Most people that are vegan or vegetarian choose that, because the ethics part of eating meat is the most important factor for them, with price and taste and nutrition trailing that.
And then a lot of those people make the assumption that everyone who isn't vegan absolutely doesn't care about the ethics of it. But that is simply not true. A lot of people, myself included, care about the ethics, it's just that we care more about taste and cost and nutrition. I love eating a good burger, or a good steak. I'm sorry a cow had to die, but I'm not sorry enough to stop doing it.
But give me an alternative that is just as good, but where cows don't have to die, and I'll switch in a heartbeat.
Imagine the following scenario: I have a choice between two burgers. They both taste the same and cost the same, but the first one requires a cow to die, and the second one doesn't.
If I don't care about ethics, then I would choose randomly between the two, because that's not a deciding factor.
But if I consistently choose the second one, then I obviously care about ethics, it is a deciding factor for me. It's just not the most important deciding factor, but it's still there. Why does it have to be binary? Why does it have to be all-or-nothing for you?
I obviously might not care as much as you do about it, but you claiming that I don't care about it at all is incredibly offensive.
There are actors in the cultural discourse that are already trying to make large scale meat consumption a cultural authenticity issue, especially if you read some of the nativist criticism of the Green New Deal [1]
I don't think that line of manipulation will go away, as it always will have some cultural currency with a subset of the population, but eventually the economics of the meat substitutes will win out, and "real meat" will become more of a special occasion thing, like truffles.
1. https://www.eater.com/2019/3/1/18246220/aoc-green-deal-burge...
If we're talking about the global population I'd say it's more than a small subset and it's not a cultural "statement", it's just culture.
People in Mexico aren't going to eat fake lengua or carnitas. Doro wat with fake chicken? Anything grilled or bbq'd. Sashimi, sushi...
People have been eating some of this stuff for hundreds if not thousands of years. I think it's a very Americentric view to suggest that people are going to stop eating their traditional foods in favor of fake meat.
This might be the case to some degree in Western first world countries but even there, I don't see people in the mid-west giving up real steak anytime soon.
It's not an all-or-nothing market. There will always be a demand for those things. But in the end what is used for what will be dictated by the economics, as cuisine always has been, even in traditional culture. Eating things like lengua, or tripe and other off-cuts of meat were largely about not wasting meat when resources were scarce, not about identity politics.
Take chorizo ... turns out Mexico already has a vegetarian version of this most culturally sacred of foods: https://www.mexgrocer.com/74562-06205.html
I was offered it with eggs ("huevos con soyrizo") at a breakfast restaurant in Baja ... 17 years ago.
There are plenty of dishes that use ground meat or meat that has been spiced or stewed to the point that the taste difference with regular meat is marginal.
> This might be the case to some degree in Western first world countries but even there, I don't see people in the mid-west giving up real steak anytime soon.
They don't have to. Real meat from slaughtered animals isn't going away, but it's use cases will be more limited to steaks, etc, which aren't "everyday" foods anyways.
And a good amount of Mexico's population is urban and first world, just like their counterparts in other countries. From what I can tell, urban Mexico has as liberal a palate as any other urban part of the world, be that NYC or London.
But also, if it's cheaper? People will eat it for sure regardless of the culture.
Side note: a lot of those things that are "hundreds if not thousands of years" are actually a lot more recent if you look at them. It's pretty common for cultures to reuse the name of some old dish for a new one that becomes more common, and is similar in some way - not even necessarily in terms of how it tastes, but e.g. in its purpose. In other cases, you can trace a direct connection to some much older recipe, but new additions have mutated it beyond all recognition. Just look at what the introduction of potato did to traditional recipes in Europe.
Soy and legumes are pretty common allergens for people, and the effects mild enough early in life that some may not realize it's actually legumes (mostly soy) that is the problem. I got used to the side effects and was only at 42 when it started to get bad enough that I found out via elimination diet.