The vegan war machine 🌿

To understand why veganism has such a powerful engine of propaganda, it’s clearest to ignore the ethical noise and only follow the incentives.

We’re inundated with an explosion of pro-vegan science, documentaries, and plant-based food advertisements because plant-based food products have stronger economics than animal based foods, and can operate at investable margins.

There is no vegan conspiracy, but there is a decentralized network of corporations+investors, media personalities and scientists with strong incentives to promote a “plant-based future”

A member of our Discord has perfected a Seed Oil communication card through years of trial and error when dining out.

He has finally made it available for sale:

Use code SCOUTS25 for 25% off at SeedOilSafety.com 🫡

In short, food science is funded with hopes to sell processed food. (See Calley Means tweet) This is no different than the media-scientific-industrial complex of Pharma companies. Good luck monetizing sunlight, exercise and deep sleep.

Most individual actors in this system, whether they are producing a documentary or simply frying up an Impossible Burger at home don’t even see that they are part of this cyclone of money and influence.

An industry of visually-appealing and well-funded plant based products create a positive-feedback loop with consumer preferences, turning the cultural economic engine around an unnatural and impoverished way of eating.

How to scale a cow

It’s very hard to improve upon the design of a cow, but we’ve done our best. The modern Hollstein-Friesian cross produces 22,530 pounds of milk per year, ten times a heritage breed on traditional feed today, but we have basically hit the wall in cow technology.

(This is modern, high-output milk is worse in numerous ways, but it did feed many people cheaply)

When you can’t scale a cow any further, you enter the lab and try to scale ground up mushrooms and chemicals, and have an IPO around it. In the 1970s, being vegan was actually anti-corporate, but today it’s been flipped on its head, becoming a weaponized ideology for ultra-processed foods.

Impossible Foods has raised a total of $2 Billion dollars, giving it a tremendous war chest to wrap us in funhouse-mirrors of fake science and compassionate advertising.

Challenges in packaging animal products

Oreos used to be made with lard, but nearly all food copackers and highly scaled production lines must be Kosher today, so they decided to switch to seed oils.

“Getting the lard out: The koshering of the Oreo cookie”

From conversations with animal based food packagers like Masa Chips and Serenity Kids, there are incredible challenges in turning any animal fat or meat into a consumer packaged product, driving up their price and making it much harder for them to compete.

Compared to plant-based products, animal products:

• Can’t use Kosher or Vegan copackers

• Are generally less shelf stable

• Are generally more expensive, seed oils are dirt cheap

That’s why there are 1000 seed oil-fried potato chips for every Rosie’s: It’s far riskier to go animal based. They can compete at scale, but it’s much harder to get there.

The new wave

The last wave of vegan products have largely belly flopped, though they still splashed billions of dollars into warping consumer preferences along the way.

Beyond Meat, Impossible Burger and Oatly are some of the worst investments of the past decade, as consumers slowly woke up to the fact that they were eating chow made for lab rats.

The next wave of food products to secure the funding and take their stab at market dominance are lab-grown, fermented, cultured and genetically modified attempts at meats and fat. Hoxton Farms is culturing lard, for example:

Currently, none of these companies are near the unit economics of a plain old animal, and it’s unclear if they are even vegan, but investors are hopeful and pumping in the cash.

Lab grown foods companies are fighting a tough battle as they are currently more expensive than animal products with no clear message to deliver the consumer about health benefits. Either reach scale and get cheaper than meat, or foment ethical hysteria around cow farts.

The hard truth

It doesn’t feel like it, but Americans spend a lower percentage of their income today on food than at any point in history, and less than any country on Earth.

Factory farming is a disgusting practice that produces low quality meat and milk. We need to accept the reality that regenerative methods are inherently going to cost much more, even at scale. (Don’t google “Pig lagoon”)

Luckily, we wield the flaming sword of truth. If you want to live in a country where real food, pastured under sunlight is available you’ll need to support the farmers and businesses supplying it.

At SOS we’ll do our best to make this easier, and we’re open to ideas.

Zuck doesn’t have enough Macadamia-Wagyu cows on his Hawaiian estate for all of us, sadly.

🫡