THE FUTURE OF MEAT.

One of the reasons we're likely to eat less meat in coming decades is that restaurants are going to be cutting back on portions. And not because they're hippies who realized that animals are our friends when they participated in an empathy circle in their sophomore year at Reed. Rather, it's because they're business people. Chef David Change explains:

Recently I was chatting with one of my purveyors about meat, prices, and the food chain. Michael raises Tamworth pigs in upstate New York and rocks his John Deere cap without a trace of irony. He's an honest, upright citizen, a real person, not some revolutionary or back-to-the-land type...The cost of food--of producing and procuring it--is soaring. In the restaurant world, it's all anyone can talk about. And the thing is, this is no temporary spike; it's actually a massive correction. Ever since my parents came to America in 1968, it has been meat and milk 24/7. They emigrated from war-ravaged Korea and, like Americans coming out of World War II, they couldn't believe--and didn't resist--the Crazy Eddie abundance of the American agricultural industry. As far as my parents are concerned, meat grows on trees.But guess what? The machinery that's pumped so much meat into our lives over the last half century was never built to last, and now it's breaking down big-time. Feed is more expensive. Gasoline is more expensive. Milk, rice, butter, corn--it's all going through the roof. And for the foreseeable future, it's not coming back down.Farmer Michael's feed costs have risen 400 percent in the last twelve months. To make a profit on the beautiful turkeys his family is raising in time for Thanksgiving, he'll have to charge a hundred bucks a bird. At Momofuku, I'm paying 150 percent more for humanely raised pork belly than I was paying at this time last year.

Chang does hint at one particular fix: You can make meat cheaper by raising it ever more cruelly. Efficiency can be the simple function of suffering. Of overcrowding. Of antibiotics and force-fattening and inhumane slaughter. That may not make meat cheaper, but with some real innovations in industrial farming, we can probably slow the price in growth. It will be more dangerous for us, of course: More disease, more environmental damage, more land destruction, more heart disease. That's not the sort of thing a decent society would probably permit, but if the procedures can be well-enough hidden, and the advertisements smartly crafted ("Happy cows produce good milk!"), it might just work. And because it's considered both politically suicidal and unacceptably elitist to say that meat should be used sparingly -- as a side dish or condiment, which is how most cultures have used it for generations, and is healthier to boot -- there'll be little in the way of counter-claims.