If enough people in, for example, the US felt as strongly about not eating animals as they do/did about not having human slaves, they could have another "quaint" civil war (or maybe a political argument that could achieve the same thing without bloodshed) and get to a point where it would be illegal to eat animals just as it's illegal to have slaves.
(I'm neither American, nor a vegetarian, FWIW.)
I don't buy or eat cheap chicken because I know how it is bred/produced and it's both miserable for the animal as well as for anyone who eats it. I prefer paying twice as much for chicken and having it less often, which is what I do.
Speciesist and anthropocentric mentality that is reinforced by world's most popular ideologies - shallow postmodernism, christianity and other religious ideologies - is what keeps this stuff alive.
It is a shame war is necessary to force people to abandon congitive dissonance and start making a better place of this world. At least we in first world countries have all the time to make the change and be the role model, but we seem to be doing business-as-usual, at least the majority of us.
Yeah, there's nothing cognitively dissonant about the idea of making the world a better place through mass slaughter. You know, while we're talking of ideology keeping terrible ideas alive.
Forcing (?) billions of people to change their eating habits is a far more difficult task than a quaint little Civil War to settle slavery.