In fact, octopuses are one of the species about to gain a new level of protection in the UK, along with decapods (lobsters, shrimp, and so on) and all vertebrates. The new Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, currently working its way through parliament, calls for the creation of a committee to assess whether government decisions have due regard for the welfare of animals “as sentient beings”. It will join EU legislation, which has recognised animal sentience since 2009, as well as that of countries including Australia, Switzerland and Brazil. Going a step further, a number of bodies in recent years have attempted to secure legal personhood for individual animals held in zoos and research facilities, though with little success to date.

These efforts owe much to the concept of “speciesism”, popularised in the Seventies by bioethicist Peter Singer. Drawing a provocative comparison with racism and sexism, he argues that there is no reason that a morality based on minimising suffering should be limited only to humans. Fifty years ago, this argument was radical. But today, the idea (or something like it) is banal enough that the passing of the Animal Sentience Bill has come up against virtually no opposition. Few would argue that animals do not have sentience (“the capacity to experience feelings and sensations”) — though the moral implications remain much more controversial.

The fact that this conversation is being had at all is in itself a striking reflection of how far the Enlightenment moral project has come. If you suggested to the average person living 500 years ago that keeping octopuses in confinement was an unconscionable cruelty, I expect they’d have thought you were mad. This was an era when public torture and executions were good family fun, and London Bridge was decorated with the severed heads of victims; when people thought nothing of children or servants being flogged for misdemeanours, and unwanted infants were left to perish in their thousands. People would have been inured to brutality and death to a degree that is almost unimaginable to us nowadays.

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While the world around us has become steadily less violent, until the very recent past any stirrings of empathy for animals would have been hammered out of people at an early age. If from childhood you are wringing the necks of chickens you’ve raised yourself and plucking them for dinner, there is no space for worrying about their sentience. What good would it do you?

The emotions that guide our morality — empathy, guilt, a sense of fairness — don’t exist to guide us towards some objective moral truth. We’re evolved creatures, and these are adaptations that help us get along with each other — and aid our relatives or allies in times of need. Depending on when and where we live, these emotions might take very different forms.

Today, a child’s interaction with live animals is most probably limited to pets, who are increasingly treated as part of the family, or even as an alternative to having children of one’s own. For many of us (or at least, the 99% who aren’t vegan), reminders of the flesh and blood origins of the food we eat elicit pangs of guilt, and feel like a hangover from a more bloodthirsty and animalistic past.

But this is the elephant in the room in all discussions of animal welfare. Despite our newfound squeamishness over seeing how the sausage is made, the exploitation of animals for food is central to our species’ way of life. As the human population has become much larger and wealthier in the last century, global meat consumption has climbed to unprecedented heights, both per capita and in absolute terms. When it comes to chickens in particular, the scale of increase boggles the mind — over ten times as many chickens are eaten today as at the beginning of the Sixties. Though supermarkets in the Anglosphere are increasingly likely to stock plant-based No Chicken Kievs as an alternative, these put barely a dent in the market for the real thing, which is projected to continue expanding for years to come.

For all our talk of animal welfare, the ancient and widespread practice of killing animals for food is not going anywhere any time soon. And while this is the case, legal proclamations like the sentience bill seem rather toothless and hypocritical. What can it mean to recognise animal sentience if we also condone the slaughter of animals in their billions every year?

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It’s not just the eating of animals where a true rejection of speciesism would have profound consequences. For instance, if we stop and think about the sentience of rats and mice — social, intelligent creatures — can we really justify razing entire communities of them simply because we don’t want them in our restaurants and cafés?

Then there are the animal genocides we commit in the name of conservation. Efforts to preserve the biological integrity of the Galapagos islands have seen sniper hit squads hunting down invasive goats by helicopter. In 2018, the largest eradication scheme in history led to the island of South Georgia, home to albatrosses and other endangered seabirds, being declared officially rodent-free. And if you have a pet cat, her continued survival depends on the deaths of the chickens, cows, and fish that go into her can of Purina, not to mention the hundred or so small mammals and birds she personally dispatches in an average year.

