I'd give Foer a break. No matter whether you agree or disagree with his POV, he definitely didn't pick the title. Some editor did to try to make it sound more controversial (i.e. clickbaitey) and stir up conversations like ours. I'm all for anyone eating meat who wants to eat meat, but like with the oil industry, I just wish its end user cost was more reflective of its true cost. A $1 cheeseburger just shouldn't be a thing (and yet I subsisted on them and $5 pizzas in grad school, so who am I to talk).

I'm well read enough on the politics of the food industry to not expect that anytime soon, but political winds shift very quickly sometimes. Remember when no one in the US had really thought about gay marriage as a thing (except for activists on either side), but then Karl Rove had the genius idea to make it the linchpin of W's reelection, which didn't look great in early 2004? It worked in the short term, because they got all these stupid amendments on state ballots, which really brought out the Bible thumpers and W narrowly won reelection. Guess what happened next? It sort of became a rallying cry, and then Joe No-liberal-bona-fides Biden went on TV and said that it was the policy of the administration to support gay marriage (much to the surprise of Obama, whose views were still "evolving"), and a decade after W's big play legal gay marriage was the law of the land. I don't know how old you are but that was unthinkable in the 90s. I went to a high school that had 2400 students and there were like 2 openly gay people. (And both were tormented by their peers. One died of a drug overdose a few years after graduation, and the other went on to be a successful lawyer, so not a great success ratio.)

Not exactly saying that there's an analogy here, but I'm just trying to use a recent example of something that went from nothing to inevitable in the space of 10 years. Of course lots of other examples exist, and in retrospect things that seem unlikely often look inevitable or even obvious after the fact. I don't think meat will ever be illegal (and I don't think that would be good policy anyway), but I also think that our current policy choices are on a trajectory that is bound to break at some point.