The Disclosure Podcast
Join best-selling author Ed Winters as he dives into veganism and our connection with animals, touching on everything from philosophy and psychology to health, science, politics, and the environment.
The Disclosure Podcast
Have we been overpromised on cell-cultured meat? A journalist reveals what they’ve seen firsthand | In conversation with Jenny Kleeman
How do we compare animal euthanasia versus human euthanasia, do we sometimes actually value animal life over human life, and are we being deceived by Silicon Valley when it comes to cell-cultured meat? In this podcast episode, I sit down with author, journalist and broadcaster Jenny Kleeman to discuss these topics and much more.
Jenny Kleeman is a journalist, author and broadcaster. Her long form writing appears in the Guardian, the Sunday Times, and the Financial Times Magazine, and she is a 2025 finalist of the prestigious Orwell Journalism Prize.
Jenny has reported for BBC One's Panorama, HBO's Vice News Tonight, and Channel 4's Dispatches, as well as making 13 films from across the globe for Channel 4’s Unreported World.
She is a regular voice on BBC Radio 4, where she writes and presents the documentary series The Gift. As well as writing for her Substack The Little Red Notebook, Jenny has published two books, the first being Sex Robots and Vegan Meat and the second being The Price of Life - both are widely available online and in bookstores.
You can find more of Jenny's work here:
- https://www.jennykleeman.com/
- https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jenny-kleeman
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Welcome to the Disclosure Podcast. If you enjoy this episode and the work that I'm doing here, then please consider checking out my Substack where I post regular articles. You can also support my work by becoming a paid member of my Substack, through which you will also gain access to weekly articles or by making a donation through my website. For those of you who do support my work, thank you so much. I am incredibly grateful and appreciate it very much. Links for everything can be found in this episode's show notes. Leaving a review for this podcast is also really helpful and encourages more people to listen to it. I hope you find this episode interesting and informative, and thank you for listening. Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Disclosure Podcast. In today's episode, I'm thrilled to say that I'm joined by Jenny Kleman. Jenny Kleman is a journalist, broadcaster, and author. Her long form writing can be found in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and the Financial Times magazine, and she is also a 2025 finalist of the prestigious Orwell Journalism Prize. Jenny Kleman has presented for BBC One's Panorama, HBO's Vice News Tonight, and Channel 4's Dispatches, and she's also made 13 films from across the globe for Channel 4's Unreported World. Jenny is a regular voice on BBC Radio 4, where she also writes and presents the documentary series The Gift, and as well as writing of her Substack, The Little Red Notebook, she has so far published two books, the first being Sex, Robots and Vegan Meat, and the second being The Price of Life. So, Jenny, thank you so much for joining me on today's podcast.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, my absolute pleasure. I think after reading both of your books, what's what's so notable is just the huge expanse of conversation that takes place within both of them. And, you know, we could spend 10, 11, we could spend, you know, many, many, many hours and only really touch the surface in terms of all of the details you go into and the consequences of these different things. And I think with the first book, Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, because you kind of cover technology, that there's a really interesting sort of conversation to have around this moment in time that we're in and sort of the sort of almost, and this may sound dramatic, but the sort of the abyss that we're peering into, which is the future and what this technology could mean for us. And you have a chapter called The Future of Food, which is all about cell-cultured meat and how technology may well take us in a new direction when it comes to meat. And what I really love about you know that chapter, but into both both of your books, is the sort of way that you discuss sort of the full spectrum of arguments in relation to these topics and you interview people and talk to people from all differing viewpoints. And that obviously puts you in a very unique position where you kind of had this sort of more objective view of kind of the the world and these technologies. And I'm wondering if when it comes to cell-cultured meat, you could maybe talk me through the different people you spoke to, sort of the experiences you had, and then maybe how that left you feeling about cell-cultured meat.
SPEAKER_02:Sure, yeah. So the the section of the book that's about cell-cultured meat, which back in the day that I was reporting it was called clean meat. That's part of the discussion, is that nobody really knows what to call it. Um it begins with an exploration of why it's needed. Um, and I come at this as somebody who is not a vegan, who's not even a vegetarian, who eats meat. And that's part of the story, I guess, is that I am looking into the arguments against eating meat and the arguments for, and there basically aren't, as you know very well, there aren't really arguments for eating meat other than we're used to it and we think it tastes nice. Um, but the the first section is all about all of those arguments, and I speak to uh Bruce Friedrich from the Good Food Institute, who's a fantastic, very intelligent, very erudite person, a man on a mission, and uh the mission is to encourage people to be uh growing meat from cells rather than growing them in the bodies of dead animals or growing them in animals in order that they might be killed and eaten. So uh I speak to him, and then I go to um San Francisco, I go to the Bay Area, and uh I go to a startup where they are growing cell-based meat, and they give me a tour. And in fact, it was it's quite an interesting experience of kind of Silicon Valley stardust. I was kind of given a performance, the sort of performance that they would give to investors or journalists who are already predisposed into thinking this is a brilliant idea. Um, and they taught me through the process about how uh animal cells are cultured and grown. And then I got to eat a lab-grown chicken nugget.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, how was that?
SPEAKER_02:It was really disgusting. It was really, really, it was really wrong. Um, I have to point out that I tasted this chicken nugget in 2018, so that's quite a long time ago, and I'm sure it's better. Yeah, but it was this strange thing where it tasted just like chicken because it was chicken, but it had completely the wrong texture because it was a kind of mash of chicken cells bulked out in filler and and encrusted in big breadcrumbs and deep fried. And I think you have a kind of primordial brain that tells you when you're eating bad meat that you mustn't swallow it, that it's going to poison you. And yet I was being surrounded by these PR people, and I had to kind of eat it and say, Yeah, tastes like chicken, which it did. So it was really disgusting. I'm sure it's better now. I'm sure the way that they're growing it is better now. But yes, I ate a lab-grown chicken nugget, interviewed the people who who ran the company. Uh, I spoke to uh someone who creates lab-grown fish who is perhaps more skeptical, less Californian, less Silicon Valley Valley in his approach to all of it, more pragmatic. Um, some I tried to find um vegans who were against lab-grown meat, and there weren't any, as far as I could find. It was really, really difficult. And I rang the Vegan Society, right, did quite a lot of research to try and find people who, because it does involve taking a biopsy from an animal, a living animal, and it does involve keeping a herd of, it could be very small herd of cows, for example, or chickens in order to get your original seed culture. But there really weren't any. And in fact, I interviewed I rang up some really serious animal rights activists who were doing some very um big demonstrations in supermarkets in in San Francisco around the time that I was there, and they were very in favour of it. But I found um a really interesting sociologist called Matthew Cole, who had thought about it and and written about it and uh made some quite sophisticated arguments about um how relying on technology to create progress is denying us the opportunity for growth as a society. And in fact, we just need, you know, it's a ridiculously over-engineered solution to a problem which um could be solved by us just eating less meat. And then I went kind of back to the beginning and I interviewed the person who was the first person to create a lab-grown um burger that was eaten, um, who's a man called Mark Post, who's a uh a um Dutch um a Dutch biologist who I really liked very much.
SPEAKER_00:Tell me more about that. This is the man who made the frog. Is it oh no, sorry, that was that was a different person. This yes, this is the man who in 2014 did that big display in London with the.