Should we let the albatross and the Galapagos tortoise go extinct, or euthanise our pets for the greater good of animal kind? And for that matter, what about all the carnivorous animals in nature subjecting their brethren to horrific ends every minute of every day? What of those that die in even greater numbers from exposure, starvation and disease? Why shouldn’t our duty of care for animals as sentient beings extend to preventing their suffering too, as it surely would for humans?

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All of these questions become impossibly knotty unless we do what we’re accustomed to doing for our own sanity and convenience, which is to draw a sharp dividing line between humans and non-human animals, declaring that only the individuals on the near side of that line are worthy of our full moral consideration. Even if we could prevent all animal suffering, we wouldn’t want to — this would mean a total dismantling of the circle of life that keeps all the planet’s ecosystems in balance.

But this kind of approach becomes less and less acceptable to a world that is increasingly sensitive to violence, and where morality is derived from utilitarian principles (whose founder, Jeremy Bentham, said of animals: “The question is not can they reason … but can they suffer?”) rather than God-given (“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you”). With speciesism, we may have reached the first point where modern moral sensibilities, having emerged from instincts evolved to help our species thrive as small bands of kin millions of years ago, hit a major roadblock imposed by the limitations of the physical world.

The UK’s animal sentience bill is brief, containing no detail as to how exactly animal interests should be weighted. Even PETA’s press release celebrating the passing of the bill doesn’t mention any specific practices that they hope it might restrict. As our aversion to violence increases further, I expect we will see a ramping up of non-specific proclamations in favour of animal rights, and of debates over banning things such as trophy hunting or foie gras, which are so minor in the scheme of things they might as well be symbolic gestures.

But at the same time, the number of animals killed for our consumption shows no sign of declining or even plateauing. A hundred years from now the prospect of putting a genuinely anti-speciesist worldview into practice is likely to remain as impracticable as it is today. Our moral intuitions may be changing, but we have no way of escaping the natural world that we’re part of, red in tooth and claw. A substantially brighter future for animals seems unlikely. And for humans, the future spells a lot more cognitive dissonance, as our evolving ideals will continue to bump up against the constraints of the world in which we find ourselves.

But don’t despair. Instead of the annual jamboree that you probably couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be invited to, there’s an online event called The Davos Agenda. This opened on Monday with a “special address” by Xi Jinping.

What could be more Davos than China’s communist dictator telling a bunch of virtual capitalists that we should “remove barriers, not erect walls”? Inspirational stuff — and I’m sure a great comfort to the people of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.

For Davos-sceptics, however, this will only confirm suspicions that something has gone very wrong with global capitalism — with the World Economic Forum at the centre of it all. The fact that we’ve exported so much of our productive capacity to China and other countries is one concern. But the bigger worry is about what we’re getting back from the globalised economy. 

For Westerners, capitalism is first and foremost a consumer experience. In the 20th century, the system triumphed over its socialist rival because it delivered the goods. After the long, dark centuries of scarcity, we suddenly found ourselves in a time of plenty. We were grateful — but not, let it be noted, pathetically grateful. Indeed, the real clincher for consumer capitalism is that it made us feel strong. 

Motorised transport — above all the car — gave us the ability to go where we wanted, when we wanted. Combined with modern construction methods, our newfound mobility also massively expanded the supply of new housing. Space and privacy, previously reserved for the rich became available to the masses.

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Then there was the food. Today, we romanticise the kitchen table as the heart of traditional family life. But in most homes it was also a traditional — and very necessary — instrument of rationing. Consumer capitalism transformed the situation. Above all, there was the miracle of meat every day, not just on special occasions; the modern world is defined as much by beef and pork as it is by steel and silicon. 

