‘Humanity’s favourite food’: how to end the livestock industry but keep eating meat

Bruce Friedrich argues the only way to tackle the world’s insatiable but damaging craving for meat is like-for-like replacements like cultivated and plant-based meat

For someone aiming to end the global livestock industry, Bruce Friedrich begins his new book – called Meat – in disarming fashion: “I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat. You won’t find vegetarian or vegan recipes in this book, and you won’t find a single sentence attempting to convince you to eat differently. This book isn’t about policing your plate.”

There’s more. Friedrich, a vegan for almost four decades, says meat is “humanity’s favourite food”.

“It appears to be biological,” he says. “Meat has dense calories, which come from a lot of fat, and it has an umami flavour that humans have evolved to crave. Plus, meat is deeply rooted in most cultures and is the centrepiece at many social gatherings.”

The global damage wreaked by industrial livestock, from climate-heating methane burps to water pollution to the destruction of forests, is well established. For at least 50 years, says Friedrich, environmentalists, health experts and animal advocates – including him – have been trying to convince people to eat less meat and some have done so.

But global meat consumption has risen every single year since good records began in 1961. Humans have eaten meat for about 2.6m years and farmed animals for about 12,000 years.

“A decline has never happened in all of human history, so it seems very unlikely that it’s going to happen now,” Friedrich says. “Everywhere in the world where incomes rise, meat consumption rises.”

His fundamental argument is this: “If we’re going to address the world’s insatiable craving for animal meat, we’re going to have to replace like for like.” That means cultivating meat from cells in brewery-like factories or making taste-identical plant-based meats. In both cases, for people to buy them, the products must also cost the same or less than conventional meat.

These alternative proteins are the electric vehicles (EVs) of food, Friedrich says; the same experience, but better: “Just like a car doesn’t now need a combustion engine, a phone doesn’t need a cord, and you can take pictures without film, you can make meat without the need for live animals.”

Friedrich, head of the nonprofit Good Food Institute, which focuses on accelerating scientific research on these alternative proteins, is convinced conventional meat could be replaced: “If plant-based meat or cultivated meat doesn’t reach price and taste parity, it will be because of a lack of will, not because the science doesn’t work.”

It is possible that all industrial meat will be cultivated or plant-based by 2050, he says, with a niche market in regeneratively farmed conventional meat. Analysts at McKinsey, Barclays and Credit Suisse have estimated a 50% share by mid-century.

But such progress will require governments to ramp up their support for the scientists overcoming the obstacles in this still-embryonic field. They have done it before for previous transformative technologies, from penicillin to the internet to renewable energy, Friedrich says.

If China went all-in for example, he says, conventional meat could be all but history by mid-century: “They took EV sales [at home] from 1% to more than 50% in the 10 years to 2025, and that’s a tougher tech challenge and scaling challenge than alternative meats.” Alternatively, a tech company such as Google or Microsoft could go all-in and leverage AI to solve the key challenges, he says.

Friedrich thinks the rapid acceleration in the rollout of alternative proteins – the steep part of the S-curve growth that EVs are now on – will happen when they get to price and taste parity, and that could be within a decade. Even if progress is slower, the prize is great, he says, as every 10% of conventional meat replaced by alternative proteins has about the same climate impact as replacing all the world’s fossil-fuelled vehicles with EVs.

‘Shockingly inefficient’

Friedrich is a compelling advocate for his goal of ending industrial agriculture, with answers for the many criticisms: “It’s just a shockingly inefficient way of producing food. It takes nine calories of crops to get one calorie of chicken, 10 or 11 calories of crops to get one calorie of pig meat or farmed fish and 40 to 100 calories of crops to get one calorie of beef.”

But are people ready for such a seismic change? The list of advantages of alternative proteins is long and not just environmental. More efficient food production can feed more people, he says – 673 million people went hungry in 2024. Livestock farming also drives up the risks of two of the world’s most concerning global health scourges: antibiotic resistance and pandemics.

But these facts have failed to shift people’s diets. “If somebody doesn’t know about these benefits, it’s because they don’t want to know. Meat consumption just continues to go up,” he says.

Frequently raised is the “yuck factor” of cultivated meat. This is overblown, Friedrich says.

“People are not eating meat because of how it’s produced,” he says. “They’re eating meat because it’s delicious and affordable. All of the polling indicates significant enthusiasm for cultivated meat, especially among people who eat the most meat.”

Even the worst polling on cultivated meat still finds 25-30% of people enthusiastic, he says, and that’s 25-30 times more than those who currently eat plant-based meat. Cultivated meat is also clean meat, he argues, compared with the bacteria-laden conventional variety. Ensuring conventional meat is safe requires “cooking the crap out of it – literally” and treating your kitchen “like a biohazard lab”, scrubbing your hands and surfaces and avoiding cross-contamination with other foods.

For plant-based meats, a key criticism is that they are ultra-processed foods (UPFs). The idea of UPFs being harmful to health is usually a pretty good rule of thumb, Friedrich says.