SPEAKER_02:Um, and it's the first time lab-grown meat had been grown, cooked, and eaten. Because in the past there's been frog meat, there's been goldfish meat, there's been various other things, but it's the first time it's actually been eaten. Um, and he, because he's an academic and he's publicly funded, he was kind of wary of the sort of hype that I'd seen in Silicon Valley. Um, but um, it was really fascinating for me because it forced me to confront a lot of my um it forced me to clarify my position on certain things. And it also the reaction to the book when it came out from uh meat eaters and from vegans alike was actually very interesting.
SPEAKER_00:In in what way would you say interesting?
SPEAKER_02:There is a resistance among people who eat meat, and I'm thinking even about my husband and people in my family to the arguments against eating meat that goes to quite a personal level of their identity. And I found myself in a position where, because for me, I I have gone through the arguments quite systematically. I've looked at the scientific papers that back them up, and they're quite robust, the, the, the evidence for, you know, I think if you eat meat, you have to kind of accept that there is no real reason for you to do so other than you are choosing to do so. But the amount that I had people sort of say, you know, if you make the argument about the environmental impact of animal agriculture, uh, you know, I had people say, well, we'll, you know, carbon capture, we'll we'll find some way around it. Or and I found myself on really quite, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast and he was asking, he's very, very interested in in uh lab-grown meat, cell cultured meat. Um, and we had an argument where he was saying, you know, uh, grass-reared cattle, it's it's gonna be fine if we just don't have intensive agriculture. And I was saying, well, you know, even then, uh, you know, animals eating meat will still give you cancer, it will give you all these things. And he was saying, it won't, it just won't. And I was saying, well, I think it will. I think there's quite it's quite well established. And people just don't want to hear those arguments. That's the point. People who have who are all in for eating meat don't want to hear those arguments in the same way as when we buy meat, I say we because I still eat meat, even though I know all of this. Um we buy it in de-animalised packaging that doesn't look like what it is. And we we we embrace the cognitive dissonance because it allows us to continue as we are.
SPEAKER_00:You've touched on so many really important things. I think in in a way, you've kind of summarized the full spectrum of sort of the the main spectrum of issues that we as vegans have in terms of how we convince people and how we kind of get this message through to people. I think Joe Rogan's a fascinating example because he has a habit of maybe denying uh lots of different types of science and also I think having a really strong view of what he wants to be true. Yes. And then stopping or he allows that sort of cloudest vision of what might actually be true. Um, but what I think is interesting is we have a lot of people, environmentalists, health conscious people, intelligent, well-educated people who who who are not sort of the types who might have a contrarian position to many issues. But with this particular issue, they do start to rationalize it in a way that they don't with climate science or or maybe sort of broader nutrition science or science around cigarettes and you know and cancer. People start to have this sort of real blockage around acknowledging things more objectively. And you get people who who will who will make arguments about, yeah, grass-fed beef is great. And actually the science shows that you know, raising animals, ruining ruminant animals outside is the leading cause of so many issues related to agricultural problems. And it is strange that we have this sort of blind spot around it. But you also mentioned about yourself, and you're you're not that person who has that blind spot necessarily. You do readily acknowledge that. And I think what's interesting about reading through the cell-cultured me book is the thing that the chapter is that I found it challenging in a different way. I realized that how how my kind of biases and feelings were kind of clouding my judgment a little bit. Because when I was reading you eating the cell-cultured chicken bite and not enjoying it, I was like, oh, you know, it made me annoyed. I was like, no, no, no. And I kind of wanted to deny that experience for you because that didn't conform to what I desperately wanted to be true, which is I was hoping you'd eat it and go, this is delicious, this is the future. We're in safe hands, nobody worry. But I'm reading through that chapter and I'm reading about some of the experience you had in San Francisco, and it's just kind of like chipping away a little bit at some of the those feelings that I had. Not necessarily in terms of my overall hope for self-cultured meat, or at least in terms of my hope about it arriving, but maybe my my views about the inevitability of it. And and the reason I say that is you spoke about sort of public funding for for Mark and the burger, but one of the issues that I found sort of that this kind of came out to me when I was reading the piece about when you're in San Francisco, was this sort of challenge that these startups and companies have around making progress, like meaningful progress, but appealing to investors. Yeah. And I'm reading it, I'm thinking, Elizabeth Holmes, you know, I'm thinking this is this an example of people over-promising and under-delivering. I mean, the good thing is Mark shows that there is proof of concept there. We can do it. It's not this abstract scientific theory, but doing it on a scale that makes it commercially viable is an entirely different story. Yes. Is there a conflict there, do you think?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I would say there is a conflict there. I would say that the Silicon Valley model, which is about selling dreams, about selling, if you invest in this, if you get in this early, you're going to make so much money in the future because this is going to be the future, requires a little bit of fake it till you make it, which is Elizabeth Holmes, which for something as potentially transformative as this can be extremely harmful because, and the person who makes lab-growing fish says says very well in in in in my interview with him, this is an incredibly intimate, personal thing, the food that you eat. And if you get it wrong, if people have a bad experience, they won't go back to it. Um, so this is a dream that you you you it shouldn't be a dream that you're selling, it has to be based based in reality. And I think, you know, there is a kind of middle ground that is a lot less sexy and lost less easy to sell to investors, which is, for example, if all the bolognese or all the meat in shop bought lasagna ready meals came from cell-based meat, you could very easily not not use meat for that because it is the the texture of it doesn't matter very much. It doesn't matter if it's sort of grown in small little globules, you could very easily replace all of that meat in in sort of cheap sources and in all of those things. But that is much less of an attractive proposition to say, oh yeah, you know, I, you know, my money went behind replacing all of the beef in in lasagna in Tesco Ready Meals than um here is a Wagyu beef steak, you know. And so you're you're selling dreams, and I mean, and perhaps I was a little bit too annoyed by it in the book, but I don't like being spun a tail. I mean, my stock in trade is I like interviewing ordinary people generally, and I don't like I don't interview celebrities, I don't really interview politicians. I like interviewing academics and experts, but I don't like it when someone is trying to uh use me to market themselves. That's part of the reason why I don't interview celebrities. So being in these, in this Silicon Valley culture and having people tell me a story really grated with me. I would much rather people answered truthfully. And um, so that kind of made me resistant, I guess. Although I was trying to be objective, it made me resistant to what they were sort of trying to say. I know now that subsequently, so I've covered quite a lot to do with cell-cultured meat since then, and have spoken to people in the UK who are producing meat and they're producing um meat in laboratories for sausages, for example, or doing it in a much more pragmatic way. And that's much less likely to attract all of the money and investment. But actually, um, it could go a very long way to minimising the death of animals.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I think what's what's interesting is you we were speaking a little bit earlier before before we came in and to record this, and you had said that the book is is quite anti-capitalist. And when I was reading it, I was thinking more that it's sort of anti-technology. And I'm wondering, is your opposition to some of this technology? I say opposition quite loosely because you know it's not that you're opposed to sell-cultured meat necessarily, but your opposition, maybe in the way it's being carried out, is that because you're fearful of the technology or your fear of the capitalist side of that technology, the idea that it'll be owned by a few very powerful companies that will kind of as they do now, they will basically own the meat industry. Is that is that your fear?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I I don't think I'm anti-technology, although the book does is very skeptical of of these four technologies that I look at. I am very grateful for technology. I mean, you know, I wouldn't have been able to write the book without technology.
