Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I am a vegetarian myself. I do expect that modern society will eventually become fully vegetarian (by which I mean banning of the slaughterhouse at least for the main cattle animals). I think this will happen for several reasons:

1) I think that the better our understanding of the neuroscience of animal brains and animal psychology the more untenable it will be to aportion a very low moral value to other animals. Recent experiments raise serious questions as to our treatment of animals and the old orthodoxy that animals lack higher levels of awareness.

2) Most meat eating is inefficient use of agricultural resources, energy and land. Furthermore biofuels made from cellulose will eventually come to compete with land currently only suited to raising cattle.

3) Economically the main value of meat is as a luxury foodstuff. Pretty much every other slaughterhouse byproduct can now be replaced (gelatine with agar, leather with advanced materials e.g goretex). Scientific developments in food science are bound to come up with morally acceptable alternatives to animals meats. One possibility are 'vat grown' meats that are currently in development, others include new and better alternatives based on specially bred vegetables and funghi.

In short I am convinced that the moral arguments are overwhelmingly in favour of a vegetarian society, the meat industry is not a good use of resources and is only economic due to the luxury value of meat and finally slaughterhouse meats will soon be in competition with new and better meat alternatives probably including vat grown meat. In the past changing moral understandings, economic preasures and new breakthrough technologies have opened the doorway to huge societal shifts. This has happened before with democracy, slavery, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement and I think in the coming century we shall see this happen with the abolition of the slaughterhouse.