If you’ve become a Vegan or Vegetarian in recent years, it’s likely that you did so because of a marketing campaign run by people like myself. The purpose of this campaign is not actually to stop you eating meat – but more precisely to turn you against the animal livestock industry.
Our techniques include the use of celebrity vegetarians and Influencers, on-line videos and shockumentaries, and the commissioning of reports to give authority to our information. Our campaign gets inside your head by focusing on the issues which are most emotive to you – your personal health, environmental concerns, and animal welfare.
This doesn’t mean that you’ve been tricked or lied to, or that your reasons for not eating meat are any less valid. It simply means that someone else has put the idea in your head and then you’ve decided that you like the idea and will adopt it as your own.
It just so happens that your decision to go along with our idea will also benefit our client. This is the whole purpose of Public Relations. It’s a form of invisible advertising and it’s how people like me make a living.
So why does our client want you to stop eating meat? Well, strictly speaking he doesn’t. What he wants is to turn you off eating meat from our current system of animal farming. He can then be there to offer an alternative source of meat which can be marketed as ethical, healthy, and environmentally friendly. This is a well-used tactic in PR and marketing and is often the reason for negative publicity about certain food stuffs. Our clients will always have an alternative product to offer you instead.
The purpose of our PR campaign is to gain public acceptance for meat which has been grown in a lab. And the reason our client wants to do this is because his company owns the licence for the necessary technology needed by companies who want to move into this market.
The Technological Era
Technology is about to change how we do everything we need as Humans. And that includes how we produce our food. Bio-engineering, genome sequencing, and Artificial Intelligence are about to reinvent our methods of food production for life in the coming Technological Era.
Technology will be used to create brand new species of nutrition-dense crops; to give fruit and veg a natural protective skin for non-refrigerated transport; and to use 3D-Printing to deliver your own genetically tailored personal nutrition program straight to your kitchen.
But it’s not all about the crops we grow – the way we produce our meat is also about to have a hi-tech makeover as we move the source of our animal protein from outside on the farm to inside in the lab.
Lab Grown Meat
So if you’re a Vegan or Vegetarian would you eat a burger that’s been grown in a lab?
It would still be real chicken, real beef and real pork – but instead of being produced by the slaughter of an animal it would actually be produced from the growth of animal stem-cells in a process now made possible by modern technology.
Lab grown meat will be marketed as healthy, environmentally friendly, sustainable, and cruelty-free, and the groundwork for this marketing campaign has already been prepared with the creation of the modern day Vegan and Vegetarian movements.
Lab grown meat will be on our supermarket shelves in the very near future, and the only reasons that it’s not already available are the cost of production and the difficulty in replicating the recognised flavour of the particular meat.
But whereas the cost of production will come down in time, an unexpected consequence of the taste issue could see a boom in the popularity of the exotic meat market.
Zebra, Giraffe or Elephant Burger?
Whilst sales of lab grown beef or chicken might struggle because of our prepossessed ideas of how it should taste, this won’t be an issue for more unfamiliar meats.
Elephant, Giraffe and Zebra products will be no more difficult to produce than from the animals which make up our current diet. These new additions to our usual choice could easily become a normal part of our regular menu and could even inspire new cultural and social gatherings such as the ‘exotic meat dinner party’.
In fact, one start-up company is already assembling a ‘Noah’s Ark’ library of stem cells from different animals in order to react to the demand, and the choices available will throw up some interesting moral dilemmas as they offer meats which are seen as taboo in our current society.
So, if you are a currently vegan or vegetarian, would you go back to eating meat which has addressed your concerns over environmental, health or animal welfare issues? Our client thinks you will.
But another question will be asked of the wider public – will we be happy to eat dog, cat or maybe dolphin? Of course, for those who are really daring they could even opt for the ultimate in taboo food stuffs. Human burger anyone?
The Long Blue Wall 