15 May The War on Food
Several weeks ago, Current Affairs – which describes itself as a “magazine of politics and culture” – published a strange and telling article about raising livestock and eating meat. The author of the piece, a vegan activist named Emilia A. Leese, insisted that “animal farming” is an “obsolete tradition that denies living creatures the right to dignity, freedom, and comfort.” Yes, that’s right, animal “freedom.” And it just got weirder from there:
The farming of animals – raising, using and ultimately killing animals for human purposes—is a tradition that dates back to the Neolithic Revolution, about 11,000 years ago. That’s only 3 percent – a mere blink – of our existence as Homo sapiens. Stretch the timeline further to include our hominin ancestors, who thrived for millions of years without the practices of farming animals or growing crops, and the practice accounts for much less than 1 percent of our history. For most of our time on Earth, we’ve lived without it.
My instinct reaction to the article was to note (on Twitter/X) that the core argument here is pretty stupid. Almost everything we associate with civilization – cities, laws, farming, trade, etc. – is a tradition that dates back only a few thousand years and has thus been a part of man’s existence for “a mere blink” of his total history. Indeed, most of those things are far more recent developments than the practice of raising livestock. Does that mean, in the author’s view, that they are also unnecessary and should therefore be abandoned? Who needs clean drinking water, after all, a bizarre contrivance of modern man’s prissiness? And one can be forgiven for wondering about Ms. Leese’s views on equality between the sexes, an idea that’s only been taken seriously for a couple of centuries at most, and which is not universally accepted even today. Does its recency also condemn it to the trash bin of history?
My second reaction, however – which was prompted by Isaac Willour, who handles shareholder engagement at Bowyer Research – was to place this article in the context of a broader and developing trend, one that exists both in the culture at large and in the far narrower realm of business and capital markets. The weakness of her argument notwithstanding, Ms. Leese and her article are part of what Bowyer Research’s CEO, Jerry Bowyer, has identified as a burgeoning “war on food.” This “war” is not new, exactly, but it has taken on greater relevance in the business and investment worlds of late and likely represents a new frontier in the ongoing evolution of ESG.
For the entirety of its existence, ESG investing has focused predominantly on the “need” to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and, concomitantly, to promote the “energy transition.” Over the last couple of years, however, as events have demonstrated the limitations of alternative energy sources and the fantastical nature of the energy transition, the markets’ appetite for full-blown “sustainability” has waned notably. As it turns out, cheap, reliable energy matters to corporations and their shareholders, meaning that ESG investors and environmental advocates have had to focus their attention elsewhere. More and more, it appears they will focus that attention on food – its production, packaging, distribution, and consumption. So, while the mainstream press occupies itself with articles warning about the political dangers of protein, theoretically intellectual publications like Current Affairs worry about the inhumanity of raising livestock, and the financial press insists that farming is destroying the planet, the powers that be in ESG are lately focusing less on oil and car companies and more on meat producers, ag equipment manufacturers, plastics makers, and others involved in food in some way or another.
In a real sense, the first person to raise the alarm about ESG’s fixation on food was John Murante, the former Treasurer of the State of Nebraska. In 2022, when he was the national chairman of the State Financial Officers Foundation, Murante warned his fellow financial officers that ESG, if pursued to its logical ends, would cripple America’s farmers, destroy its agriculture industry, contribute to massive food inflation, and, quite possibly, leave millions of people starving throughout the world. Murante’s concerns were, not coincidentally, echoed by farmers in France and the Netherlands, who spent several summers protesting against their government’s net-zero policies and the deleterious effects they were having (and would continue to have) on food production and the survival of rural communities.
In 2024, Ohio’s Buckeye Institute produced a long report on the dire impact that the Biden administration’s environmental policies would have on farming and food prices, with special focus on the then-pending SEC emissions reporting rule. Mercifully, under President Trump, the SEC has decided to abandon that rule, in no small part because of the havoc it would have wreaked on food production and supplies. Unfortunately, that was hardly the end of the ESG war on food. Indeed, as the Manhattan Institute’s James Copland noted the other day, it was only the beginning:
[D]espite its near-universal popularity, Kit-Kat has now come under the crosshairs of the meddling investors operating under the ESG umbrella—that’s “environmental, social, and governance” to you and me.
To date, such efforts have focused mainly on questions like gender equality or the environment, but academics and activists are now pushing to add “nutrition” to the causes that dominate the ESG investing strategy….
A group of institutional investors managing some $3 trillion in assets descended on the annual meeting of food giant Nestlé, which owns the global Kit Kat brand. (The candy is marketed under license to Hershey’s in the U.S.) The investors demanded that “the company needs to rebalance its sales towards healthier products.”
As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink famously noted, ESG is, at its heart, about “forcing behaviors.” It’s about making companies – and their customers, by extension – do what the activists want them to do, what the activists feel is in their best interests, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not. It is no coincidence, therefore, that ESG and the statist temperament tend to go hand-in-hand. ESG, statism, the administrative state, etc. are all about control, about forcing people to do what they would otherwise not do. They circumvent the will of the people – both individually and in the aggregate – in favor of “the common good,” which is arbitrarily and unilaterally decided. Yesterday, they wanted to limit your access to affordable energy. Today, they want to limit your access to affordable food. Tomorrow, heaven only knows what they’ll want to limit, but rest assured, it will be for your own good and for the betterment of humankind, as well.
One of the longest-standing and most persistent complaints about ESG is that it is poorly defined. It means whatever its advocates want it to mean in the moment. To ESG advocates, this is a feature, not a bug. It enables them to shift their focus without explanation or apology, not only for financial reasons but also for what amount to political reasons. It allows them to pursue radically disparate policy preferences at the same time or in series without having to explain how or why they related or consistent with E, S, and G principles.
The war on food is the latest focus for ESG, but it won’t be the last.
