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Comment by xexers | Hacker News Reader

When talking about the ethics of eating meat, we often focus on the ethics of killing animals... but it's also worth talking about the ethics towards out fellow human beings.

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)

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Not to mention massive greenhouse gas emissions and toxic runoff of animal sewage into rivers, lakes and oceans that makes people that live near them sick.

I grew up on a cattle ranch. We butchered our own cattle.

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...

I just bought from a small farmer, the process was remarkably painless. I bought from them, they delivered the animal to the butcher, and I picked it up after it was processed and packaged. Maybe Washington/Seattle makes it easier, but it really wasn't a whole lot more effort than getting the meat from a grocery store.

Farming this way is better for the animals and the environment but it can never scale to meet even current demand for meat. Farms like the one you describe are a tiny minority and there are even fewer small independent slaughterhouses. 99% of the meat people eat comes from places like the one described in this article. This book explains in detail why this is the case:

https://meatonomics.com/

> "Please don't assume all meat comes from conditions described in this article."

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

Also cattle ranching is the largest source of man-made methane emissions as well as the leading cause of amazon rainforest deforestation. Since people don't want to discuss the meat issue, it is easy for Brazilian ranchers to burn down millions of acres of rain forest every year to create cattle grazing land.

What do you think about "lab-grown" meat, if such would ever reach market to speak of?

I'm super excited about it. It would solve all of the problems I listed above (and then some).

Probably not point 2. Lab grown meat would probably still need antibiotics.

I'd say probably not. It should be in a very controlled process.

Yeah, if anything is growing in the culture medium that isn’t part of the standard process that batch is waste. There are many, many more ways for growing anything relying on a bioreactor to go wrong than right.

Why would that be?

No it would not. It is grown in a sterile environment.

Regular meat would have far more dangerous pathogens on it.

I find that nauseating and gross. Maybe I'll change my mind if I've actually seen and tasted such a piece of "meat", but right now it's on the same level as Soylent for me.

I'm curious: What disgusts you about it? Assuming "meat is meat", is there a difference for you between "grown in a sunlit grassy field" vs "grown in simulated conditions"?

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?

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