How to enforce a Ban on Vegetarianism

Question

Let's say that Vegetarianism is banned in my country and meat eating is mandatory. The technology is modern. Stuff like Tofu, Quorn and other things that can make vegetarianism more popular are banned and considered contraband drugs.

The punishments are the following (but differ by region, sometimes being harsher):

• practicing vegetarianism on purpose - flogging, imprisonment, brainwashing, death
• practicing veganism (no milk and eggs either) - life imprisonment, brainwashing, death
• converting others to vegetarianism/veganism - death
• forcing others to be vegetarian/vegan (especially children) - death
• tofu contraband - death

My question is how to enforce the ban effectively, both at home and in restaurants. Technology is modern, so no magic survelliance nanobots.

Do I have to have a "food police" which comes to various homes once in a week or so and inspects the dinner (of course including taste control, so nothing is left for the people to be controlled)? Survelliance cameras in restaurants connected to police stations? Only allowing restaurants to be located in specially constructed buildings with meat broth bombs? Having chemical sensors in restaurants which can smell even the lowest concentrations of tofu?

NOTE: The consumption of vegetables is NOT banned, it is even encouraged to eat some pesky green stuff with your lamb chops. For breakfast, you can eat stuff like salami or sausages. For the purposes of this question, "vegetarianism" means intentional abstention from meat for more than 3 days.

Answer 1

Simple: Mandatory public meat-eating.

A somewhat related historical example occurred in Spain from the 16th century onwards. The Jewish and Muslim religions were banned, and eating of pork was a common way to demonstrate that one was an authentic Christian.

Answer 2

The House Vegetarian Activities Committee

Many answers have been given, most of them pretty practical and uninvasive (considering). But practical and uninvasive is not what governments are going for with these kinds of laws.

Sure you can instute mandatory public meat eating, but that's like making a communist salute the flag. They'll eat the meatloaf to escape detection, but inside they're still deeply, morally corrupt. The question is not whether they're behaving like vegetarians, but whether they are thinking like vegetarians.

What we need to do, is get at at the heart of the matter. Root out these vegetarians. Investigate every inch of their lives, until the weight of evidence can be used to force them to admit their wicked ideals. Then, force them to give up all their vegetarian comrades, that they met at their surreptitious soy buffets, and keep going until every last seitan shyster is in chains.

Yes, we may have to relax some of those civil liberties that the intellectuals are so keen on, but when it's those civil liberties that the Vegetarians are using to erode the moral fiber of our proud carnivorous nation, I say that's a risk worth taking.

Answer 3

How do you tell if a person is vegetarian? Test the microbiota.

The population of microbies in the gut is a function of diet, drug treatments, etc.(See, for instance, this article.) The procedure would only require a stool sample, from where the DNA would be extracted and analysed.

Given the volumes you have to process, the whole procedure can be fully automated. The lab machines can fit in a few large rooms scattered around the city, and the data would be sent to central supercomputers (probably the most expensive part). Bottlenecks are easily dealt with, the samples can be stored frozen for very long periods of time, and you actually need very little material to perform the actual experiment.

Note that you cannot fool this method by just eating some meat before getting tested, you actually have to incorporate it in your diet to affect the bacteria population. You are actually testing the person's lifestyle, not their last meal.

As a bonus, for the same cost, you can make a good sampling of the population's health and catch early most of the colon cancers and other gut diseases.

(If you are interested in this approach, I can add more the details.)

Answer 4

Make eating a public activity

As @royal-canadian-bandit suggested, regular public meat eating events would help to spot meat-avoiding people.

But what if all eating was a mandatory public activity? Let's create large community eating areas where people consume their meals. The meals are made by government cooks under permanent surveillance of food police agents.

Someone doesn't show up? Food police will investigate. Someone is ill? Food police will take care and send a doctor to cure them and provide a healthy meat diet. Need to travel? Food police will assign you temporary community food areas.

You are not eating enough? You surely need some guidance. Food police will provide you a mentor staying at your side for several days, keeping you from any troubles with your food choices...

Answer 5

Make meat a required product to add to all produced food products. Only needs to be a small quantity, so you can just mix it in the spice-mixes that are used in the factories.

And second, require fields of crops to be dusted with meat-products the same way they are dusted with pesticides and the like. That'll make even regular veggies bought from a market non-vegetarian.

Then you'll only need to crack down on people who grow all their own food, but that should be quite doable considering how big a farm for even sustaining a small family is.

Answer 6

With modern technology, the government can track what people are buying.

One method to do that is to create a database of all purchases made with credit cards or checks. This way you can see if someone never buys meat products.

