What are the most important animal products to replace from a lives saved/suffering prevented perspective?
There are many companies launching products from plant-based burgers, to plant-based chicken, to plant-based milk, to plant-based eggs etc. Products high in beef and other ruminant content tend to contribute the most to greenhouse gasses, largely through methane release which is many times more destructive than carbon.
But setting aside for the moment environmental damage, and setting aside profit margins and other business considerations, if a founder is interested in animal welfare and preventing suffering, what would be the most important products to replace first (for example burgers, chicken nuggets, liquid eggs, etc.) from a perspective of how many animals would be saved?
The answer is determined by the amount of consumption per year of a product, and how many animals are used per serving (for example, far more chickens are affected per ounce of chicken consumed than cows per ounce of beef). And perhaps an even more important question is how many days of suffering are represented by each serving of a food. For example, regardless of the animal size and how many servings a single animal represents, is that animal living each day in suffering prior to slaughter, or are they free from suffering until they are killed (for example wild-caught fish)?
We posed this question and worked with Faunalytics to answer it for the United States based on USDA data, and here are the results of their research. The answer to the question of “lives saved” and “suffering prevented” will differ from society to society, as there are differences in the types of foods consumed and the ingredients used.
We are now exploring answering this question for China and are funding a project to examine data available from mobile food ordering apps to help answer it.