Of course, abundance comes at a cost. There are the obvious downsides of excess; but also our growing distance from the old ways: the rhythms of nature, the bonds of community, the dignity of craftsmanship. Yet we didn’t sacrifice these deep connections in return for mere comfort. Rather, we were offered an alternative form of vitality: the freedom of the road; the mastery of owning one’s home; the visceral satisfaction of unrestricted carnivory. It might seem strange to describe these things as cultural goods, but within a certain set of consumerist values, that’s exactly what they are.  

Beyond its merely material comforts, the consumer society — especially the American version — offered an empowered, independent and, dare I say it, manly way of life. Whether or not one approves, the fact is that it gave birth to a distinctive culture — one to which most of us remain attached.

Nonetheless, it’s now under threat. While the global economy produces more than ever, there’s a growing anxiety that the associated sense of empowerment — what could be called the red meat of capitalism — is about to be snatched away from us. 

That’s literally the case when it comes to food. One only has to look at the effort being made to promote meat-substitutes. Most distastefully, there’s the argument that we should feed the world on insect protein. A quick search of the World Economic Forum website reveals an obsession with the idea. Here’s a small selection of articles from the last few years: “Worms for dinner? Europe backs insect based food”; “Good grub: why we might be eating insects soon”; and “Fancy a bug burger?”

The house journals of global capitalism, the Financial Times and The Economist, take a similar line. Both publications advocate for entomophagy beneath perky headlines such as “Eating bugs: a culinary idea with legs” and “Why eating insects makes sense”.

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Yet a backlash is underway. “I will not eat the bugs!” has become a rallying cry on the alt — and not-so-alt — Right. The golden age of capitalism gave us affordable meat, and there’s a slice of public opinion that’s in no mood to accept substitutes.

We’re not just talking food here, but a whole way of life. Consider the second part of the anti-Davos mantra: “I will not live in the pod!” This refers to the proposition that we should radically rethink how we allocate living space in crowded, unaffordable cities. And by “rethink”, I mean “reduce” — both in terms of floor area and privacy. In place of apartments and houses, a WEF report invites us to consider “tiny homes” (i.e. boxes) and experiments in “shared living” (i.e. dormitories).  

Then there is mobility. Never mind the “war on the motorist”, vehicle automation threatens to abolish the motorist. In the golden age of capitalism, people drove cars; but Davos looks forward to a future in which cars drive people.  

It’s not difficult to see all this as a process of disempowerment — indeed of emasculation. I’m not surprised to see Right-wingers, especially in the US, leading the backlash. It’s as if some alien force has taken control of capitalism, pulling it in a new and unAmerican direction. I’m also not surprised to see the WEF — with its rhetoric around “The Great Reset” — become a symbol of this apparent change of course. 

Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, Davos isn’t to blame. All of the trends that the Right-wingers see as threatening their kind of capitalism are in fact a consequence of it. 

It’s a paradox of productivity. The greater the abundance of goods and services we produce, the greater the number of people who get to enjoy them. Unfortunately, it also means we use up more of the enabling resources that can’t be as easily multiplied. The most obvious example is the car, or rather the space required for cars. There was a time when the freedom of the road really meant something. But as roads fill up, there’s no choice but to impose speed limits, one-way systems, road charging and other measures required to save lives and keep cities moving. Self-driving cars, if and when we get them, are just the next step — a means of reducing driver error and thus making the most of limited road capacity. After all, that’s what free markets are supposed to do: maximise resource efficiency.

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The same applies to living space. That too is limited, especially in city centres — and, therefore, we can expect the laws of supply and demand to have their inevitable impact. You may not want to live in a pod, but if that’s all you can afford, then you have a choice: either take the deal or move somewhere less expensive. 

Eating the bugs is a yet another response to market forces. Meat is delicious, which is why demand for it is going up as more of the world’s people get rich enough to afford it. Supply responds to demand, but also pushes harder against natural limits — like the availability of land for feed crops. There are ethical concerns too — and so producers and consumers look for alternatives. If you see supermarkets filling their shelves with an ever wider range of meatless meat products, it’s not because someone at Davos told them to. 

