Paul Rozin
Subject: The End of Meat
Bio: Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is The End of Meat.
Our speaker is Paul Rozin who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
This discussion was held at a conference that I hosted in Philadelphia so the questions will be asked by me as well as my friends.
I want to learn from Paul about why our future may have substantially less meat because of cost, health and moral reasons despite the fact that many of us find it delicious.
Paul, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Paul Rozin:
The title is The Future of Meat. Let’s talk about the good side of meat. It’s a complete food. You can live on it alone because we’re made of the same stuff, so we get everything we need. It’s delicious. It’s the favorite food of humans around the world. It only accounts for 18% of all the calories eaten but that’s because it’s expensive. Most people in the world would eat more meat if they could afford it.
There’s a bad side of meat. High meat diets are associated with cardiovascular disease. It involves killing and maltreating animals, which is not nice. Some don’t think about it when we’re eating a steak, but it’s true.
Meat is much costlier to the world than plants. Beef especially is an extraordinarily extravagant food. You need 30 plant calories to get one calorie of beef. That’s wasteful of a lot of plant food. You have to wait a year and a half to get a cow big enough to kill. To get a quarter pound of beef, it’s 164 square meters. For chicken, it’s 7. Chicken is a lot better for the world. If you got rid of all the beef and lamb in the world you save an amount of land that’s roughly twice the size of the United States that’s now being used to either pasture the animals or to grow food for them. Over 70% of the agricultural land in the world is devoted to feeding animals, not humans.
Meat is the favorite and most taboo food in the world. Almost all food taboos are about animals. 500 million people won’t eat meat. They can afford to eat meat but who are voluntary vegetarians and their primarily motive is compassion. About half of vegetarians live in India and are Hindus.
I want to talk about three psychological things that affect our relation to meat. One is the idea of disgust, which is the strongest food rejection. You can feel how strong it is. If a cockroach or a rat touches your food, you won’t eat it, even if it’s your favorite food. Almost all food disgusts are animal products. It’s rare for people to say something like asparagus is disgusting. And if they do say that, you say, “Suppose your favorite food touched a piece of asparagus.” People say, “Oh, that’s fine.” So, they don’t mind.
Americans eat a lot of meat, but we don’t eat many different kinds of meat. There are 4,000 mammal’s species. We eat three: cows, pigs, and lambs. We only eat their muscle. Many don’t eat the liver. Some people do but very few. We don’t eat kidneys. We don’t eat eyeballs. We only eat them cooked. Of animals we only eat a little piece of them. Most animals are disgusting.
People in this country particularly and most of the West, love natural. They think that natural is healthier, but there is no evidence for that. It’s tastier, no evidence for that.
Some favorite foods are pizza, cheese, and chocolate. Pizza is the most popular American food. They’re not natural foods. You think you can find a pizza tree?
There are volcanoes, hurricanes, heat waves, and death. They’re all natural. If you look at what people think is natural it is not what’s in it as it’s how it got there. For example, if you take mineral water out of a spring, that’s good, that’s natural.
Now take out the minerals. That’s not natural anymore. Now you put the minerals back in. Now it’s like it was originally and people think that’s really unnatural. That’s much more unnatural than when you just took the minerals out. Putting it back means you poked in twice.
The context of the genetically engineered crop is almost the same, but it’s got a different history. The corn that we eat is so far from the corn that you find in Mexico, the original corn. It’s about one-tenth the size. The opposition to genetic engineering is moral. 50% of Americans say genetic engineering should be prohibited no matter the risks and benefits because it’s wrong. Technology is the only way out of this mess and yet people are opposed to it because they think it’s not natural.
The last point I want to make is sustainability. That’s a new moral issue. People are generally opposed to genetically engineered food, but it’s pro sustainable because it increases yield and pest resistance. They love organic food, but it’s actually not sustainable because it takes considerably more land to grow organic food. It costs more but people are willing to pay more.
Lots of people believe that natural things cause sustainability. That’s absolutely incorrect. Natural is not bad. It’s just neutral. Meat is not sustainable because it’s such an inefficient use of land and it produces toxic gases. The solutions are technology and behavior change. Due to technology, meat is not necessary anymore. We can replace meat with plant products and can supplement the plant products with things like vitamin B-12 that you can’t get from plants.
There are four potential ways we have of dealing with this problem, most of which involve technology. One is eating insects. Insects are eaten by two billion people. I’ve eaten quite a few of them. They’re pretty good. They don’t taste like meat, but they are tasty and natural. It’s disgusting and that stops people from eating it. They’re not cheap because they haven’t been scaled yet. No one’s tried.
The next thing is precision fermentation. This is a modern genetic transfer. You could get microorganisms by putting animal genes in them to make animal proteins. Insulin is made like that now. You can make heme, which is a blood protein, which makes meat taste like meat. You can grow that in plants. But it is not natural to poke it in there and change the genes. So, there’s opposition.
There’s plant-based imitation meat. The idea is to make plant products often from soy into meat texture and add heme to it, which has the taste of meat. It’s more expensive than meat and it’s not the same taste, but it’s moving quickly.