SPEAKER_00:That's true, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And, you know, as a woman, you know, technology has transformed the lives of women, I would have been perpetually pregnant for the last 20 years of my life were it not for technology. So I'm very grateful for technology. But what I am skeptical of is people who are selling us solutions to problems that we could solve without spending any money. And I find the kind of commercialization of everything and the most intimate personal aspects of our lives dangerous because it makes us reliant on corporations and it it stops us from growing on a personal level. The book came out in 2020 in hardback, and that was a year when we showed how adaptable we can be as human beings, that we can really change our behavior if we feel that we really have to. But all the technologies that I cover in that book assume that we're never going to change and we're never going to grow. And there are unintended consequences of relying on technology to solve problems. And one of those, and particularly in the case of sell-cultured meat, one of those is instead of being self-sufficient and free and independent, we will become reliant on reliant on extremely specialized technology that will be owned by giant corporations. There's not going to be, I mean, some people are talking about craft meat breweries, craft meat breweries where you can grow your own meat at home. This is just not going to happen. It will be giant, giant companies produ mass producing this meat if it ever happens. Is that not what it is now though? That is what it is now, but at least we have the option to do it differently. Whereas I don't see people getting their own bioreactor and and and and doing it differently at home. Yeah, and it that that worries me in terms of a food security premise. But the overarching thing for me is what does this say about humanity? That we're going to these ridiculous lengths when we could just eat less meat. Not even eat no meat, but eat meat once a week or once a month.
SPEAKER_00:When people ask me questions about cell-culture and meat, I always try and qualify what I say by saying I I find it sort of ridiculous that we live in a world where this is something that we're even considering. It it it fills me with a great sense of of um disappointment that rather than just not eating animals, we've decided that the ide the best solution is to pour huge sums of money into a fairly speculative technology, although one you know that does have proof of concept, in the hope that we might someday create something that matches the taste and texture of something that we don't even need. It seems really, as you say, over engineering.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But the problem is people aren't changing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And I suppose in a in a way, are you not a testament to the quote unquote necessity of cell culture meat? You you're you're educated, you are well informed, you don't you don't argue against the validity of veganism or argue necessarily in favor of eating animal products, but but you do. So, are you not the argument for cell-cultured meat?
SPEAKER_02:In one respect, you could say that I am, but in another respect, part of what I encountered in the book is how alienating some of veganism can be in terms of how hard line it is that you have people who are made to feel that they can't be vegan if they're not having vegan wine. That that vegan veganism can be so the boundaries of veganism can be so prescriptive that it makes people feel like, oh, I can never conform to that, so I'm not vegan. I'm just going to say I'm just going to give up on the whole premise because I'll never be pure enough to qualify according to these rules. And for me, having written this book, I am pretty much vegan until I have a meal in the evening with my husband, who is not vegan at all. My goal would be to eat a lot less meat. But to live a life where I consciously say I don't do this and I have these prohibitions about food involves a kind of recalibration of my life that as someone with children who eat meat, as I talk about in the book, and a husband who eats meat would involve a changing of my identity. And it's that thing that is the kind of extra barrier to it. But if you were to ask me what my favorite foods are, genuinely, my favorite food, I, you know, I love chocolate, I love chips, I love, you know, for lunch today, I will have the same soup that I always have, which is happens to be vegan. I eat a lot of things that happen to be vegan.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It's not top of my list, although, you know, I, as I say in the book, I love eating a steak.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But that is that I don't eat, I might eat a steak twice a year. You know, I could very easily live a life where I happen to be vegan without wearing the badge.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I think, I think that there is a huge amount of, I mean, the thing you said, which is so, so true. And I think sometimes we as vegans can struggle to kind of fully comprehend this, is sometimes we think that when we talk about veganism, we're talking about sort of calories and nutrition, and all we have to do is tell people that they can get protein from plants, and then that's the light bulb moment, and people go, Oh, this is easy. But actually, it's not really about iron or protein or vitamin B12. It's about identity, it's about culture, it's about our upbringing, it's about our families, it's about our histories. It is so much deeper. It ties into who we are, how we relate to the world around us. And that's the tricky thing about this conversation. It's not whether you can get nutrients from plants, it's whether people feel like a part of themselves is inextricably tied to the consumption of animal products. But I think what you were saying and sort of the situation you were describing with your family, in a way almost sort of solidifies to me the I the idea that cell-cultured meat would be good. Because in those couple of moments where you have a piece of steak or on those evenings where you are cooking a lasagna or a spaghetti bolognese, if you could have cell-cultured meat, then essentially you've you've you've not given anything up. So if cell-cultured meat was available, would you opt for that over genuine animal products?
SPEAKER_02:If there was cell-cultured meat that was indistinguishable or very close and was close in price, it wouldn't have to be cheaper. Wouldn't even have to be the same price, then I would certainly, of course I would buy that instead of buying an uh from from a from a dead animal.
SPEAKER_00:But then you you are the argument for cell-cultured meat, then.
SPEAKER_02:I am, but I guess from what I saw in the reporting of it, the the story that's being sold to the world, which is that this is going to be the replacement for all meat, is not a truthful one, and it is one that is going to be delaying the progress of what could be a transformative technology. I mean, I don't argue against the, I don't think the technology shouldn't exist. I think it is not the answer to the problem that it rightfully presents, which is we are living in an unsustainable, you know, our relationship with animals is unsustainable and cruel and unhealthy. Um, it's not the solution to that problem. Uh, and I think I think there is a cultural solution to that problem, which is we all need to, those of us who do eat meat, need to eat a lot less meat. And I think that veganism as a movement can feel alienating for people who are people who care about moral and ethical issues but do eat meat. Because a lot of this, as I say in the book, in the book, comes from um what food you were given when you were young and what you what you're used to eating. And if you have a if you're used to eating this stuff and then you're confronted with the arguments, it can be very difficult to make that shift. I know you know this, and I know you've got you've got all the arguments that help people make that shift, but it can it can be a difficult process to go through. So I think there is there is a middle ground that I think perhaps that I know that a lot of vegans won't countenance, which is just eating a lot less animal products, which I think we do need to be willing to embrace as a transitional thing or as just a thing for our bodies and the planets and the animals and all and all the rest of it.
SPEAKER_00:I think you're right. That there is this sense sometimes that veganism and what it means can be so all-encompassing that as a consequence, people feel too intimidated to even sort of make an effort to do different, you know, anything related to it. And I think I guess labels and sort of terminology that that relates to our identities can feel intimidating because we want to make sure that we meet that sort of label, the definitions of that label. Because if we're going to create sort of an identity around that label, or at least involve that label within our identity, we don't want to be falling short of that for our own convictions, but also because of how we then appear to other people. What I would say is just take out that sort of expectation of a vegan wine and vegan bit. Worry about that later.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The big issue is food, you know. And once you've dealt with that, it can be so much easier to start thinking about some of these other sort of more um outside, outside topics, if you know what I mean. Not to say that they're not important. Um but again, I suppose what I find quite interesting about the idea of identities and culture and how cell-cultured meat relates to that is a lot of the pushback against cell-cultured meat comes from the idea that it kind of goes against tradition, it goes against heritage, it goes against kind of the way things should be done. And one of the main arguments that I hear from vegans as well as non-vegans about it is the idea that it's it's not natural. It seems to me that there's a slight contradiction in that, which is that animal farming is already a product of technology. Is cell-cultured meat just an extension of agricultural technology? Is it really that different from selectively breeding animals? You know, we we take them and we breed them in such a way to to optimize certain genes. Are we not just taking some of these genes and optimizing them in in a different way?