What the malcontents see as a conspiracy is just the market doing its thing. And Davos, when it comes down to it, is just a fancy trade fair for a global economy selling whatever it can at a competitive price. 

Of course, that still leaves a lot of good reasons for rejecting the “Davos agenda” — but if you do, then you’re going to have to contemplate a rather more radical break with consumer capitalism. I don’t expect many takers. If the choice is between eating the bugs or eating only carrots, then most people will eat the bugs. 

While Americans everywhere are eager to pretend that the virus is under control, the situation in Wisconsin is getting precarious. According to the state’s Department of Health Services, a total of 920 people in Brown County — where Green Bay is located — have tested positive for Covid-19, up 603 from a week ago. The infection rate in the county is 3.54 cases per 1,000 residents — the highest in the state. By point of comparison, in Dane County, where the capital city of Madison is located, the rate is just .79 per 1,000.

The explanation for that disparity is simple: Dane County is, for the most part, a middle-class region.  Residents work predominantly for the state government, its legal apparatus, the huge University of Wisconsin and the technology sector. Brown County, in contrast, is working class, with the meat packing industry a big employer. As we’ve already seen (if we’ve been paying attention) this virus is particularly cruel to the working class.

Americans are huge consumers of meat. They eat 124 kilos per person per year, which puts them near the top of the league table of carnivores. Among major countries, only Denmark and New Zealand consume more.  Americans aren’t about to let a pandemic get in the way of their meat consumption — especially not with the barbecue season heating up. That demand for meat has placed a great strain on the processing industry — and particularly its workers.

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Earlier this month, one of the largest pork-producing plants in the US — Tyson Foods of Sioux Falls, South Dakota — closed indefinitely because nearly 300 of its employees had tested positive for Coronavirus. That was the first real hint of worrisome trend. Last week Smithfields, a huge pork processor, temporarily closed two plants because of the virus. At one plant, which employs nearly 4,000 largely Hispanic workers, almost 900 people were infected.

The spike in Brown County has been linked to JBS Packerland, a meat industry plant in Green Bay. Infectious disease experts have found that meat processing plants have become hot spots because employees have to work in close quarters, making social distancing impossible. Wet animal carcasses are passed from person to person along the production line, acting as conduits for the disease. The workforce at these plants is made up largely of recently arrived Hispanic immigrants who live in crowded housing. Throw in the language barrier, and it’s easy to see why controlling the spread of the virus within the packing industry is extremely difficult.

So far, 22 packing plants in the US have closed. Some 3,300 workers have been diagnosed with the virus, and 20 have died, but those figures are rising with every passing day. Plant closures were motivated by the need to protect the lives of workers, a noble principle. But the consequence has been a severe drop in the supply of meat — up to one quarter in the case of pork. There’s talk of having to euthanise millions of animals because of the lack of processing capacity in the industry at the moment.

Last Sunday, John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, took out full-page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times warning that “as pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close … millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain”. In an intentionally apocalyptic tone, Tyson warned: “the nation’s food supply is breaking”. That’s not strictly true, since, for the moment, it’s mainly the meat industry that’s in peril, not the entire food supply. But, given the American fondness for meat, Tyson’s scaremongering hit home.

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Tyson is a long-time friend of Sonny Perdue, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary. Both made their fortunes in the chicken industry. Tyson and Perdue appear to have had a word in Donald Trump’s ear. On Tuesday, the President invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) mandating that meat is a vital commodity and ruling that packing plants must remain open.

According to the executive order, closures “threaten the continued functioning of the national meat and poultry supply chain, undermining critical infrastructure during the national emergency”. The order designates that meatpacking plants are part of the critical infrastructure of the nation. Cynics might notice how quickly Trump invoked the DPA with respect to the meat supply, compared with his much slower response in the case of test kits, PPE and ventilators.