The last one I want to mention is cultivated meat. We take muscle cells out of a cow and grow them in a culture. Its taste is supposed to be quite good. For many people, it’s disgusting because almost all animal products are disgusting and this one is not natural.
We’re in a situation where the technology is moving rapidly and within 10 years, I think we’ll have cultivated meat that’s cheap enough and tastes good. It’s typically an S-shaped curve where a new technology develops very slowly, then some breakthrough occurs and it goes up quickly.
Let me give you examples. There were 8,000 cars in the United States in 1900. In the mid-1920s, America produced 20 million a year. Solar panels are now 10,000 times cheaper than in the 1950s.
What can we do to get people to eat less meat? We could take a little plant-based or cultivated meat and mix it in with real meat. So, it’s only 2% and then 5%, then 10%. We in psychology know that people get used to anything. People get used to losing a leg. They get used to getting old. Old people have as much quality of life as healthy young people.
If the person next to you breathes right into your mouth, you would find that disgusting, but you’re breathing their air if you’re sitting right next to them and you just get used to it. That’s the way the world is. Your body contains a pile of shit. You get used to it. You don’t think about it.
We’re going to get to the point where meat substitutes taste as good as meat. There’s the moral issue of poking into things and making them unnatural. The answer to this is to fight moral upset with counter morals to tell people that genetically engineered food has been poked in, but it’s saving people’s lives in Africa because they get more food. You got one moral against another and you work that through.
We know in psychology that people are more moved by individual events than by statistics. Joseph Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” And he was right about that. If you think about the eco value of not eating meat, the fact that it saves the earth is abstract. If you do to not eat meat, it is not going to affect the climate much. But on the other hand, you’re participating in killing an animal when you eat meat. That’s much more immediate and it’s been the main reason people became vegetarians. We can use what we know about persuasion to get people to accept biotech because they can see the moral advantages of biotech.
Mitch Feinman:
I’m curious of the journey of your interest in meat. You were my Psychology 101 teacher in 1983. My only D in academia ever on your first midterm exam.
Paul Rozin:
My daughter got her only D at Penn in Psych one too. Not mine.
Mitch Feinman:
She was probably not studying like me. You talked about disgust and persuasion. Tell us about the journey studying psychology to meat.
Paul Rozin:
I have a joint PhD in biology and psychology. I started out working on how animals choose foods that are good for them. Rats can eat everything, but they eat what they need. I then decided to work with humans like how kids learned to read.
My wife wrote The Flavor-Principal Cookbook that said that most of the world’s cuisines have a set of flavors that they use on almost all food. Like with China, it’s soy sauce and ginger root. And I said, “That’s odd. Why do they do that?” I started working on how humans deal with food, which I’ve done for the rest of my life.
The first thing I studied was why people eat hot peppers because it tastes terrible. And then, I got interested in meat because it’s the favorite and most taboo food in the world. Much of my work now has been about how we’ve perverted the pleasure of eating in the United States. I do a lot of comparisons between French and Americans. The French enjoy eating as an experience and we think of eating primarily as affecting our arteries.
I recently got back into meat. I was working with a young postdoc who was a vegan and started thinking about how there are both health and moral reasons to not eat it. Some vegetarians are health vegetarians and some are moral. For example, if a newspaper article says, “Meat is great for you.” Health Vegetarians would stop being vegetarians and it would have no effect at all on moral vegetarians. They don’t care about that.
I’ve been studying sustainability and natural. Once I found that people think that natural is sustainable, which is wildly incorrect, I decided I better look into this because breaking this belief that natural is wonderful would be a major advance in dealing with a crisis of climate. So that’s how I got here.
Hugh Nickola:
Internationally does the view of meat and disgust differ dramatically.
Paul Rozin:
Most of our data comes from the Western world. I do a little work in India and Mexico where it’s quite different. India is different because they have half the world’s vegetarians for moral reasons at birth. They’ve never eaten meat. Most of the vegetarians we encounter in this country had an early experience of eating meat and turned away from it for health or moral reasons. We are the most obsessed with the health effects of food.
We have good food in this country and we enjoy it, but it’s tempered by this worry about weight. In the third world, which is 80% of the world, they’re much more worried about getting enough food. In Brazil and China, they’re increasing their meat intake because they’re getting wealthier and that’s what’s kept them from eating meat.
The French spend about twice as much time eating as we do it a day, but they eat less. They eat slowly, they savor their food and it’s why they have half the level of obesity that we do. It’s very ritualistic eating in France. You don’t watch the Dallas Cowboys or the French soccer team during dinner because that would intrude on the food experience. The proper way to eat, proper sitting at the table, not getting up at the middle of the meal while other people are still eating. All of this is deteriorating slowly because convenience food even affects the French. The world is getting more like America. People are getting more concerned about longevity. If you love food, it’s a disadvantage.
Larry Bernstein:
One of your core points was that meat’s too expensive in its use of land and plants. But our farms have become increasingly more productive. 99 percent of Americans used to work on the farm and now it’s less than 1%.