SPEAKER_02:You could certainly make that argument. Um, I mean, I I never really bought into this whole idea of the problem with it is it's unnatural and and uh traditional agriculture is natural because there's nothing natural about fattening up a chicken and feeding it with antibiotics and you know giving it an incredibly short life. So I've never really bought into that, but I do think um there is something about the level of intervention required in terms of the bioreactors, the culturing, all of the rest of it, that makes it so far removed from it being an animal that is born and raised anywhere that it is it is at a different end of the spectrum. Uh but yes, I think it is a spectrum and it is it's certainly a continuum from agriculture, traditional agriculture.
SPEAKER_00:I wonder if maybe I wonder if maybe you could see if there's a contradiction in my ethical beliefs here. I I am someone who thinks that cell cultured meat shouldn't really need to exist. Um but let's say it does exist. And let's say that it exists in the most perfect way. We are producing uh lots of meat and it is sustainable. All the all the reactors and the the all the instruments that are used are powered from renewable energy. There's there's no fetal bovine serum at all in the supply chain. It's ethical and it's the most sustainable it can be. Do I, as an ethical vegan who wants to reduce animal suffering and exploitation and death, should I have an ethical obligation to opt for cell-cultured meat over, say, fruits, vegetables, and foods produced in fields? Because producing plants in fields would actually cause more harm from maybe an animal perspective because of insects that are killed in harvesting. And also, probably from a sustainability perspective, when we consider that, would there be an ethical obligation for vegans to opt for cell-cultured meats? That's so interesting.
SPEAKER_02:I think this is an interesting thought experiment because it would never happen in the real world that you would have this absolutely perfect cell-cultured meat that were. I guess there would be an argument because these meat is being cultured in completely sterile conditions whereby there are no living creatures in there and no living creatures harmed in the in the production of it. However, you still have a herd, an original herd of animals through which these biopsies are taken. I don't think it's possible for us to live in a world where we're not having, we're not using animals or not affecting animals in any way. But it is a thought experiment. The idea that all over the world, I mean, you'd have to have, first of all, a completely different economic system where there is no inequality, where everyone can have access to this technology. Where it's an interesting question, though.
SPEAKER_00:It is. The reason I ask it is because in the book, I'm I can't remember who it is you're speaking to. Maybe it's maybe it's Bruce, but you they say that it's not it's not vegan because it's meat or something. And this is another thing I hear from vegans. I wouldn't eat it because it's not vegan. And I always think that's interesting because it depends what our opposition as vegans is to. Yeah. You know, is it meat that's the problem, or is it what happens to animals that provides us meat? You know, the meat isn't the issue. It's it's everything that happens before that meat arrives in front of us that's the issue. But if you took all of that out of the equation, there's no reason why that meat wouldn't be classified as vegan. And if in such a a world where that thought experiment came to be, you could argue that meat becomes the most vegan food if it's the food that then causes the least harm.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. But surely doesn't that come from the the intrinsic disgust that some people feel about the idea of there being something sanguinous that you cut into and that that that that itself is on an aesthetic level disgusting. And so meat can always be must always be disgusting because it can never be, you can never remove yourself psychologically from what it is, even if it is the simulation of what it is.
SPEAKER_00:Gosh, I love that. That's so true. Because actually then the question becomes, and this you and this is in the book as well. If we are still viewing meat as a food, will we ever move past the point of viewing animals as a resource? Because I went vegan for ethical reasons, but I think it was it was sort of the abstinence from animal products that allowed me to see with more clarity the problem. I I'd stopped eating animal products for ethical reasons, but it wasn't until I'd actually got some distance from actually eating them when I could start to view it a little bit more objectively and without some of those attachments that I had. And I wonder if cell-cultured meat could then hold people back from challenging the idea of viewing animals in this way. Is it just kind of condoning that but saying, hey, we've got this technology, so we should opt for that? But animals, yeah, they are still there to be exploited.
SPEAKER_02:In a kind of green way or in a safe way. Or yes. I mean, it's still about a culture of domination and exploitation. And I mean, gosh, I I don't want to, I don't want to draw too many generalizations here, but it is something that I realized through the course of reporting the book about um I wasn't expecting there to be, I mean, the book looks at lots of different technologies, and I wasn't expecting there to be a gendered dimension when it came to food, but there was so much of a gendered dimension when it came to meat. And I'm thinking about this again in terms of my husband, or in terms of Joe Rogan, or in terms of uh meat being intrinsically linked to masculinity through this idea of to be masculine is to be the man at the barbecue, it is to catch animals, it is to dominate nature and be the master of the animals. Um, and I think that goes very deep for a lot of people and very unquestioningly, if you're in a restaurant and you see what people order, even women that eat meat and fish will quite often order chicken or or the salmon rather than the big, you know, it it's a very it's a lot of stuff to disentangle there. So I think yes, it's not necessarily to do with the meat itself, it's to do with what it represents in terms of where you see your position in the world. I don't want to bad mouth my husband here, who's a very nice man.
SPEAKER_00:No, absolutely not. Absolutely not, no, not for seconds. We could spend so long talking about just this issue, but that there are other ones that I would like to bring into the conversation. I think for me, just as a sort of a general summary, I think cell-cultured meat is not ideal, it's not what I would like. I'd like to be able to clip my fingers and get people to stop eating animal products, but that's not the world. It never will be. So is this the quickest way to getting rid of animal farming? Maybe, in which case I'd embrace it for that reason. Um, but I do find myself kind of disappointed that this is something that we feel the need to be.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I would just say I think you might be right. I think in order to get to that place, we need to have a different funding model for it as a product. And if it's being sold as a sort of potential money maker miracle cure for all of the world's ills, that's never going to happen. And if people don't have faith in it, it will take another generation for for the goodwill to be built up again for it to for it to really land.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely right. So true, so true. Um, in sex robots and vegan meat, you also talk about the future of death. And that book, that chapter in the book, kind of focuses a lot on the right to die. Uh, who should have the right to die? At what point should that be decriminalized? And I think this is really topical now because in the UK we just had a vote in the House of Commons, uh, in the House of Commons to uh to legalize people having the right to die if they have less than six months uh left to live. The interesting thing was that vote, the margin was was very slim. I think it only passed by 23 votes. So really, really controversial topic. And yet the idea of euthanizing animals, non-human animals who are suffering is not controversial at all. I mean, most people would agree that if a dog or a cat is is suffering, then euthanizing them would be the most ethical thing to do. Do you think there is a contradiction between how we view human suffering and and and non-human animal suffering in that context?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, there clearly is. And and uh the means with which people would would die under assisted dying is they want to actually use the same chemicals that we use to um euthanize animals. So what what human beings are trying to fight for the right for in this country, or it's being legislated at the moment, is the right to be euthanized like an animal would be. I think we think that animal suffering is different because we feel that animals don't have an awareness of um, for example, if they're being given medical treatment, they don't have awareness of the fact that it this might hurt for now, but you might feel better later, or animals can't weigh up the risks and tell you whether or not they would want to undergo a procedure uh given the risks. And there is a sense that it's cruel to prolong uh animals' lives in that context. Although, I mean, there is a real problem in the moment, in the moment, I've I've kind of covered this a little bit on a I've covered this in the past where there has been a move for vets have been complaining that people are seeking to prolong their animals' lives beyond what vets feel comfortable with because people don't, of course, don't want to see their animals die, but there is enough medicine so that you can prolong an animal's life, but they will be in pain and they will not understand what's what's going on. And the the kind of vet position is it is less cruel to end their life sooner than have them continue living in in great pain. But I think that is because we have different understandings about suffering between human and animals, and part of that is a self-awareness, I think, an awareness of what's going on.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I think what's interesting is that sometimes that argument makes me think more favorably in terms of how we view the issue of animal suffering. Because, you know, if if there was a dog here and a human here, and a dog breaks their leg and a human breaks their leg, you can say to the human, don't worry, the pain's going to end, someone's going to be here, they're going to give you a strong painkiller, your leg will be fine. I know it's awful, but don't worry. And we can kind of talk them through that. But the dog has no idea. For all they know, this is how they will always feel forever. And there's this issue of like, is animal suffering potentially made worse for them because they can't rationalize the sort of the full picture of what that means and how it will end. But I think we do sometimes think about human suffering as being higher, and we value human life as being higher. But does that then make the contradiction even more apparent? Because I suppose what makes life worth living? And I'm not a religious person, so for me, life is worth living because of the uh pleasurable experiences we can have, the connections we can form, the value that we can bring to ourselves through engaging meaningfully with the people around us. But if that's taken from me and in its place is just kind of hopelessness and suffering, does that not make the the issue of my euthanasia actually more important than animal euthanasia? Because that suffering has robbed me of something greater than we perceive within animals. You know, if our value of life is higher, then surely our experience of suffering should be viewed more importantly as well.
