Can humanity abandon its meat-based diet, and is it willing to? This diet is unique in that it institutes an endlessly bloody relationship to animals. Highlighted time and again in analyses of the sacrificial system, the possibility of substituting a plant-based offering (or an object) for one that requires killing, replacing the latter with the former and eventually achieving equivalence between the two, could prove unexpectedly fruitful in contemporary discussions of substitutes for meat (both plant-based meats, which imitate animal meat but do not contain it, and cultured animal muscle tissue, commonly referred to as in-vitro meat). This is the guiding question and the answer, in the form of a structuralist hypothesis, that this article proposes to clarify and develop.