Along with that executive order came a “hold harmless” decree which stipulates that the plants cannot be held liable for the spread of the illness among employees. Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines designed to protect the worker in these factories have been temporarily relaxed in order to address the threat of meat shortages. Nowhere has there been mention, by the President or his assistants, that now might be a good time to cut back on consumption.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), the largest US meatpacking union, has demanded that the Trump administration compel meat companies to provide proper protective equipment and frequent coronavirus testing for slaughterhouse workers. That demand, however, is likely to fall on deaf ears. The unions, already weak in the US, are powerless against a determined President who loves his hamburgers, and who seems to take delight in using this crisis to assert his power. It’s easy for him to argue that desperate times require desperate measures.

The workers in those packing plants are the innocent lambs led helplessly to slaughter. They’re faced with a stark choice: they can go back to work and risk their health, or they can protect their health and lose their jobs. With unemployment approaching 20%, the employers hold all the cards. Finding replacement workers at the slaughterhouses shouldn’t prove too difficult, even if the job has suddenly become deadly.

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By Justin Webb

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his novel about the harsh conditions of immigrant workers in America’s meatpacking industry. Ironically, most middle-class readers of the book ended up more concerned about the insanitary processing of meat than about the welfare of those workers. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” wrote Sinclair, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Things haven’t really changed much since that book was published. Americans have always been more concerned about the meat they consume than about the unfortunate people who process it. No one really wants to think about what goes on in a slaughterhouse.

America has been hit in the stomach again. What we’re seeing is a particularly stark example of a phenomenon that will become painfully apparent in the weeks to come. And let us not pretend that this is an exclusively American story. Powerful people desperately want a return to normal. Normality, however, will be restored by the underclass – the low-paid, powerless workers who face the choice of protecting their health or protecting their livelihood.

In truth, it’s not a choice at all; those workers have no alternative but to become martyrs in this battle for meat. Middle-class habits will always trump working-class well-being.

Peterson Sr has, I learn, claimed a few times that eating nothing but beef, salt and water has rid him of depression, anxiety,  gingivitis, and, apparently, snoring. He got the idea from Mikhaila, his daughter, who had a variety of childhood health problems — rheumatoid arthritis, depression, “idiopathic hypersomnia” — which, she says, all cleared up after she started eating nothing but beef and water (and vodka and bourbon). She calls it the ‘Lion Diet’, and for just $599 a year you can sign up for live videos and meetups talking about how to do it. (Spotter’s badge to Ben Sixmith; previously I had only heard of her $120-an-hour Skype consultations.) A book about the diet, purportedly by the pair of them (Mikhaila says it isn’t), was recently the best-selling book on Amazon about “toxicology”.

My first concern, by the way, was that the Petersons would have died some time ago of scurvy, and I was going to suggest that someone go and check up on them. But apparently you can get reasonable amounts of vitamin C from raw or nearly raw meat, especially organ meat — the Inuit managed it for centuries. (Although, the Inuit apparently also have larger-than-human-average livers to assist with the breakdown of protein; it’s not clear that the Peterson family does.) So as long as the Lion Diet includes steak tartare, or beef kidneys, they’re probably still alive. (Still, if you’re in the neighbourhood, you know…)

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Anyway. The elder Peterson sells himself as a purveyor of unvarnished truth, and the idea that he’d been cured of his mental and physical ailments by eating beef struck me as, shall we say, unlikely to be true. To explain why, I thought I’d start by talking about how hard it is to work out what is and isn’t good for you, diet-wise.

We read a lot of confident, specific claims about what is and isn’t good for us, but the actual evidence supporting them is usually patchy. Even apparently basic questions like “does red meat cause cancer?” are immensely vexed. There was a neat demonstration of that earlier this month when a group of scientists published a set of guidelines based on reviews of the evidence. They were looking at the same data that everyone else had looked at — including the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which concluded that bacon was a carcinogen. The Department of Health and Cancer Research UK also say that you should eat red meat sparingly, because it raises your risk of colorectal cancer.

But the new advice came out and said, according to media reports, that this was all nonsense and you should eat as much red meat as you like.

