Vegetarians Who Turned into Butchers

Where are you getting your chicken? Around here, most free range that I've seen tends to be nearly double the cost.

> The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) requires that chickens raised for their meat have access to the outside in order to receive the free-range certification.[6] There is no requirement for access to pasture, and there may be access to only dirt or gravel . Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range . Basically “free range“ just means that the place where the chickens are housed has a door on it and that the chickens can use this door themselves. That’s it. There could be a fenced-in cement pad on the other side of the door, or it could be an open field, the standard doesn’t care.

I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year.

The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations.

Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point.

My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me.

If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.

I do agree with the rest of your statements though. Beef farming is far kinder then any poultry farming

This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different, that somehow cow suffering is unrelated to human suffering. But most of what we feel and do every day is not actually dictated by consciousness. If you were put into a tiny, roasting summer pen so tiny you couldn't even walk in circles, filled with drugs, covered in your own excrement, ravaged by hunger even though all you do is eat dirty grey hard food, I don't think you'd respond with some kind of elegant, mathematical, civilized emotion. You'd be out of your mind with terror, sadness and grief. Cows can feel all those things, and they do in factory farms. It's common sense, and I agree with those who say we will look back on this era as a disgusting, ignominious chapter in human society.

By that logic we could grow humans in concentration camps and make them perform slave labor for their whole life. Their lives are miserable but at least they have existed.

You seem to have a very rose colored impression of how life is for most animals is on farms or feed lots. Their whole life is miserable and stressful.

If you don't enjoy the thought of a eating a slaughtered cow patty, eating a healthier, plant-based version of a slaughtered cow patty that looks and tastes roughly the same may still not be that appealing.

But it's still regularly promoted that the best way to see to a full diet is a natural diet along with any necessary supplementation because [from my limited memory] we don't have a full grasp on the complex interactions/delivery of nutrients.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-ge...

A predisposition to a B12 deficiency runs in my family. In other family members it's more severe than others (for instance a B12 shot has been not enough to bring my mother back from near physical collapse and has required emergency blood transfusions).

I've often thought I had a handle on it—take a daily oral or sublingual tablet of 5000mcg (usually urinate most of it out pretty quickly) and added more red meat to my diet (per my doctor) but still I've noticed advancing effects occasionally. One more physically apparent one is slowly advancing Vitiligo—I'd had some spots for years but notice a new or expanding one every so often. It's a [physically] harmless symptom, mind.

Worse are some of the others I experienced in my earlier years that persisted before I was diagnosed. I still have bouts where I thought I was looking after myself and those periods of sensation loss/global pins and needles, nausea. It can be frightening, and quality of life plummets. It's no joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitiligo

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/vitamin-b12-deficiency-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency

So solve the diet thing and I'm on board. Until then, I think it's a bit of hubris. I'm sure there are other incremental improvements we can make until then, however.

Synthetic meat (or any kind of food) in particular sounds like a really awful idea. It sounds like some kind of progressive, rational choice but it is really only an extreme of the abuses of technology that make our lives miserable and drive people to seek a "natural" way of life (which never existed).

If I may be so bold, that is not how we resolve the ethical issues of industrial meat production. It's how we turn into the Borg.

As an engineer I can afford to buy meat substitutes. I can afford veganism, or at least the kind that is comfortable to someone who grew up loving meat and cheese. One day, these substitutes will be more broadly available, but that day isn't today.

Also, I am re-inspired by the careful meat/egg/dairy simulation work that has been done by Beyond Meat and similar innovators, and now regard engineering as the correct approach for solving this and other ecological crises at scale.

I once again think that my technical training can help save the world, rather than just provide me with savings. I believe in the high-science approach again. This might seem like the obvious solution to the HN audience, but I assure you, lots of folks are drawn to traditional bodies of knowledge and lifeways, and regard them as known-good, and regard the food difficulties the world faces as symptoms of a hasty rush into the embrace of high technology, which in turn entails finance and markets, which in turn entails global capitalism or something like it (e.g. whatever the appropriate term is for the hybrid approach pursued by China.) I myself found this position alluring for quite some time -- "just keep the old ways!" -- but it's a dead end.

Artisanal & heirloom approaches to food production have a lot to teach us, but none of those lessons are 'ok great now let's feed a couple billion new folks'. Instead, they are best at teaching us what we've already lost. That in turn might help us avoid the next loss -- or pursue the next restoration.

2. Culture - if your family has historically relied on meat for sustenance, you can't exactly go vegetarian with the flip of a switch. It requires a shit ton of planning, asking questions, identifying what you like, resetting your taste palate and expectations meanwhile still entailing a fair bit of confusion. OTOH, Grandma taught Mom who taught her children on how to cook meat.

3. Younger ages are tough since you would probably be living with family and decisions regarding what is bought and cooked are probably being made by parents who might not exactly share your inclinations to go meat-free.

And saying vegans are not being sustainable for eating "exotic" food seems absurd to me, hardly any meat eater eats local food, especially if you consider animal feed of the meat, milk and leather you use. That's not an argument against vegans or vegetarians, but an argument against people who don't eat locally produced products (on both sides).