Reality Check, Please: The Market Will Not Stop Factory Farming

How can we solve one of the most intractable problems in the food system: over-production and consumption of animal products. By almost any measure, environmental, public health, animal cruelty, or labor standards, the conventional meat, egg, and dairy industries cause immense destruction and harm.

If you just paid attention to certain media outlets and activist social media accounts, you might think factory farming is being solved by the marketplace. Hardly a week goes by without some new celebration of the latest “victory” from a brand in the plant-based foods industry.

Recently, the animal rights group, Good Food Institute released a report celebrating a record $2 billion in capital investment in plant-based food companies, including $700 million in Impossible Foods alone, which sells its burgers to Burger King, among other outlets. (Impossible’s CEO is fond of predicting that animals will be replaced by 2035.) 

But the cheerleaders fail to understand that the marketplace alone will not fix the systemic problems that led to the mess we are in. While the market has an important role to play in the short term, expecting the marketplace to fix the problem that it created is a losing proposition in the long run.

Greenwashing Fast Food

When we celebrate the latest partnership of a plant-based brand with a major fast food outlet, who benefits exactly? Obviously, the plant-based brand benefits, but that’s about it. It’s a great way for the brand to increase that brand’s value while the fast-food company gains a massive greenwashing PR opportunity.

When advocates celebrate fast food for adding a plant-based menu item, they are propping up the most destructive companies in the food industry. Many advocates have become unpaid ambassadors of the very global corporations that are still destroying the environment, killing animals, exploiting labor, etc.

Fast food companies are simply responding to what they perceive as a consumer trend. But the moment that trend goes south or causes higher costs than its bean-counters will allow, it’s game over. History is littered with failed “healthy” menu items at fast food outlets, from salads to kids’ meals.

Even if we accept that some amount of plant-based meats are “replacing” their animal counterparts (the jury is still out here, as all we have is limited data from the companies themselves), where does that leave us? With essentially the same destructive and extractive business model invented by Big Food: centralized control and concentrated power in a globalized food system that places cost-cutting efficiency above all, with no improvements to human health or labor practices.

Faulty Foundation

What is the real opportunity cost of putting all our eggs in the marketplace basket? Taking our eyes off the policy arena.

Most proponents of a marketplace-driven approach don’t realize how critical the policy arena is to how markets operate. The phrase “private sector” is really a misnomer because corporations are a product of laws and regulations and the food and ag sectors have spent decades engineering the public sector to bend towards its will.

For example, there is a lot of head-scratching over how will plant-based meats ever reach price parity with animal meats, given that for most consumers, higher price is a deal breaker. The conventional wisdom is that it’s simply a matter of scaling up. But it’s far more complex. The reason animal products are artificially cheap is due to decades of exploitation and consolidation, essentially capitalism and regulatory capture run amok. Is this the business model we want to follow?

To ignore what the purveyors of the factory farming system are doing in favor of the market is to ignore the underlying causes of what got us here. It’s like your house has a faulty foundation and you think that giving it a fresh coat of paint will solve the problem. Simply swapping out animal meat with a plant-based burger in a Whopper is only addressing one symptom of a much larger problem while ignoring the structural underlying causes.

There are many groups taking a more systems-based approach to fixing our broken food system. Plant-based food advocates could learn a lot by listening to them.

Michele Simon is a public health attorney, author, and founder and former executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association. This is the first in a collection of articles called “Reality Check, Please”. Got ideas to share? Michele@MicheleRSimon.com