It was, of course, more complicated than that. In fact, the new review found that there was an increased risk from eating bacon, just that in absolute terms it was small (very roughly, between 1 and 18 new lifetime cases of cancer for every 1,000 people who eat an extra 90g of red meat a day). It is entirely in line with what CRUK and everyone else said. The new guidelines said that the uncertainty was huge, and that a lot of people enjoy eating meat, so the tradeoff might not be worth it; the WHO and so on didn’t take into account those tradeoffs, but simply looked at whether or not, on the balance of evidence, eating red meat would raise your risk of cancer.

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Still: that’s the level of complexity we’re dealing with. Two groups of well-intentioned, intelligent experts can assess the same evidence, even arrive at broadly the same conclusions as to what the evidence says about the risk, and come out with entirely different advice about what you should do on the basis of that risk.

So when someone such as Mikhaila Peterson comes out with a faddish diet which they confidently say will make you healthier and cure your diseases and so on, I am immediately sceptical. Especially if they’re charging punters hundreds of dollars for it.

The Petersons are far from the only people to push daft diets; on Google you can see lists of “the seven superfoods” (fish, yoghurt, chocolate, nuts, olive oil, eggs, and blueberries, apparently) or “the 25 superfoods” (acai, avocado, bee pollen, cacao — I can’t face listing them all) and so on. The claim is that these particular foodstuffs are powerfully good for you in some health-giving way, beyond simply “eating your greens”.

But there isn’t much good research into it. It’s hard to do randomised controlled trials where you give 10,000 people avocado and 10,000 people some placebo avocado for 30 years and see who dies first. So the main kind of research is asking people what foods they eat, and seeing whether people who tend to eat more avocado tend to be healthier or live longer.

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But first, that relies on people accurately remembering what they ate, which is not always the case; and second, it relies on the people who eat avocado being otherwise the same as the people who don’t. Obviously, in real life, that’s not the case: people who eat lots of avocado are likely to be very different — notably, richer — than the ones who don’t. And since richer people are more likely to be healthy, it’s very hard to be sure that avocado is causing the improvement. You can try to control for socioeconomic status and other factors, but in the end it’s very messy.

You could, perhaps, detect some enormous effect. The impact of smoking on cancer risk was discovered, essentially, like this — because loads of smokers got lung cancer and almost no non-smokers did. But no foodstuff has been found to do any such thing. Even the purported negative effects of specific elements (such as fat, or sugar, or red or processed meat) have, as in the case of bacon and cancer, been largely small, ambiguous, and contested. If eating meat-only diets had a huge effect, it would probably have been noticed in the same way that the smoking-cancer link was noticed; it hasn’t been.

Peterson Jr’s absurd assertions about her regime — “This Lion Diet that healed me works for everyone” — strongly remind me of claims made about other pseudoscientific fads that have sprung up. Disciples all think that whatever it is they’re campaigning against, be it red meat, WiFi radiation, insufficient water, or vaccines, is the cause of every disease, and that simply following some simple step (avoiding red meat, or not vaccinating, or turning off your router) will lead instantly to a healthy population.

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Her Lion Diet is obviously nonsense. It is, though, at least symbolically interesting nonsense, since the leftist position is to eat more plants and less meat, for health, environmental and animal-concern reasons, and Jordan Peterson’s whole thing is constantly telling the Left (not always incorrectly, I should admit) that they’re wrong. So the Peterson family brand of pseudoscientific food nonsense is to go 180° in the other direction and eat only the most carbon-intensive form of sentient being they can think of.

There’s an irony here, really. In general, with diet, it’s essentially impossible to be much more specific than “eat everything in moderation, and eat your greens”, just like your parents told you. You’d think that Jordan Peterson of all people, king of the “tidy your room” brand of homespun wisdom, would be in favour of that old-school advice. And yet somehow, perhaps sincerely, perhaps to own the libs, he and his daughter have ended up pushing an all-meat diet that is every bit as stupid (and significantly more likely to make you sick) than any number of hippyish gluten-free vegan fads. I’d keep my $599, myself.