If people use cash, the government can also enforce a mandatory customer card (mix between ID card and loyalty card) policy. The citizens will have to present this card for all food purchases, in shops and restaurants.

The problem with this method is that people could buy meat and then throw it away.

A solution would be to ask restaurants to take note if someone didn't eat the meat products in their plates, and signal it when editing the bill (this plus the customer card will immediately give you the names of the picky eater).

To accelerate the process and be sure people too poor to eat out won't stay off the grid, restaurants and shops around the country could sell small meat balls or chunks of jerky at the counter. The cashiers would validate the sale only after the customer put it in their mouth.
If the meat bits are cheap enough the government can make weekly public meat-eating mandatory to all citizens.

The advantage of these solutions is that they won't cost too much. Data mining will give you lists of potential vegetarian (people who only buy the legal minimum amount of meat products), and most of the policing part will be done by the citizens themselves (cashiers, waiters, etc.).

EDIT :

For the contraband part, you can find inspiration in the real world.

Encourage people to denounce their neighbors, and remember that good detectives are more useful for the War on tofu than random search in the street.

Don't worry too much if you still have a few smugglers, they'll make excellent skapegoats in case of economic crisis of epidemy.

Answer 7

Random Testing

People could be selected to produce stool samples that would be examined for animal tissue. There could be random testing along with more targeted testing of people the authorities were suspicious of. You'd obviously have to give people enough time to "produce the goods" but not enough that they could have digested meat in the meantime.

Answer 8

Encourage members of the public to report suspected vegetarians to the authorities, and have a strong under cover police force. Eating is often a social occasion, and out of necessity many people eat in view of others, e.g. at a workplace.

People could notice a friend, colleague or family member consistently not eating meat and report them to the authorities. Make it a crime to fail to report a suspected vegetarian.

Use a propaganda campaign to convince the public of the dangers of vegetarianism and therefore the need to report.

Answer 9

Spacelizard had a point in monitoring what comes in. For the sake of keeping it dry I will not repeat his answer.

Now to monitor what comes out: a smart toilet that beams information to your celluar device. (Another) This would be a good addition to check what comes in is also what comes out.

This could be complemented with having barcodes on the trash bags.

This is in no way foolproof, and creative people will always exist. But it would make it a lot more difficult.

Answer 10

1. You check their garbage.

2. You go round their house with a warrant and demand to see what they have in the kitchen.

This is exactly what the Spanish Inquisition did to Jews and Muslims who had failed to convert to Christianity, or those who ("worse") had publicly converted (because they had been threatened with violence if they did not) but continued to practice their original religion in private.

Any suspected Jewish or Muslim household that received a visit from the Spanish inquisition better have some ham (a ubiquitous food in Spain) in the cupboard, otherwise they would be taken away for torturing.

http://vanorabennett.com/blog/how-the-inquisition-found-secret-jews-in-spain-by-sniffing-their-kitchen-smells-and-rooting-through-their-garbage/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

Answer 11

First, you need a police state.

Control every source of food, and tell people what they need to eat. Make growing food yourself illegal, and make selling it illegal. Urine tests?

Answer 12

All vegetables are genetically modified to produce a poison and all livestock are genetically modified to produce the antidote. You then need to eat minimum amount of meat to prevent getting ill and eventually dying.

Answer 13

Believe it or not, the simplest and most effective answer is : DO NOTHING. Simply continue the status quo of modern industrial agriculture.. if possible, provide more incentives for using more fertilizers and pesticides. The soils of the world are already on a terminal fertility decline.. in good time they will degrade even further.

A point will be reached when it will no longer be possible to grow vegetables, fruits, nuts, foodgrains etc as those require higher fertility levels that will no longer exist. The only thing that'll grow now will be short rough grass and other inedible shrubs. Only grazing animals will be able to feed on that, and so the only people who will be able to survive any further will be the ones who can eat meat. The vegetarians will all have to convert or die. Or they might adapt to eating grass, but maybe you can then declare them to be sub-human and start eating them too.

Of course, this will also bring in encroaching desertification and after a limited honeymoon period of global meat-only-eating, the soils will degrade to levels that won't even support the most basic forms of grass. The grazing animals population will collapse and following them so will the human population. Sea food will have already died off a long time ago, btw, due to the pesticides runoff and overfishing. The global oxygen supply by that time will also have reduced to levels where the remaining people won't be in any state to do much. But thats ok.. at least we will have achieved the objective stated if only for a limited time period.

