Post editors’ essay is that the stock price of Impossible Foods had fallen, which they took to mean that Americans had rejected anything but "real" (that is, cruelly produced) meat. The essay included the outlandish claim that Americans rejected Impossible Burgers because the number of ingredients was too long. How desperate does a meat apologist have to be to offer that whopper (terrible pun intended)? Americans love processed foods, and ingredient lists for most foods sold there are notoriously long and include unpronounceable chemical names. Here is a relatively short ingredient list: "beef, water, contains 2% or less of salt, sorbitol, sodium lactate, natural flavorings, sodium phosphates, hydrolyzed corn protein, paprika, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite."
As it happens, those are the ingredients of Nathan's hot dogs. And as it also happens, Nathan's made the news in an odd way last month when it decided to ban long-time champion Joey Chestnut from its annual binge-eating competition. Why the ban? He committed the unforgivable sin of signing a sponsorship deal with ... wait for it ... Impossible Foods. Chestnut is not a vegan. He wants money, and Impossible Foods had money to give him. And even if plant-based meat companies were ultimately to fall out of favor among the profits-now-or-we-sell Wall Street crowd, that would not mean that there is no long-term market for such foods.
Ah, but the editors at The Post did not in fact say that vegans should be given no meat-like options. They wrote: "More than 100 start-ups are working on such cultivated meat products, and we’re hopeful they can pioneer the next generation of food production." Again, that was just a bit more than a year ago, and before writing the prophecy that I copied at the beginning of this column, I predicted that the supposedly reasonable types would end up rejecting LGM if it ever came even close to being a real possibility. Soon enough, among the people who are not culture warriors (or who at least are not obvious hacks like Cruz), the sun rose in the East and the arguments against LGM began to spread.
One particularly annoying take was offered in a column in The New York Times in February of this year, graced by another groan-inducing headline pun: "The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner." (Seriously, what is wrong with these weirdos?) The argument? Companies trying to create LGM and bring it to market are not currently profitable, having raised and spent about three billion dollars over six years without yet having succeeded in creating and dominating a market.
Sound familiar? "Oh no, people hate fake meats. Surrender Dorothy!" To its credit, The Times did eventually publish several letters to the editor, one of which offered an informed rebuttal to the idea that LGM has failed the market test:
But $3 billion is not a lot of money, and six years is not a lot of time. Three billion dollars is about the cost of one electric-vehicle battery factory, and those investments into cultivated meat have been spread across more than 100 companies.
The biggest cultivated meat company in the world, Upside Foods, has raised a total of $600 million; that’s less than the half the average cost required to develop a single drug, and that’s if you already have a massive drug company from which to build.
And six years? General Motors launched the first modern, mass-produced electric vehicle in the U.S. in 1996, and Tesla was founded in 2003. It took electric vehicles until 2017 to reach 1 percent sales in the U.S. and globally, and now they’re on track for both U.S. and global domination.
Technological progress takes time and costs money; nothing about cultivated meat’s trajectory so far indicates that it’s costing more or taking longer than what’s expected or reasonable.
Exactly. How ridiculous is it to hold the LGM innovators to this kind of unrealistic standard?
The larger point, however, is that apparently some on the right do not think that LGM will simply fail or fade away. After all, what could show less confidence on the pro-cruelty side that they will inevitably win than a panicky decision to use the government to shut down the competition? And even though I had no idea a year ago that the anti-LGM battalion in the culture wars was already being recruited, it was not a difficult thing to predict. That is what these people do.
Few people are more authoritarian in their impulses -- and less trusting in the wonders of the free market -- than Florida's height-challenged, term-limited governor. He used the power of the third-largest state government in the country to go after Disney for the sin of using its voice to oppose a bill that DeSantis signed (a bill that attacked the LGBTQ+ community, of course). He pushed through a bill forbidding private companies from making their own decisions during the pandemic regarding customers' and employees' vaccination status and use of masks. He abused his power to fire elected prosecutors (for things that they said, not did) rather than trusting that his party can beat them at the ballot box.
DeSantis is the brilliant political strategist whose presidential campaign made even some of his supporters tire of the word "woke," a crusade in which he won exactly nine delegates in one caucus before dropping out (after spending $34 million). Why did he attack LGM? To own the libs, of course. How did he attack LGM? No surprise, as a Washington Post article reported:
[A] ban on “woke meat” — food products cultivated in a lab from animal cells — easily got the green light from Republican lawmakers [in Florida].
“You need meat, okay? Like, we’re going to have fake meat? That doesn’t work,” he said at a news conference in February, rejecting arguments that banning it could stifle innovation.
That. Doesn't. Work. Like, great argument. And that was only the governor's spoken comment. As Florida native Dave Barry wrote in a guest piece in The Post:
[Floridians are] threatened by a threat so threatening that the state legislature recently passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill banning it.
I refer, of course, to lab-grown meat. To quote the official press release issued by the governor’s office (I am not making this up):
“Florida is taking action to stop the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects. ... ‘Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,’ said Governor Ron DeSantis.”
Aha, so it is not merely owning the libs but fighting back against the world government. Paul Krugman extended the point:
Sure enough, eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler. ...
The people who cast themselves as Reagan’s successors ... seem uninterested in serious policymaking. For a lot of them, politics is a form of live-action role play. It’s not even about “owning” those they term the elites; it’s about perpetually jousting with a fantasy version of what elites supposedly want.
Again, I dearly wish that an aggressive pro-vegan agenda is what those dastardly elites really wanted. But given how predictable it was that the DeSantises of the world would outright ban attempts to give people freedom of choice, why would people like the editors of The Post (who are too often frustratingly obtuse, but not idiots) attack vegans but claim that it is the vegans' tactics that are misbegotten? Don't do plant-based; do lab-grown. That's the ticket.
It is the usual game of three-card monte, the same as the "Don't tax sugary drinks, do something else" ... "But don't regulate sugary drinks, do something else" ... "But don't litigate the harms of sugary drinks, do something else" nonsense from fifteen years ago. Being against reducing or eliminating meat production cannot be pulled off by people who do not want to look like monsters, so they hide behind a procedural objection. This is a very old scam.
Yet I am undeterred. Happy veganniversary, everyone!