Cleanup at the slaughterhouse
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'm vegetarian outside the house, and our family ordered a half a cow from a farmer who lives ~30 minutes away. It was butchered by a small shop. I received something like 200+lbs of meat from a single animal, raised well, grass fed at a cost of around $8/lb.
The lifestyle change has been far easier than I expected, and it feels like a decision that actually has a local impact. (As opposed to, say, tweeting outrage.)
There's a whole bunch of support for making this change that I wasn't aware of. If you are in the NW, Seattle Tilth puts out a guide to all the regional farms [2], and most of them have websites and email contact info.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
I think this illustrates why it's so hard to make any large-scale progress on industrial animal welfare. I'm glad that this works for you and you're able to make a difference in your own life, but spending $1600 on meat, even 200lbs of meat, is not an option that most people have.
There's a lot more to not-plants than a steak, though. Fish and milk and eggs and cheese and shellfish and who knows. That is a huge variety of food, of flavors, of sources and methods for farming, giving it all up is arguably as-healthy, not healthier, and certainly much, much more boring. Also, harder to sustain, it's easy to find food with meat in it, plenty of places have few vegan/vegetarian options.
It's true it can sometimes be hard to find vegan options, depending on where you live, but the situation has improved massively in the last few years. The number of vegans in the UK has almost quadrupled in the last 10 years, for example, with a corresponding rise in products, restaurants etc:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/number-of-veg...
For a certain subset of the population, getting the appropriate amount of protein and other nutrients would be nigh impossible since those foods could make them incredibly ill or kill them.
People also mistakenly put way too much emphasis on protein and not nearly enough on other nutrients. The average American, for example, gets way more protein than they need and not nearly enough dietary fiber.
Regarding the topic of too much protein, nutrition doesn't quite work that way. You can't go tick-tock on your diet just because you have too much protein today; you will need protein until the day you die. You also need suger, fat, salt, and yes, fiber.
It's also quite wrong to say everyone could be on a vegetarian / vegan diet because you well know that it's quite dangerous if it isn't followed correctly, and lo and behold, the average American is overweight.
We can sort of blame the new trend diets for the lack of fiber.
Which diet is dangerous again?
Unless you're eating a really weird diet it's almost impossible to get enough calories but not enough protein. Eating a healthy vegan diet is easy and easier now than it's ever been with the wealth of information out there.
> Oral allergy syndrome (OAS) is an allergic reaction in the mouth following eating food.[1] It is a type of food allergy classified by a cluster of allergic reactions in the mouth in response to eating certain (usually fresh) fruits, nuts, and vegetables that typically develops in adults with hay fever.[2]
> OAS is perhaps the most common food-related allergy in adults.
> It is usually limited to ingestion of only uncooked fruits or vegetables
I'm actually susceptible to this to some degree during hayfever season too. Unfortunately I can't eat some fresh, raw fruit during that time without getting a very itchy mouth. It's hardly a dealbreaker for a plant-based diet though.
I have been well off and poor and if you look at what you are spending you cash on very carefully, you can make changes that allow you to get ahead, even if only a small way.
I just watched a local lady buy 3 packs of fags (30 per pack) and she spent $90+ on those items. That's the equivalent of a week's food for the five of us at home (youngest is 16, eldest is 58).
The process above of buying from a farmer and getting a butcher to slaughter and pack is something we have done over the years. I have even slaughtered and butchered sheep myself, an interesting task but well worth the effort to learn. Best mutton I have ever had.
I know people for whom $1600 is more than a month's pay. No amount of budgeting makes it reasonable or responsible to spend that on meat.
For that matter, I know people who work their asses off and budget their expenditures down to the penny and are still living paycheck-to-paycheck. I think you're deluding yourself about just how poor "poor" can be.
In the case you mention, how much of that $1600 is spent of optional niceties and how much on actual necessities? I know of people (friends) who can take $100 and buy 2 or 3 weeks of food for a family of 4.
It take a lot of judicious planning to do so, but it is doable. If the area you are in does not allow such planning, then it is time to move away to a better place.
One can join other people and buy in bulk. One can use the base ingredients to make your own cereals. There are so many different things that can be done.
The person I'm talking about does that. I wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise. She feeds her family as cheaply as possible, pays the rent and the bills and the gas, and still struggles to save enough to keep the kids in clothes and school supplies. If the car breaks down, or someone gets sick, it's a disaster.
These are just numbers off the top of my head, but if you take home $1600/month and pay $800 in rent, $200 for gas and electric and water and a landline phone, $200 car payment, and $200 for gas to get to work, you aren't going to be saving much no matter how cheaply you eat. Budgeting is important, but it can't create money where there is none.
