Let me be way way more specific for you than should be necessary. It takes more plants to feed animals than us to feed plants ourselves directly. E.g., a culture of animal product consumption requires more land to be cultivated and maintained to feed those animals before we can even feed the animals to us. This requires more workers to be exploited in the ‘consumption’ industry.
If you are arguing that ‘well those workers will just be exploited in another business,’ you could make that argument about any change in the workforce where labor requirements are reduced. It’s not relevant if we are focusing strictly on the food system and the amount of workers required within it. If we continue this more broadly though, it’s still not necessarily true if we don’t assume a political/socioeconomic system that puts them in that position. So in a hypothetical far far future, if we for some reason still need human labor to work fields but have outsourced enough jobs to robotics elsewhere so as to have UBI for many citizens without work, it would still require less workers to focus on a plant based diet than a meat eating diet. Frankly, by reducing the amount of workers required in any instance, you inch ever closer to UBI. So if you want to inch closer to a society that doesn’t exploit workers generally, even from that point of view, The Vegans are still approaching this closer than meat eaters.
Let me be way way more specific for you than should be necessary. It takes more plants to feed animals than us to feed plants ourselves directly. E.g., a culture of animal product consumption requires more land to be cultivated and maintained to feed those animals before we can even feed the animals to us. This requires more workers to be exploited in the ‘consumption’ industry.
If you are arguing that ‘well those workers will just be exploited in another business,’ you could make that argument about any change in the workforce where labor requirements are reduced. It’s not relevant if we are focusing strictly on the food system and the amount of workers required within it. If we continue this more broadly though, it’s still not necessarily true if we don’t assume a political/socioeconomic system that puts them in that position. So in a hypothetical far far future, if we for some reason still need human labor to work fields but have outsourced enough jobs to robotics elsewhere so as to have UBI for many citizens without work, it would still require less workers to focus on a plant based diet than a meat eating diet. Frankly, by reducing the amount of workers required in any instance, you inch ever closer to UBI. So if you want to inch closer to a society that doesn’t exploit workers generally, even from that point of view, The Vegans are still approaching this closer than meat eaters.