We’re seeing increases in productivity of 3 to 5% per year in use of pesticides, genetically modified crops, ability to minimize damage by insects. The tractor gets more productive every year. When you have massive increases in productivity, the cost of meat goes down.
My inclination to go for the cockroach seems low given that we are becoming rich. Why can’t we splurge and eat as much meat as we want?
Paul Rozin:
First, we’re plateauing on the efficiency of crops. I don’t think that we’re going to be able to continue to yield that much more from the land even with genetic engineering, but we are getting more. That’s true that it is getting cheaper, but we’re not going to have enough land. Arable land is half the land in the world. And of that, half is used for agriculture and of that over 70% is used to feed animals. Converting that pasture land to forests would be good for climate change.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to talk about imitation meat. In this audience we have Howard Shainker who can’t distinguish between a real and a fake diamond. Can you tell us about the transition in how humans think about manufactured versus natural diamonds?
Howard Shainker:
We used to own the largest online diamond vendor in the world called Blue Nile. When we bought the business, the lab grown diamond market was like 0.25% of the market. Over five years that we owned the business, which was a bad investment, the penetration of lab grown diamonds went from basically zero to now 50%.
Larry Bernstein:
Why did that change?
Howard Shainker:
You can’t tell the difference between one diamond and the other. At the very high end of the market, people cared and we had the belief wrongly that there would be nostalgia, why is a diamond forever? It takes thousands of years. It grows deep in the earth. And that’s the bond that means this marriage is forever. It turns out that women want the biggest ring you can buy within your budget. Women and men at 25 are optimizing for bling and the biggest you can get is the best. That is the consumer preference over everything else. Now, the majority of the market is lab grown and the price point has decreased even more.
Paul Rozin:
This raises the issue of authenticity. With art, for example, you would pay a lot more for an original Picasso than a really good imitation, not because you can tell them apart, though experts can, but because he really touched it.
For your grandmother’s ring, she touched it. That’s very valuable to you. You’re not going to trade that in for an imitation. Why did that not work for diamonds and why does it work for great art? Nobody cares about hearing the original performance of a great piece of music as opposed to the current one. So that’s like the diamonds. For some things authenticity matters and for other things it doesn’t and we don’t know the principle that explains why your diamonds were taken over.
Larry Bernstein:
Our next speaker is Steve Zoll who is the sausage king of Chicago.
Steve Zoll:
Say, we develop a meat duplicate by using vegetables or cultures. Will people want to eat it? Will the grossness be an obstacle to getting people to adopt this manmade meat?
Paul Rozin:
People get used to almost anything but not everything. When we have a perfect imitation meat and another piece of meat that’s real next to it, how are people going to react to that? Are they going to be willing to pay more for the real meat even though the experience is the same? But we do know that people care deeply about the history of things. If beef died out because of some plague, people would go without beef for a while and they might not go back as much when that got better.
Shani Raviv:
I advised for a company that farmed grasshoppers at scale. They chose this insect because you can use 100% of it. It’s kosher and halal.
The decision was to go with dog food because this is an easier access to the market. There wasn’t success in bringing insect-based protein into real food. They mostly hide it. There are energy bars that have 1% to 5%. Do you think the right strategy is to hide it as 1 or 2% in the ingredients or to define a new category?
Paul Rozin:
Insects are so disgusting to people that it’s probably better to make insect flour. I’ve tasted it. It’s pretty neutral. It’s a little nutty, but it’s good. The insect bars that you’re talking about, which are available now, are expensive. And the reason for that is no one scaled insect production.
It’s easy to farm insects. You don’t need a lot of space and the black soldier fly has to live for three weeks and then you can harvest the larvae and grind it. They eat non-human food. They eat melon rinds. They even eat feces.
Jeff Shell:
In 2025, more meat per person was consumed in the United States than any year in history. I would propose a theory that beef is part of the culture of eating in America. July 4th is flipping burgers on the grill. A burger is about as American as it gets. You do not see a lot of people on July 4th flipping impossible burgers.
Paul Rozin:
You’re absolutely right. It is a central part of American culture. So, there are two issues. One is to give up on the hamburger, which is a problematic thing to do and another is to make the hamburger an imitation roughly as good. And if you do the latter, how many people will still be upset because it isn’t a real hamburger. I can’t predict that.
Larry Bernstein:
Paul, end on a note of optimism as it relates to meat.
Paul Rozin:
I care about killing animals, which not all of you do. From my point of view, there’s going to be reduction in the amount of real meat. It’s going to be better for the earth, but how fast that’s going to happen I can’t say. There’s so much working against meat. What’s in favor of it is that it tastes great and it’s got prestige. In the third world, the more meat you eat, the more respected you are.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Paul for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was Following the Terrorist’s Money.
Our two speakers were Eyal Azoulay and Ellie who are the founders of an Israeli Not-for-profit called ColEven. Terrorists move money from their Western supporters to the Middle East to fund their nefarious affairs. This happens despite the best efforts of American and European banks who spend billions of dollars trying to stop it.
Learn about how ColEven with its staff of former Israeli intelligence professionals work with the banks to impede bad actors.
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I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Containing the New Axis Powers: China, Russia and Iran, here.
