I’m Karthik, a scientist by training in biochemical engineering and systems/quantitative biology. I’ve been keen on the Effective Altruism movement since first hearing about it on Sam Harris’ podcast in 2016. I’m particularly motivated by the problem of farmed animal agriculture, and have steered my life and pursuits accordingly. I currently work as a data scientist at Climax Foods to develop next-generation vegan food products. And I’ve also authored a book about the impending end of animal agriculture—focusing on how poor and inefficient animals are as a production system (the “technological” argument against animal ag). Book is titled After Meat, and more info is here: https://aftermeatbook.com/
Karthik Sekar
Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative
AMA: I’ve authored a new book (After Meat) about the technological limits of animals for production and why we’ll do better
The Tipping Point Case for Vegan Advocacy
I love the story and helpful summarization of Singer’s mindset. His emphasis on the truth and listening to your detractors is an inspiration.
Reading an essay from him in college was my first step toward appreciating animal welfare and steering my life accordingly. I can’t imagine how different my focus would be if it weren’t for Peter Singer.
The details will matter as far as what will have the most impact.
If she’s starting another plant-based burger or milk company, a la Beyond Meat or Oatly, then I’d say she can’t add so much value because there’s already a ton of activity solving that problem. But if she has novel solutions; for example, a new way to make semi-solid lipids at scale, then she can add a lot. Semi-solid lipids are a problem for nearly every alternative food effort; there two “natural” options with coconut oil and palm oil. Also, for what it’s worth, many of these companies are struggling with hiring. So rather than starting her own startup, she could join and help an impactful one. That’d likely provide even more safety.
And likewise, with the non-profit, the details matter too. I write that fighting agriculture subsidies is the biggest barrier to the alternative food revolution. At the time of writing, I couldn’t find any organization addressing this problem specifically (likely because lobbying efforts are capped for non-profits). If our wunderkind is willing to tackle that, then she could have a substantial impact.
I don’t dispute that. We want to make it as convenient for folks as possible to feed their cats vegan.
I’ll reach out to my vegan pet food contacts and see if they know.
I am honestly not sure.
Yes. I hesitated from forecasting an exact value for how decrease in consumption of meat by cats affects deforestation. It’s hard due to the way animal agriculture divides up a carcass and sells the different parts. We almost have to look at cat food as a subsidy to eliminate from animal agriculture. The true reduction will depend on the elasticity of demand.
Furthermore, the asks here are modest: Wouldn’t surprise me if even ~$1M can fund, say, 10 ingredient approvals and 1 RCT.
- 7 May 2023 14:25 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative by (
A cat I used to have would wear a collar with a bell when she went outside. It seemed to alert all of the birds around her.
The reports largely echo my worries about the tractability and feasibility of cultured (in vitro) meat. When I talked with my friend at GFI about it, she sent me this post that GFI authored, in particular responding to the Counter article: https://gfi.org/cultivated/tea-statement/
The post indicates that there’s more information beyond what’s available publicly and that these companies and investors are well-versed with the challenges. I know the post rings of a “trust us; we know what we’re doing” sentiment and asks for a lot to be taken at face value. So, the Truth is out there, but, unfortunately, hidden under trade secrets.
As far resource allocation goes to have the most impact, I wouldn’t eliminate cultured meat funding completely, but I would reduce it compared to plant- and fermentation-based technology. It’s hard to prognosticate how certain technologies will fare, and so I prefer a hedging, diversified portfolio approach. For that reason, it’s good to have cultured meat R&D efforts. Cultured meat may even help in a specific way, such as supplying a few key ingredients but never forming into an entire meat replacement.
Secondly, it’s clear that we just need more public disclosure in the cultured meat space. I wouldn’t mind more academic efforts tackling the problems and publishing papers.
Private funding for alternative food is eye-popping, to say the least. “Buzzy” is a good descriptor :)
I hesitate to make any proclamations on what’s too much or too little, as it does depend on the counterfactual. I think the problems that Beyond Meat are trying to solve are worthwhile. Giving them cheaper capital helps their efforts. Glad it’s going there versus, say, Palantir.