SPEAKER_02:I think, I think, in one respect, we as human beings assume that animals have a higher tolerance of suffering, of physical suffering, than we do. We think of animals as being more or less purely physical. We don't think about the kind of emotional internal life of animals. You might think about it with with dogs or animals that we can anthropomorphise or or see behavioral characteristics that we recognise in ourselves. But other than that, we I think a lot of people don't think of animals as experiencing much beyond pleasure and pain, hunger and tiredness, those those basic things. And so, yes, I think we assume that we have a more sophisticated continuum of experiences that makes our suffering more um more nuanced than the suffering of of animals, whether or not that's right or wrong, but we can never know. We can never know. But there is a a narcissism in how we view everything. Of course, we view our our own experiences and suffering as being the pinnacle of everything, just like you know, in the in the colonial world, you know, white men and their experiences of the world were the default for everything.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's supremacy again. Supremacy that I think so much always comes back down to that way of viewing things and viewing issues. Um, so yeah, I think I think there is probably an interesting contradiction in terms of how how we view death and then how we view life as a consequence of death. And I think with with animals, what what's notable is how is how little we place value on their experience of life and ultimately what death means for them. You know, for us, death is this all-consuming thing that we spend our lives fearing and worrying about. And, you know, people will turn to religion to try and rationalize that or turn to spiritual practices to try and find peace within it. And there's just so much around it that we're kind of born into this world. And then as soon as we conceptualize what death is, we fear it in so many ways. And yet, actually, the way That we view death is so diminished when we then turn our attention to non-human animals. But what's interesting in the book is you talk about how our relationship with death used to be different because it was more all around us. Yes. So in the same way that our disconnection from animals makes it easier for us to exploit them, just our disconnection from death as sort of a real-world scenario, you know, everyday scenario, does that sort of distance us from thinking about death in in them in a meaningful way that would then impact how we relate to animals?
SPEAKER_02:I think I think very much so, in that we, again, it's like buying meat in de-animalized packaging. We live life uh never seeing death, very rarely being confronted with it, being able to live in a way where death is unthinkable, that our minds don't go there because we're not forced to think about it. And uh and therefore the death of an animal is we we just don't think about it in the same sort of terms. But it is strange. I mean, in terms of I guess we assume that animals don't mourn, even though some animals do. And we assume that animals don't anticipate their own death, that they may not be aware of what it is until it's happening to them. So we perhaps think that they have less of a profound relationship to their own mortality than we do. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00:If an animal has no comprehension of death, let's say that they are in um a a farm um in in Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, you have a chapter called Kauschwitz, okay, which is extremely powerful and creates a very visual image of what you're describing and um and obviously sort of tells us very succinctly sort of how terrible farming can be for animals. Let's say that you're you're an animal in one in a farm like that, and from the moment you're born, you have your autonomy denied, your experiences overlooked, suffering is something that is inflicted upon you without without any idea of mercy or or anything like that. And you don't comprehend death. So you you can't comprehend an experience of life outside of this reality, and you can't comprehend that there will ever be an end to this reality. Is that not sort of like have we not created a version of hell for animals in the sense of it is a place where all they've ever known is suffering, and it's a place that they think they can never escape from, and they don't conceptualize the idea that it will one day end. Is that not like a sort of a hell on earth?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, it is. I mean, it's torture and followed by death. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:But if they can't even conceptualize death, then they have no they have no way of evening.
SPEAKER_02:That is all that existence is for them. So would they would they become inured to it? Would they just think, oh, here's my food, at least I'm eating, I have the pleasure of having a full belly, even though it's full of horrible, horrible things.
SPEAKER_00:I think of um Victor Frankel, a Holocaust survivor, and he has a book called Man's Search for Meaning, and it's about how he and people around him survived in in the concentration camps in in the Second World War. And it was all about how, in even in the worst and most extreme environments, we can still find ways of just grounding ourselves and taking something. And obviously, part of that came from this sort of vision of not being there, of being with loved ones again, of seeing an end to it if it was if it was ever possible. And it kind of speaks to that sort of human cognition of how we can sort of think about things in deep, complex ways, and we can also see beyond our present environment. But I think on the one hand, because of how we view non-human animals, and if our perception of their intelligence is true, it almost makes some of those environments feel potentially worse than than we might perceive them as being currently because they don't have the cognition to even think about things in ways that would allow them some kind of respite from that. But then maybe that's speciest of me because I'm denying them cognition that they may have, if you know what I mean. It's interesting how sort of our prejudices and views of animals can lead us in certain directions.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yes, no, I and I see exactly what you're saying. And part of what all of this comes down to in both of my books, actually, is to do with the consequences of seeing human beings as objects, as non-persons. So the sex robots part of it is if you could create something that exists purely for you, that is there for for simply for your pleasure, what are the consequences of that? And with farming and intensive agriculture, you have to deny the personhood of animals. You have to not, you have to, you have to see them as objects, otherwise, you it is murder what you're doing, it is torture, it is, it is concentration camps followed by death. Um, so the question is, and again, this is the debate of the the personhood of animals, the rights of animals, that um if you can think of an animal as having the capacity of thought where they can think beyond that or have a conception of themselves within that system, then it could be better for them or it could be worse.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, gosh. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty hard to sometimes think about that in terms of what it means for their individual experiences at any given time and just how terrible, you know, that that that clearly must be. And I suppose what's interesting is we're sort of talking about kind of consistently turning a blind eye to things. We turn a blind eye to death in our own lives to provide comfort for us. But maybe one of the consequences of that is we turn a blind eye to the death that we cause. We do it with humans, you know, we turn a blind eye to human suffering all the time with the choices that we make, technology choices, clothing choices. It's this we live, I suppose, in this really interconnected web of exploitation. And obviously, animals bear the brunt of that, but they're not the only ones who bear the brunt of that. Women do, um, people in low-income nations do. It's just a system of mass exploitation and supremacy. Do you think it's realistic that sort of incremental change will ever take us to the point where these things are dismantled in a meaningful way?