Answer 14

If I was the dictator attempting to enforce this I'd do it with three forces. The first would be secret police that attempted to entrap citizens by trying to sell them tofu in dark allies to create fear and distrust in the vegetarian community. The second would be propaganda declaring how evil Tofu is (maybe say it's made of people or causes cancer). The third would be monthly required blood tests checking for markers only found in meat for the citizens.

Answer 15

How it is enforced is going to depend on why such a ban was enacted.

If the ban is religious based I would expect some sort of inquisition type body might be involved, perhaps with the law primarily being used to punish those do not support the church leaders.

If the law is enacted because all food animals are being injected with some drug or other control agent that is transferred through consumption, then I would think that regular testing for levels of the agent in the blood or tissues. With those refusing rounded up and put in control camps.

Laws like this dont get put in place with our either a good reason, or a evil one. How it is enforced will depend on why it was enacted in the first place. Some of the most evil punishments have been devised by men attempting to bring out the good in men and drive out the evil. So if it is intended to be for the good I Would expect the enforcement to be more heavy handed, where evil plots are going to have more subtle coercion as primary enforcement, with more harsh penalties reserved for the holdouts creating the most danger of disrupting the plot.

Answer 16

Required cholesterol testing, call it "Boosting Biometrics". Generically speaking, the total cholesterol and LDL can provide insight into what the person eats. Studies vary but generally show 10-30% lower numbers for vegetarians than meat-eaters.

That's not a perfect test:

1. genetics could account for X percent difference (I have not found any studies citing a percent range).

2. a vegetarian could eat primarily processed foods (instead of fresh fruit and veggies) and thus gain the cholesterol numbers needed to pass as a meat eater. But, perhaps that's one approach that people in this hypothetical country could take to avoid a flogging.

I could imagine that this hypothetical country is proud of it's meat-eating, but clueless about the high rates of coronary artery disease, not recognizing the relationship.

Answer 17

Subsidize the price of meat products and increase the price of vegetarian sources of protein (beans and nuts, for example). Basically, make it too expensive to be vegetarian and healthy.

Place restrictions on home gardening and farming of vegetables to make it difficult for people to live off their own produce. Rather than making it illegal, require gardeners to register for a permit and force them to sell all of what they produce to the state (sort of how liquor laws work in some US states).

Answer 18

Turn everybody into zombies (because the zombie virus is, of course, real). Zombies don't eat silly plant matter, zombies like meat.

Answer 19

If you want to go the creepy route:

• No crops are to be grown in dirt as all farmland is reserved for livestock
• All vegetables have been engineered to be grown sangoponically in a diluted blood solution in greenhouses adjacent to the slaughterhouses. This ensures that all veggies are also meat products!

Then you can have neighbours turning on neighbours for suspicion of growing organic tomatoes out back!

Answer 20

Create a system [ call it "BigBrotherBook" ], that:

• Allows everyone to upload photos of themselves eating.
• Has software agents analyze the uploaded data on a continual basis to see what people are doing

So the final element is to have that system create reports on the eating habits of everyone. It can even automatically post such reports directly to public notice boards, the police or most effectively to the people concerned. Each persons "wall" or some such could contain a "likes meat" icon indicating their meat eating status.

Having implemented such a system, a government can then not just pass appropriate legislation, but have some chance of enforcing it.

Obviously such as system is readily modified to enforce compliance to any other arbitrary behavior by a totalitarian state.

Equally obviously, no freedom desiring society would allow "BigBrotherBook" to be created ...

Answer 21

A ban is too forceful for a population to accept totally. What you want to do is alter behaviour!

Religion is a powerful motivator and has historically made people do all kinds of things and continues to this day.

For a great example. Check out what this Brazilian Pastor told his congragation!

Answer 22

Drugs everywhere.

drugs that make people addicted to meat. eazy peazy

Add those drugs everywhere, cigarettes, cultivations,farms, forests... Maybe build machines that release this drug as gas on public zones 24h/7d.

anyway, executions are incredibly expensive three times as much than keeping someone in jail for from birth to death. your world would go to famine and eventually fall with all the money spent on killing vegetarians or vegans.

To avoid an istanteous economy fall, the drug has to automatically kill people if they don't eat meat for more than 3 days cause even when drugged people with a strong morality won't sell their souls, specially empaths which are almost always only vegans or vegetarian people.

Anyway, great part of the human population will die anyway cause they don't eat meat for health reasons and forcing them to do so would be exactly like telling them to suicide.

Then another great part of humanity will die too for not being able to afford buying meat..... you'd expect to have a world with only 2-3 billion people instead of 7 billions

But anyway, meat consumation is so destructive that the economy will be destroyed anyway sooner or later.