I spent Chapter 9 discussing specific funding opportunities, but I thought of a couple of ones since the book went to the presses:
Fundamental characterization of casein and casein micelles. Casein micelles impart the desired properties of cheese: the meltability, stretchiness, as well as the ability to form cheese curds. Much about casein biochemistry is just unknown: how do the different casein molecules form into the casein micelles? What are the caseins and micelles doing during the stretch process? These are questions that can be answered by academic efforts with modest funding (millions).
How should we tackle agriculture subsidies? In Chapter 10, I write about how intricate and interconnected the subsidies are. The tangled web makes it hard to know where even to start. Do we go for something big like crop insurances? Or something more tractable such as lobbying to exclude animal agriculture from the EQIP program, which helps them save money by getting funding for environmental compliance. (https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/programs/financial/eqip/)
If we could pay for a team to sit down and calculate all this, then I think that would pay dividends. It’s boring and unsexy, but, man, it would be so impactful.
That’s how I understand it too.
Dogs eat more meat than cats in the United States. So in terms of magnitude, dogs are a bigger issue.
Currently, it seems to be easier to rear vegan dogs. There’s more retail options and more studies. Furthermore, dogs are perceived as omnivores, and so the concerns about feeding them plant-based food are less acute.
As far as where to put our resources, I think, yes, in the long run, we’ll probably want to focus more on dogs, but we’re in a terrible place right now with respect to cat food. I think modest resources here could do much good. If we had more ingredient approvals and a few RCTs, it would open more options and trust for vegan cat food. I would anticipate these efforts costing, at most, a couple of million of dollars.
Re: Source of meat: I am not sure. I was just suspecting maybe (maybe not) cats might tell from the taste better than humans? But I hope not.
It could certainly be true with initial vegan cat food recipes, but then our goal would be to figure out why cats prefer the meat option and then to close that gap by developing new vegan formulations.
Indeed. To be clear, when I refer to publications, I refer to traditionally published ones: where the papers are submitted to journals, editors will determine if it’s impactful enough, and then it’s sent out to review. This is such a belabored process, especially in the age of the internet. And for what it’s worth, the competition is exacerbated by the lack of space in lofty journals.
And sure, we can’t jettison publications without something taking it’s place. It still could be papers, just not traditionally published ones. We saw this play out during the pandemic where papers on Coronavirus were placed on pre-print servers such as BioRxiv and MedRxiv. Comments and refutations were posted in real-time. In my view, science needs to proceed in this direction. We need more real-time science. We can’t have science that remains hidden from the public view because Reviewer #3 thinks one more experiment is needed, thus dragging out publication by another year.
We’re not going to diminish competition without creating more permanent positions in academia or opportunities for academic scientists. Competition is so fierce to become a professor, which is in short supply and seemingly the only path to work permanently in academia. One idea is to have more non-traditional routes, such as a loftier, permanent post-doctoral scientist positions. These could be scientists who don’t run a lab, but may work in one and do primary research themselves.
Thanks for this post. I agree with many of your points. I see science as a problem-solving engine, and yes, if it’s not operating as well as it could be then that’s a huge opportunity cost for issues such as treating diseases, transitioning to clean energy/meat, etc.
One thought about the publishing and incentives: If funders can be convinced not to care about publications or to weigh other efforts the same or more, e.g. posting and commenting on pre-prints, then that could break the strangle that the publishing industry holds on the scientific enterprise. Institutions mostly care about how well a researcher raises money. If they see that they can hire a professor who doesn’t have lofty publications, but will have access to funding, then I suspect traditional publications will become increasingly moot. To a certain degree, we see this with Math and Physics, where many impactful papers just get published as pre-prints on ArXiV. The papers may never actually be traditionally published.
Life sciences research still has a way to go. I was thinking if private funders such as HHMI or the Gates Foundation could be lobbied to weigh publications less in their funding decisions, then that may help here.
The argument isn’t solely based on the survey data. It’s supported by fundamentals of biochemistry, metabolism, and digestion too. I won’t presume to know your biology knowledge. Earlier, you said “biology as a field is dumb”, which may or may not be indicative of much personal study of biology. So I apologize if this is over-explaining, but I feel that I may have glossed over it when making the post:
Mammals such as cats will digest food matter into constituent molecules. Those molecules are chemically converted to other molecules—collectively, metabolism--, and energy and biomass (muscles, bones) are built from those precursors. For cats to truly be obligate carnivores, there would have to be something exceptional about meat: (A) There would have to be essential molecules—nutrients—that cannot be sourced anywhere else OR (B) the meat would have to be digestible in a way that’s not possible with plant matter.