SPEAKER_02:It's so interesting because hearing you talk, I'm thinking about so much of what I'm interested in ethically is the stuff that we choose not to see, and the stuff that I, even though I have been confronted with it, choose not to see. You know, like even things, I mean you're talking about in the developing world, even things in our world now that things that are a little bit too cheap and that you can't really understand, you know, how am I able to uh, you know, get my nails done this cheaply, and why uh how am I able to take this Uber? How can their costs possibly be covered? How can this be fair for everybody and good for the planet? And these are uncomfortable truths. And the problem with uncomfortable truths is there's not there's that people don't want to confront them, and there's not a market for them. There is a market for having your ideas confirmed and reaffirmed, and your identity reaffirmed and the righteousness of your ideas reaffirmed. There is not a market for that thing you enjoy doing, it's actually at the expense of another being, and um you should be aware of aware of that. I do think though, perhaps confronting people with the reality of things can be done in a way that that people are prepared to engage with. But it's it would be much uh it's a much more marketable proposition to be comforting people that the way they're doing things already is absolutely fine and they just need to just keep their head down.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? Um I suppose that brings us on quite nicely to to your second book, The Price of Life. Um it's so fascinating reading through how we value human life in different ways. One of the ones that I found I was gonna say most shocking, but actually I didn't find it shocking at all was in the US you say that people who were killed by gun violence, you know, mass shootings can't sue gun manufacturers. But let's say, for example, the shooter was in a hotel, you couldn't you couldn't sue the company who made the gun, but you can sue the hotel where the shooter's shot from. I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about that, maybe some of the sort of strange views that you've got to be.
SPEAKER_02:There's a chapter in the book about criminal injury compensation, how much your family will get if you're killed in a terrorist attack. And there's a bit where I look at mass shootings. I mean, that was the most egregious example of where the price of life can show you where incredible injustice is and where things aren't working. The kind of premise of the book was we put prices on life, on lives all the time. We don't talk about it very much because it's a bit gross, but it happens all the time. And what do we lose and what do we gain by putting prices on lives? And I'd come to it thinking this is really gross that people do this. Um, and then it was through actually things like the the chapter on criminal injury compensation that I saw how useful it can be as a prism through which to look at the world to see injustices. So um in mass shootings in America, um there is no recourse to sue the gun manufacturers. You can sue the premises where the shootings took place. So you have um, for example, in the Pulse nightclub, where I think almost 50 people were killed in Florida in this gay nightclub, it was independently owned. Um, the people who whose families were, were the families of the people who were killed in that attack could sue, but I think the kind of pot of money that they could, um, it was a few hundred thousand dollars from the insurance of this company. Whereas in the Las Vegas shooting, which was from um, I don't know if you remember this, but it was a very large number of people were at a music festival and somebody uh was in one of the top floors of a um a hotel shooting down indiscriminately into the crowd. That hotel was was a very, very valuable hotel part of a very valuable chain. And, you know, the families of those killed, even though many, many lives were taken, you know, dozens and dozens of lives were taken, each family would have got, you know, a very serious, significant amount of money, many, many millions. Um, and that is simply because of who can you sue? And the same thing, I look in that chapter, I look at the London Bridge terror attack where and in fact I picked that attack because so what happened in that attack is some terrorists drove across London Bridge, they killed two people on London Bridge with a van, and then they got out of the van and went into Borough Market and stabbed six people. The whole thing took about 10 minutes, the entire attack took 10 minutes. And I picked this because the eight people who were killed came from different countries, a very large, different array of countries. And I thought I could make a point about how ridiculous it is that a British life is worth 11,000 pounds, whereas a uh a Spanish life is worth a quarter of a million euros and a Canadian life is worth about 6,000 pounds. But I found from doing the reporting of that chapter that the families of the two people who were killed by the van were able to sue the rental company or the insurers of the rental company that had uh rented the van to the terrorists. So each of them, their families, got over a million pounds. Whereas the families of the people who were stabbed in Borough Market, they had no one to sue because you can't sue the knife manufacturer. So they just got the statutory pay for their um loved ones. So it is ridiculous to say that the life of someone killed by a knife is worth 1% of the life of somebody run over by a van. But this is the world in which we're living. It has real, real world consequences. So whilst it's crass and crude to put figures on lives, they can show us where injustices are happening and perhaps what we need to do to redress the balance.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and clearly there's an injustice if if is someone killed by a knife from a terrorist in the UK, their family is given 11,000 pounds compensation for that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and what do you spend that on? It's not nothing. So you can't say, I got nothing. It's not enough to live on. What do you do with it? I mean that that it's it's and also that sum hasn't been adjusted for inflation or or changed since 2012. So it just seems a rid it the whole thing seems ridiculous and absurd.
SPEAKER_00:It's mad, isn't it? If if you have a child who's say 20 killed in an incident, they could live to 85, let's say, you know, sort of average life expectancy, that's less than 200 pounds per year of life that was taken from them. I mean, to to value human life as being so low.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's really, it's really troubling. I mean, I think the UK has sort of a real issue with scandals um in different ways and lack of accountability than I think in other countries they deal with things a little bit better. I think about Grenfell and the contaminated blood scandal and the BSE scandal. And to me, this is this is kind of a scandal of how little we view human life in this country. There's all these things that just kind of sort of get suppressed in this country very well. We're very British about it. And you write about in the book about how we're very we take kind of a British attitude towards money compensation, how we don't really talk about it.
SPEAKER_02:You don't talk about it. And when you don't talk about it, it means these injustices aren't exposed. They aren't out there in the open. And people, like people in the London Bridge terrorist terrorist attack, families didn't know that other families had got enormous payouts whereas they had had got very little. And the thing is in this country, I mean, you talk about Grenville and and the these the victims of terror attacks, their families, it's the same thing. The people who are in need of compensation are really quite powerless. They are bereaved, they're sorting out the administration of their loved ones' death. They're not in a position to lobby and say, you need to update the tariffs for criminal injury compensation. Or we, you know, when you I don't want to sound like a sort of died-in-the-wall anti-capitalist here, but when you have corporate interests, change happens much, much quicker. And it's because these people are low priority politically that we don't make these changes. Um what does that say about us?