“But it’s very clear that the reason UPFs are bad for human health is that they tend to be very high in fat and sugar and very low in fibre,” he says. “The thing about plant-based meat is that, on the nutrients that matter, it is better than what it is replacing. All the plant-based meats that meat eaters like have less fat, less saturated fat, less calories, no cholesterol and more fibre.”

Another negative narrative about alternative proteins is that they were a flash in the pan, with the hype now extinguished as companies went bust. Friedrich says that’s easy to explain: most of the products were just not good enough to win over meat eaters and all of them cost too much.

But it also misunderstands how successful innovations conquer the world: slowly, then fast – the S-curve. “Until very recently, cellphones were big, bulky things that cost a fortune,” he says. The iPhone is still less than 20 years old, while the Impossible burger, seen by many as a rare example of a plant-based product that is near indistinguishable from conventional meat, is less than 10 years old.

Friedrich says his favourite example is the rise of the motorcar. For 5,000 years, people rode horses, he says. In 1900, only 8,000 cars had been sold in the entire US. Just 13 years later, there were 1.2m cars on the streets of New York City alone and during that explosion, most car companies failed. The lesson, according to Friedrich, is that once the product is right, sales fly.

Another possible roadblock for alternative meats could be opposition from powerful livestock lobby groups. Ranchers in the US are trying to ban cultivated meat and farming groups in Europe are trying to outlaw plant-based meats from using terms such as burger and sausage (but do not mention beef tomatoes).

But it is a different story for the huge companies that actually sell the meat, according to Friedrich. “All of the major meat companies are enthusiastic about alternative proteins,” he says.

The world’s three largest meat companies and two largest food companies are investing in plant-based and cultivated meat. For example, JBS has invested $100m in a cultivated meat division in Brazil, and bought the Vegetarian Butcher company in 2025.

The motivation may well not be green – JBS has been frequently criticised over deforestation – and are more likely pure business. Alternative proteins are far more efficient and have far fewer risks in their supply chains, Friedrich says, whether that is animal disease epidemics or tougher environmental rules.

“They want to deliver high quality protein to as many people as possible, as profitably as possible,” he says. “So they’re agnostic on the production process.” Unlike the fossil fuel companies who have successfully slowed climate action, meat companies do not have sunk costs in mines and wells to defend.

National security

Cultivated meat and plant-based meat can reach taste and price parity, but it is not a given, says Friedrich. Penicillin sat on Alexander Fleming’s shelf for 10 years until the US government was persuaded of its potential and put its might behind its scaleup.

“It all happens a heck of a lot more quickly if governments are funding science and incentivising private sector innovation and scaleup,” he says. To those who see government support as a sign that a technology is flawed, Friedrich says look at history.

“Literally every successful industry has government support,” he says. “The reason the US, Switzerland or the UK have robust biopharma industries is government support. The reason the big tech companies are in the US is because all of that formative research was funded by the US government. India produces 60% of global vaccines because India’s government incentivised those industries.”

The economic opportunities of alternative proteins are one reason Friedrich thinks they can win. Most nations care about the environment, but all prioritise their economies. And there is another trump card alternative proteins can play, he argues: food security, which is also national security.

The foreword to Friedrich’s book is written by Caitlin Welsh, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and formerly at the US government’s national security council. “Produced at scale, plant-based proteins and cultivated meats would help mitigate the plethora of national security threats related to animal-protein production,” she writes. “No government wants to be importing significant amounts of their food.”

It is telling that Israel and Singapore have pioneered cultivated meat production – both are small countries wanting to shake off their heavy reliance on food imports. China’s self-sufficiency in food plunged from 94% in 2000 to 66% in 2020, says Friedrich, and it is strongly pursuing alternative proteins.

Eight of the 20 most active patent grantees for cultivated meat in the last six years are in China, compared with three in the US, three in Israel and three in South Korea. China’s meat system has also been repeatedly rocked by animal diseases. “But without live animals, animal diseases vanish,” says Friedrich.

China has already eaten the US’s lunch on solar panels, batteries and wind turbines and a 2023 CSIS report, funded by the Good Food Institute, warned of China being a strategic competitor on alternative proteins: “To cede American leadership is to forfeit the food security of the US and its allies.”

While alternative proteins may have global consequences, people will experience them directly on their plates. Friedrich grew up a meat eater, his favourites at high school were McDonald’s Big Macs and KFC chicken. But he went vegan in 1987, after reading Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé.

Decades later in 2016, when he tried cultivated chicken for the first time, he found he had not lost the taste for it. “I was surprised by the visceral, lighting-up reaction that I had,” he says. “When I smell meat, I think, like the vast majority of human beings, it causes an instinctual salivation.”

Will humanity’s insatiable appetite for meat be met through technology or will it consume the planet? If Friedrich is right, that depends on the success or failure of alternative proteins.

Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food – and Our Future is published on 2 February.