The Beyond Burger, and other plant-based meat, is perhaps the most concise symbolic explanation of libertarian-progressive ideology. It’s a progressive social change, but it’s driven by cultural shifts and market reactions to those shifts, with minimal state intervention.
You may have tried plant-based meats back in say 2011 or 2012. If you did, what you ate was probably not very good; it may have even been flat-out gross. Today, plant-based meats are quite tasty. Glenn Beck, no one’s ideas of a hoity-toity liberal, even liked the Impossible Burger, at least when he thought it was animal-based meat. I personally prefer Beyond Burgers to ground beef, and I’m not a vegetarian. My daughter’s favorite chicken fingers are the vegan ones. Our household is far from alone in eating both plant-based and animal-based meats. Plant-based meat sales in 2021 are up over 70 percent since 2019 and 98 percent of those sales go to households who also purchase animal-based meat.
The taste improvement in plant-based meat was driven by market-demand at least as much as increased demand followed improvements in taste. Once there was a critical mass of people who wanted to buy plant-based meat, there was profit to be made by innovating in those product lines. That innovation led to better tasting and cheaper plant-based meats which attracted more demand- especially from us omnivores- and thus a virtuous cycle emerged. When plant-based meats become truly cost-competitive with animal-based meats, that cycle will accelerate further. The day that plant-based meats are even fractionally cheaper than animal-based meats, consumers without a preference between the two, or who cannot tell the difference between the two, will switch en masse.
This is good for the planet. Meat-production accounts for roughly 15 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with beef alone responsible for two-fifths of those emissions. It’s good for public health. According to the Journal of the American Heart Association, a plant-based diet is associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease. It shifts demand away from animal-based meat businesses, which are notorious for treating undocumented migrant workers unfairly. And all of these benefits get larger as capitalist firms find ways to make a wider variety of plant-based meats that appeal to vegetarians, vegans, and omnivores alike. Indeed, getting omnivores to shift much of their consumption from animal-based to plant-based meats would likely do more to drive those benefits than doubling the number of vegans and vegetarians. It will also make life easier for vegetarians and vegans if, when they go to supermarkets and restaurants, there are more plant-based meat options available.
Beyond those immediate and tangible benefits, and of course the great taste, plant-based meats symbolize the possibility of the fight against climate change not being a Puritanical slog where we have to stop enjoying the goods and services we like but instead being fun and interesting. They’re the Teslas of food. These benefits come without extensive government regulation or a denial of liberty for anyone. If someone wants to continue eating animal-based meat, they are free to do so. This point is crucial. The rise of plant-based meat does not force anyone to do anything they do not want to do.
This is one of the reasons that when Fox News and other right-wing populist outlets have wanted to drum up outrage around meat politics, they’ve had to do so on ginned-up stories about the government limiting meat consumption such as the false claim that the Biden Administration wanted to limit consumers to one burger per month. They struggle to drum up the same level of fear and outrage around the existence of plant-based meat because the mere existence of an alternative to animal-based meat simply isn’t very scary, at least not to small government classic conservatives or anyone else who doesn’t get spun up over what is or is not available in the meat department at the grocery store.
The culture war-obsessed right-wing populists are likely to continue ostentatiously eating enormous steaks because they’ve allowed ‘trigger the libs’ brain worms to take over their every waking decision, but so what? Really. So what?! The proper response to such behavior is to, at most, roll your eyes and get back to enjoying what you enjoy. Those people do not have the power to make me care what they do or do not eat. And truth be told, I may not eat as much beef as they do, but I probably take more flights than they do, so it would be not a little hypocritical for me to lecture them about climate change. The health costs of beef consumption are almost entirely privatized on them, and they’re adults, they can do what they want as it pertains to their own health (and even if they were children, that’s their parents’ decision, not mine). This ultimately is one of the great beauties of the libertarian-progressive viewpoint. It points to how we came promote positive social change without trying to dragoon every last traditionalist holdout into compliance with shifting cultural tastes.
We do not need everything to be a culture war. In fact, if we really care about pressing issues like climate change, we should want to douse every last ember of culture war fire around them. And that starts by, when seated next to a flamboyantly carnivorous fellow-citizen, saying: “Hey, I bet you’d like this Beyond Burger. When no one is watching, you should buy some at the grocery store and see if you like it,” rather than giving them an extended, contemptuous lecture. People of both liberty-oriented and progress-oriented instincts should not be particularly worked up about a right-wing identity politics weirdo Instagramming himself eating a 32-ounce steak.
On the other hand, if the culture war-obsessed parts of the right attempt to weaponize the state against plant-based meat, both libertarians and progressives should vigorously oppose that. And that is not an idle concern. In several red states, legislatures have adopted or are considering a slew of onerous regulations designed to impede plant-based meat. And that is on top of the market-distorting subsidies that animal-based meat producers already receive. The government ought not put its thumb on the scale in the market competition between plant-based and animal-based meats. Animal-based meat producers and plant-based meat producers should compete in the open market on equal terms, without either of them getting special help from the state.
Perhaps most importantly of all from a broader intellectual perspective, the story of plant-based meats should make both leftist activists and right-wing populists rethink some of their larger theoretical priors. For leftist activists, if private businesses and markets can be so helpful in this arena, that suggests that they can help in other climate-change relevant arenas as well from energy to building materials. As more and more Americans, particularly younger Americans, have more progressive cultural tastes, businesses will chase their dollars and markets will bend in that direction. Capitalism is change-friendly.
For right-wing populists, if progressive social change is going to look like the plant-based meat story, that is if it is going to mean more choices at the supermarket but no meaningful limitations on them doing what they like, then perhaps progressive social change isn’t as scary as they fear. Maybe, with more libertarian-progressive perspective on the menu, American politics can be more of an easygoing barbecue and less of a dyspeptic food fight.