SPEAKER_00:Nothing particularly good. That's the thing is that you know, we speak about animals and how we view them as sort of metrics, sort of cogs in this capitalist machine. And humans are very much uh, you know, cogs in this in this machine, this corporate machine as well. And it's quite disturbing to think about that. And I think what's really interesting to me is you also talk about the NHS in the book, and you talk about how um there are people who have to decide how much is too much to spend on protecting a human. And there's a really um, really interesting example um of children who were born with um something, and it's called I think spinal muscular atrophy. Yeah. And there's a a treatment that you can give this child, and it basically saves them from dying from this SMA. And it costs 1.7 million pounds. And so the question is: should the taxpayer have to spend 1.7 million pounds to save one child's life? And you think, well, well, well, of course. But then you think, but could that 1.7 million pounds be spent on many other treatments and medicines and on procedures that could save more people's lives? And you go, how do you value life? And I guess the issue is that would only work if we had this sort of very small pot of money where it had to be dispersed. But the problem is we squander so much money spending it on the militarization of you know, of our of our countries. But maybe also in relation to what I speak a bit more about agricultural subsidies. And I think when we talk about the price of life for non-human animals, our automatic assumption is that we we value them as being very, very small. And of course, we we do in a certain sense, you know, a farmer will spend 20 pence on a meat chicken from a hatchery to then fatten that chicken up to sell to a supermarket. We might spend sort of five pounds buying a whole chicken in a supermarket. And I think what's interesting about that is we think it's five pounds for a chicken, but it's not. It's five pounds for all of the feed that's gone into fattening them up and the farmer's time. The amount of money that we spent on actually the chicken themselves is very small. But we also pump billions of pounds into agriculture through subsidies. And it seems crazy to me that we'd even have a debate about whether or not 1.7 million pounds was an acceptable amount to save a child's life when we'll happily spend hundreds of millions of pounds fattening up animals just to kill them for something that we don't even need. Surely, if we just stop that, we wouldn't even have to debate 1.7 million pounds for a child's life.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, although I would say agriculture is in itself an industrial complex. And those subsidies are not just about making meat cheaper and more available, it's about keeping farmers employed in this idea that A, it's useful for the economy and B, it's useful for our food security, for us to have people that can produce this food for us, even if it, you know, the only way for it to be done in a commercially viable way is through these subsidies. In the same way in the book, I look at um the ridiculous, upsetting amount of money, billions and billions of pounds, that we spend on weapons, on fighter jets that I genuinely think are not going to keep us safe. The promise of these fighter jets being, oh, well, they'll be in use in 70 years' time, these are the, you know, these F-35 jets that have only recently come onto the market. The idea that these jets that were produced, the first used in 2018, that in 70 years' time we'll have pilots flying planes into war zones, it's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. It's all going to be drone warfare. Anyway, I came to the conclusion there that that is all about creating a sort of system of welfare for people. It's creating jobs for people in America. Uh, it's public money being um poured into something that produces jobs so that Americans can have a system of welfare without calling it welfare and a system of interconnected interdependency of countries that provide the different components for this plane, the F-35. And in many ways, agriculture is the same. Those subsidies are not necessarily about producing cheap chicken. It's about reinforcing a system that is politically useful on many different levels because it's keeping people employed and it's allowing us to say, okay, if we had to go to war with the rest of the world and shut down our borders and never import anything, we could still do it because the infrastructure's there.
SPEAKER_00:I suppose it also speaks to how we value um human life in different ways. And I think you use the word welfare, and that's such an interesting way of thinking about it. You know, we speak about welfare and sort of socially we've been conditioned to think of low-income people and and and newspapers in this country especially teach us to or try to teach us to think negatively of these people. But then we don't think about subsidies given to farmers as as being welfare, but they but they are. It's farming welfare. It's it's a handout from the government to support this, you know, to support them financially. And I guess what's what's interesting about that is when you think about how we cut welfare for disabled people, we cut welfare for low-income people, people looking for jobs, people who have who are carers, I mean, carers. And yet when we think about farmers and the farming community, we think about it in different terms. But is part of that again down to this sort of political system that we live in, where from a political perspective, if you can say lose the vote of a low a low-income person in the inner city versus a farmer in one of the shires, that that that vote from that farmer carries a larger amount of weight for you politically. So from a financial perspective, people will be more, or politicians might be more happy to cut the benefits of a low-income person in the inner city than they might the welfare of a farmer in one of the countrysides.
SPEAKER_02:I think all votes are viewed equally because it's just a numbers game. But I think it again, it goes back to this question of identity. What kind of country are we? And again, ingrained in us, and France is a really good example of this. The the agricultural subsidies in France are completely mad. But that's because France prides itself on being a country that produces what it produces and has fantastic food and lots of cheese and you know, and lots of uh homegrown, very high quality produce. And if you say I'm cutting the subsidies for farmers, if you say you're not on the side of farmers, you're saying I'm not on the side. Of us producing our own things from British soil, grown from British soil. So the ramifications of saying that that's what you stand for politically go very far and they go beyond saying, I'm not up for helping people who can't work, continue to not work.
SPEAKER_00:True. And I suppose that the thing about farming is it does tie into again cultural attitudes, um, yeah, the idea of supporting our people. And in a way, there's a sort of supremacy to that, which is saying more British farmers are the best farmers, or if you're in France, French farmers, we we we consistently want to reinforce to ourselves that the people that we belong to, whether it's yeah, nationalism. It's nationalism. It's nationalism, yeah. What's interesting, I suppose, is if we what we recognize is the system of farm we have now doesn't financially make any sense. And what we are in essence doing by subsidizing, say, livestock grazing, which is the most intensive in terms of land requirements, is the worst in terms of emissions production, and from a health perspective, is the one that causes heart disease, certain forms of cancer, increases type 2 diabetes risk. And so the industry in terms of farming that receives the highest number of subsidies is also the industry that costs us taxpayers the most in other regards, because they're the most polluting and they're the ones that create the highest bill for the NHS. And what we're kind of doing is we're not if we're saying that subsidies are there to support the farmer, we're saying that the farmer's life is more valuable than all the lives that could be saved theoretically if we freed up those subsidies and redirected them into our crippled NHS. And again, it comes down to that idea of do we value the baby who needs a 1.7 million pound jab over the farmer's employment? Or more than that, do we value protecting people on a larger scale from an NHS perspective more or less than we value creating red meat in the most affordable manner possible? And we're kind of saying that our taste buds and our enjoyment, the cultural value of those foods is actually higher than the lives that could potentially be saved if we redirected funding in a more meaningful way.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, it is a political choice. It is absolutely a political choice. And if you look, for example, about uh the way the the words meat tax have been used uh as a kind of, you know, back in the in the days, not so long ago, but a couple of years ago, where the Conservatives were saying a lot of ridiculous things about what Labour were going to do if and when they come to power. And one of them was they're going to put a meat tax. And again, they knew because of all of the ways that meat and identity are kind of interwoven, that that would rankle with some people, and then Labour say, Oh, we're not going to put in a meat tax, that being kind of politically toxic. But that is kind of what this would result in. If you didn't subsidize farms, meat would become a lot more expensive. It would, you know, it wouldn't be a meat tax, but the price of meat meat would go up. And that I think politicians would rather make the political choice of saying that meat is cheaper and the NHS will suffer a bit more. I mean, there is so much of it that that that is so backwards. I mean, for me, I I feel like, and again, I'm sound sounding like a kind of dyed-in-the-wall anti-capitalist here. I find the accumulation of wealth by a very small number of people absolutely grotesque. And the siphoning off of wealth from societies that means that it is the basic things, basic aspects of life, eating well, having a home, become unaffordable or aspirational for a large number of people. Shocking. And yet there is absolutely no political will to get people, corporations or the wealthiest to pay more tax.
SPEAKER_00:No, especially not in this the the sort of media climate we have where any sort of suggestion of doing so would be would be met with a severe rebuke. Um we've got a little bit of time left, not too much time, but I would like to just move this conversation of the price of life on a little bit to the idea of pets. Because I think pets is one of those uh is an interesting example of how actually as consumers and as individuals we might even start to place a little bit of a higher value on a non-human animal life over human animal life. In in the price of life, you speak to effective altruists, and effective altruism was was pioneered by uh, or the idea of sort of a utilitarian view of it was pioneered by Peter Singer, who who I've spoken with before, and he's an interesting man in in many ways. They sort of calculate roughly that to save uh the life of a child in Africa, I think it's about four and a half thousand dollars.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Which probably in sort of uh is comparable to the price that someone might pay in this country for a sort of a designer puppy. Now, ethically, I don't think that we should be buying puppies when we've got so many that need adopting and rescuing, especially. But take that side of it out of it, out of it and think about it from this perspective. If you have three and a half thousand pounds to spend and you want to design a puppy, is it unethical to buy that puppy rather than donate that money to side to save a child's life in Africa? And if you still choose to buy the puppy, are you saying that a dog's life has higher value than an African child's life?