> If the area you are in does not allow such planning, then it is time to move away to a better place.
Do you know how much it costs to move? Even aside from the monetary cost of transporting your possessions, and the difficulty of finding anyone who will rent to someone with no savings and little income, a single parent working 40-60 hours a week doesn't have the time to travel to a new city and search for a home and a job there. The kind of jobs that poor people do don't advertise on LinkedIn or let you interview over the phone; you need to walk in and fill out paperwork.
You said you've been poor, but I don't think you grasp just how poor many people are in America.
In bullet form, it's worth thinking about:
* Swine flu killed an estimated 1 million people (and made many other sick for a whole week). Swine flu was directly a result of factory farming
* many of our antibiotics arent working any more and people are dying in hospitals because of it
* We are overfishing the entire ocean. Some communities are poor and rely on those fish to survive. Us rich people are taking food from the poor
* Slash/burn deforestation of rainforests has largely been from farmers who want to either raise beer or grow soy (to feed to animals). Those forests are often home to aboriginal people.
* (the contents of this article)
Regular meat would have far more dangerous pathogens on it.
Going Further: in "Illegal Alien" by Robert J Sawyer, there is mention of "grown meat", basically meat "grown in and squeezed out of a tube" from a spaceship's bulkhead which crew-members slice out for personal consumption as needed during space flight. Would this also be disturbing?
Please don't assume all meat comes from conditions described in this article.
Slaughterhouse / factory systems are disgusting. I don't eat meat that I know was sourced this way.
You can, fairly easily in most places, support your local farmers and ranchers and buy direct.
And if you want to know why it's not easier to get locally sourced meat from family farms / small producers, you can look to the government. They've done all they can over the last 30 years to make it next to impossible for the "little guys" in the business.
* Small Meat Producers Take Their Slaughterhouse Gripes To Congress : The Salt : NPR || https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/15/448942740/sm...
Every time something like this comes to HN, someone always has to point out that not ALL meat comes from CAFO's.
For anyone interested, the top 4 beef producers account for over 80% of the production:
http://www.foodcircles.missouri.edu/07contable.pdf
So yea, you can go ahead and focus on how there is a sliver of meat consumed that didn't come from horrid conditions, but you'd be minimizing the true reality
In the UK, I think the equivalent agency is HSE - Health and Safety Executive. These is the first things I found to demonstrate a possible difference:
"Martin McColl Limited and JMS Retail Concepts Limited have both been sentenced today after two members of the public tripped and fell over construction work outside a convenience store in Dinas Powys, Vale of Glamorgan. ... Martin McColl Limited of Ashwells Road, Brentwood, Essex pleaded guilty on the first day of a two day trial after initially pleading not guilty to breaching Section 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and have been fined £600,000 and ordered to pay costs of £11,520.
JMS Retail Concepts Limited of Stump Lane, Chorley, Lancashire pleaded guilty to breaching Section 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and have been fined £40,000 and ordered to pay costs of £3,038."
http://press.hse.gov.uk/2017/retail-company-and-construction...
Contrast that with this:
"The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited Tampa Electric Co. and Gaffin Industrial Services Inc. after five employees were fatally injured, and one other suffered serious burns. ... Proposed penalties for both companies totaled $160,972."
> The only slaughterhouse job worse than eviscerating animals is cleaning up afterward. The third-shift workers, as the cleaners are often called, wade through blood and grease and chunks of bone and flesh, racing all night to hose down the plant with disinfectants and scalding water. The stench is unbearable. Many workers retch.
I should mention that I worked in New Zealand so YMMV, but this was never my experience. There was cleanup with high pressure hoses throughout the day, most of the time cold water to save power. No animals were eviscerated, they want as little wastage as possible; if it isn't consumable by humans it can be sold as animal food. The animals were knocked out (like a strong taser) before they were killed. Nobody was retching; it smelled bad (particularly pigs) but you get used to in the same way you adjust to any bad smell.
I agree with the comments here that we need to move quickly to lab-grown meat or a vegetarian diet. But I have to acknowledge that the abattoirs I worked at acted as responsibly and humanely as possible
Very different than the US
I went looking for example videos of cleanup:
USA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUJ4vI-JA88
Poland(?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enTQhNx_jpg
Why you clean the plant daily:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Canada_listeriosis_outbre...
Sanctuary cities exist. Large swathes of the US populace regard restricting immigration as immoral and plenty of the rest have no particular desire to do so. Why would there be consequences in those circumstances?