(A) is very easy to correct for. Just test formulations for missing nutrients (molecules) and add them. So far, there are no “special” meat molecules that can’t be sourced from elsewhere. (B) is making a more digestible formulation. If we extract pea protein and measure the digestibility, we’ll know if it’ll work for a cat or not.
On (A), AAFCO is setting this already with their nutritional guidelines, e.g. minimum amount of proteins, vitamins, etc. On (B), part of the ingredient testing is making sure the food is digestible for cats (also testing for toxicity).
So any plant-based food that passes AAFCO guidelines is nutritionally complete for cats. Ami does, for example.
One of my points is that people’s assumptions about carnivory fail to consider biochemistry. Yes, the formal scientific studies are lacking, but it really shouldn’t matter based on what’s known about more fundamental biology. Do we need long term studies to absolutely know that Yellowclothea people are safe to wear purple?
I agree that more formal studies higher on hierarchy of evidence would convince folks, seemingly like yourself. And to that point, I advocate for more of it. But given what I’ve researched and what I know about biology, I would feel comfortable raising a cat vegan healthily and recommending others to do the same.
Yes, I agree that we need more studies and more science here. The limitation is funding. I am campaigning for that.
Another comment brought up a similar point, see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AFPXXepkgitbvTtpH/getting-cats-vegan-is-possible-and-imperative?commentId=yM9hvEHYHwJnZ7PfM
Evolution-based, appeal to nature arguments aren’t good. As I suggested in the post, please see the first chapter of After Meat which discusses in detail. Key points: (1) Evolution doesn’t select for optimal health; it selects for propagation. What cats evolved on versus what they need today are different. (2) Nutrient deficiencies are one of the easiest things to measure. Measure vitals and look for what’s depleted. (3) There’s nothing magical about meat. We know how metabolism and biochemistry works, so for meat to essential, there would need to be essential nutrients that are only found in meat. That has not be found after decades of research.
Vegan diets for cats will constantly develop and be iterated. Again, we should continue to make better and better formulations. We can get to something that cats prefer versus meat and that’s more healthy for them.
This is not how ethics work. If someone has a personal choice to eat meat unnecessarily, I wouldn’t say that’s a decision to be respected. Once we get to a world where there are convenient vegan cat food options that promote better health for cats, it’d be unethical to stick with meat-based options.
Hi Jeff, I heard back from Andrew Knight who researches this issue. His findings suggest that it’s not actually an issue. I updated the post. He highlights this link: https://sustainablepetfood.info/vegetarian-feline-diets/#4
I’m still unclear on the problems that Bitcoin is solving versus fiat. I can also imagine many issues that Bitcoin has that fiat doesn’t. This post is a one-sided take, and it’d be more honest to put both the disadvantages/advantages side-by-side by fiat. There are clear advantages to our current system that we’d give up by switching more to Bitcoin; for example, if I lose my banking account login information, I can recover it with the help of a customer service representative. Whereas if I lose my wallet keys, I’m screwed.
Furthermore, fiat benefits the population because a central actor can intervene. I don’t see it as necessarily evil that the Fed can perform quantitative easing to fight inflation or stimulate economic growth, say when a crippling pandemic hits. Could many of the issues you’re highlighting be solved just by better functioning government?
Some other more specific issues:
Why/how does Bitcoin solve corruption? Also, all the transactions are public. If I’m performing Bitcoin transactions in China, the government will be able to surveil my transactions. Whereas, no one else can deduce my Bank of America transactions without having access to the system.
I’m not seeing how this solved by Bitcoin. Malefactors can obfuscate financial behavior with Bitcoin too.
Let me end by asking whether Bitcoin can solve significant problems better than fiat. Problems include climate change, suffering, risk of pandemics, risk of misaligned AI, disease, and poverty. With scant altruism resources, are we best served to invest it into Bitcoin projects in order to do the most good?