ethical meats and dairy?
And then there's ethical issues like the pollution involved in raising animals and how that's handled…
It's one thing to insist that all animal products are inherently unethical or that ethics are irrelevant to the topic (most people would not agree with either of those dogmatic views) and another to draw some sort of fuzzy line where you think the efforts at ethics are adequate to call the production "ethical".
FWIW, I'm convinced we should be eating insects https://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects
And then there's cultured meat which is coming soon and truly bypasses most of the really unethical aspects of meat production…
I've only had a few occasions, had some cricket-flour chocolate-chip cookies, some roasted ants, crickets, and grasshoppers. Mealworms sauteed with veggies is great. I'm not crazy going out of my way to get weird stuff though. I'm waiting for the day we can just go to the supermarket and buy grasshopper burgers or something. Like any food, there's ways to do it well or do it badly, and just like you don't want to eat rotten apples, it's not good food just because it's insects; insects are good food when they're good (the right type, healthy condition, prepared well).
I try not to think about the topic too much because I like the occasional spot of cheese, but the number of calves that get slaughtered each year to enable milk production is mildly disturbing. Even worse, some countries have regulations against selling animals under a certain age, and the milk's worth more to a farmer than the month-old calf, so you end up getting piles of male calf carcasses thrown into pits for composting.
That's if you merely think about the concept for a moment. If you bother considering it any further or make any effort to consider the cow's (mother's) experience, you should (if you're not a sociopath) find it far beyond mild disturbance.
Death itself is wasteful but isn't as tragically unethical as the specific aspect of taking a mother's offspring away, which hits perhaps the most powerful low-level aspect of mammalian experience. That we then go kill them is appalling in a human principle (in that we understand the whole picture). Killing them in front of the mother would be a further level of horror that I assume doesn't typically happen (Aside from the gratuitous torture, I bet that would increase cortisol levels in the milk).
Is that what you want?
His sarcasm does nothing of the sort, nor does his statement imply anything similar. I would really check that nerve he seemed to touch.
The only interpretation is about the weakness of labeling laws and ethical gerrymandering of commercial interests in the ethical treatment of animals (ie Lip Service).