I think if meat was a lot more expensive you'd have cuisine treating it the way much of the rest of the world treats it: a small part of a varied diet. I think you'd also see quality go up.

It used to be this way: a steak was a luxury because it was expensive, and people ate it when they were feeling boss because it was fucking delicious. At this point I often grind steak up into hamburger because it's only marginally more expensive than hamburger and because I know that it's only one animal's worth of contamination. You don't even have to go back very far to see old Julia Child and Jaques Pepin cooking shows treating a piece of chicken or beef or pork with some reverence and arraying other ingredients around it.

Now? Now we've got chicken fries. The protein has become so commoditized that we separate it entirely from the animal, render it into glue, add binders to it, extrude it, batter dip it and deep fry it to sell it hot at a price point commensurate with fucking potatoes.

I am not a vegetarian. But I have a pretty strong conviction that if the externalities of industrial meat production were removed, the meat consumption in the western hemisphere would return to semi-sane levels... and if the externalities of meat production were properly taxed we'd see a renaissance of vegetarian options.