SPEAKER_02:Well, from an effective altruist perspective, it would be totally unethical to buy that designer puppy because you could save so many more animals for the same amount of money. You could save thousands of chickens, thousands of fish. You are effectively acting in an emotional way by buying that puppy because it's cute and it's exactly how you want it to be. Uh I think a lot of the effective altruists who I spoke to, they see all lives as equal, animal and non-human animal, in which case there would be no difference between uh buying a puppy or saving the life of a child in Africa. However, um you could save many more lives if you were looking at non-human animal life by spending that money on different animals.
SPEAKER_00:That's interesting. And that that becomes a slightly complex moral issue, which is if you if you value human and animal life as being ethically the same, then ch spending four and a half thousand dollars, however much, to save an African child African child's life would be unethical when you could save many more lives if it was spent on reforming the chicken industry or or cutting down a fish.
SPEAKER_02:I I came to the conclusion that viewing all lives as equal and a purely utilitarian view leads you to conclusions that you would not make if you were really thinking ethically. And it leads to a scenario where you have billionaires in Silicon Valley stepping over the past-out bodies of people unconscious on the street in front of them in San Francisco and going to their foundations and pouring all their money into uh foundations that will support children in Africa because those lives are cheaper to save. Once you gamify philanthropy, once it becomes something where you can have a score and say, I donated X amount, X amount, therefore I've saved Y amount of lives, it kind of removes what I I believe, and this is my personal take on it, is it isn't just about brute saving of lives, it's about creating the world in which you want to live. And the world in which you want to live might involve you investing in causes that aren't good investments in terms of life saved, but make the world better because there aren't people dying of drug overdoses outside. There isn't, you know, suffering isn't as quantifiable as dying. Yeah. And so if you're looking purely at death, um, it can blinker you towards certain experiences. Um, and I think we do need to think about suffering as well as dying.
SPEAKER_00:And what's interesting about that idea of suffering, and and this also relates to sort of the idea of terrorist uh you know, compensation for for families of victims of terrorism is actually a lot of that compensation isn't down to, or in the case of someone who's been killed, isn't for the individual who's been killed, it's for those who are suffering, the bereavement, that that grief. Which also brings the question of how do we, if we think about human life and we place a value on a human's life, is the value we place in that human's life just strictly about the human, or is it about the people who are going to be impacted by that death? If that's the case, then you could make the argument that not all human life in terms of killing is the same morally. Yes. Because to kill someone, yeah, if if I have no friends, no family, killing me would not be as bad as potentially killing someone who has a big family, uh, you know, a wife, a husband, children who would mourn and grieve and feel terrible loss.
SPEAKER_02:The effect of altruists look at that actually as a concept. In fact, I uh there's a bit which I talk about in the book where I where somebody uh is discussing um from Give Well, which is a foundation that uses principles like this, utilitarian principles to help people decide where to give away their money. They look at when is the worst age for a child to die? Is it worse when a newborn dies, or is it worse when, for example, a a mother who has several children dies, where should they be focusing their philanthropic intervention? And they decided that it was probably at around eight years old because a newborn doesn't have meaningful connections with anyone really other than its its parents or maybe its siblings, a newborn, not even perhaps only its mother. Um, and the grief that will be caused will be terrible, but it will be self-contained. Whereas if an eight-year-old child dies, you lose all of those years that they would have had, and also they will have made meaningful connections, and people around them will be impacted by their death. So it involves thinking in that way. And again, these are useful thought experiments. As long as we use them as thought experiments, when you are using them as guiding principles for where you're going to pour your money, it becomes a separate thing. But I should say, you know, effective altruism has there is a lot that is really useful as an approach. Um, it has caused charities to become more efficient, more effective. It also, I mean, open phil, I don't write about this in the book, but open philanthropy, which is a foundation that operates according to these principles, has done some great things. For example, in focusing on brute numbers, I think they targeted McDonald's and made sure that McDonald's didn't use battery-produced eggs. And this is a small thing, but actually, in terms of the numbers, in terms of all of the egg McMuffins made on a daily basis, the amount of suffering is less because of this particular kind of advocacy. So if you're looking at it as a numbers game and looking at it in terms of suffering, there are there are there is good that you can do. But it is beguiling to think of things only in terms of numbers.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it's also hard to quantify suffering in terms of if you have 10 people suffering, is it better to relieve one person of all of their suffering and make them, you know, great, perfect again? Or is it better to reduce suffering a little bit for all 10 people?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, 10% for all 10.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Exactly. Um, and that's the thing about welfare, which is always interesting from like a vegan perspective, is how much do we focus on on abolition versus welfare? Welfare can bring more changes for larger numbers, but those changes are less meaningful than it would for them for the animals who were sped all of it.
SPEAKER_02:And what would how would you answer that question of oh is it better to alleviate suffering entirely for one or 10% for 10? It's a great question, Jenny.
SPEAKER_00:It's sadly we've run out of time. Um I think it's it's um it's it's tricky to kind of to value that because I don't I I approve of welfare reforms, but I don't advocate for welfare reforms from the perspective of if chickens had more space, it would make it okay to eat them. Um so my position is any step in the right direction is great, and I'll be delighted if chickens have a bit more space, or they're a breed that grows slightly slower. But it I worry that sometimes they can obscure us from recognizing that there's something fundamentally inherently wrong. It's not that the chickens reach slaughter weight in six weeks rather than 10 weeks, it's that they've been fattened for slaughter in in any capacity, no matter what that sort of time span is. And my issue with welfare is that I worry it stops people from from making the the change that I believe is the actually right change. But I also think that any incremental thing is undeniably a good thing as long as we keep incrementally moving to the the ultimate end goal in Myers, which is the abolition of animal farm in its totality.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That is actually all we have time for, I'm afraid. Um it's been really great speaking with you.
SPEAKER_02:It's been fascinating. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:You're welcome. It's absolutely flown by. Um I really appreciate that. And um I really do recommend both of your books to anyone listening. Um when I was reading them, we were speaking a little bit outside about this, but they're they're so stimulating intellectually. I I spent more time thinking than reading because I would read a dozen pages and I'd go, yeah, what are the implications of this? What does this mean? What is this? And for anyone who's interested in the future of our species in deep ethical and moral conundrums, I highly recommend both of your books to anyone listening.
SPEAKER_02:You're so kind, Ed. Coming from you, that really means a lot. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00:All right, well, thank you, Jenny. Thank you so much for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the disclosure podcast on whichever platform you listen to it. As doing so means that you can always stay up to date with new episodes. Leaving a review and sharing the podcast is also really helpful. And if you'd like to support the podcast and my work more generally, you can either make a donation through the link in the show notes or sign up to my substack where I post weekly and share my thoughts and feelings about the experience of living vegan. In the show notes, you can also find links to purchase my books. Thank you again for listening.