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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

This is an ignorant "wishful" thought/question on my part but, what would be the cost to "donate" this food instead of just killing. I think I understand that it costs money to go through the full process, but if they're in an "adult" stage and are "edible" after processing. Is it really better to just kill/accept the loss than to get some use out of it? I think logistics is the main issue anyway, costs money to transport/refrigerate.

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The logistics just aren't there.

You'd have to find people willing to take them, transporting them, slaughter them, and distribute the meat.

We are talking about slaughtering and butchering millions of animals in a non-factory setting, not practical. On top of that transporting animals and/meat at that scale is not cheap or easy.

This sort of operation is very difficult to do on an ad hoc/emergency basis.

If an organization would just pick up any unwanted animals on demand, I'm sure the farmers would be happy to hand them over.

Who would take it? If you handed me a live adult pig or steer for free, I wouldn't know how to turn it into edible meat. The only people who can do this at the scale necessary to avoid a culling are the processing plants, and their being bottlenecked is the reason we're in this situation.

Well my thought was poor people/food shelters/etc... I also realize it's even a larger joke to think "send it to "poor" countries". But I understand what you're saying, I wouldn't know how to cut apart meat and do it in a sanitized manner.

They can't afford to do that.

I'm sure that you could work a deal under the table to buy a hog or a bullock, if you were willing to redneck it up and process it yourself, but there is so fucking much red tape in the way of doing this at scale.

My local craigslist has people selling "butcher size" (~300lb) hogs at $100 and less; which is cheap. Processing a critter that size at home is a big task; unpleasant and exhausting and messy.

> Processing a critter

I think we should go even farther with our euphemisms and call it "harvesting a resource".

I love meat, even though I consider killing animals unethical, which makes me a hypocrite. Still, I think the least we can do is call the process "killing an animal".

I get the resistance to whitewashing, but the terminology of 'processing' seems more accurate. Killing the animal is only the beginning of the process and is generally the least time intensive. Properly butchering an animal while maintaining food safety, producing the proper cuts, etc. is a process that requires tooling and expertise.

I would hope that everyone understands that creating a final meat product involves killing, but we shouldn't trivialize the process requirements just to drive an emotional point home.

You're right, there's much more than just killing. It just felt weird to me to lump killing in with "processing", maybe "killing and processing" would have been better.

But the $100 300-pound hog being discussed a few posts up is already dead when you buy it. It's not a euphemism; it would actually be incorrect to change it to "killing and processing a foo of that size at home is a big task".

As other people have alluded it is called processing as killing is one portion. We processed 100 chickens a month ago at my neighbor's house. The first step is to put two small slits in the artery on their neck while they hang upside down in a traffic cone; easy process as they don't fight or try to get out. Next, you put the dead chicken in hot water (temperature needs to be specific to not cook them), then the de-feather machine, then you cut the head/neck and feet off, then clean all the insides out, then they sit in ice water for a day or so before you package them. We don't sell them, we do this for ourselves and pack our freezers with the meat.

I haven't done larger animals from the killing but have butchered large cuts of meat. It is a time-consuming process while being physically tiring.

It's called processing because killing the animal is just the first step. Next you have to systematically dismantle their body and cut up the usable bits into manageable chunks, which (I'd assume) is a bulk of the work. Personally, I think the word processing is more vile in this context than simply killing. That said, I also eat meat, so I can't really say much.

It is called processing instead of killing because killing is a minuscule part of going from live animal to packaged meat.

what difference does it make

Makes it easier to not think about it.

that would seem to make it a good thing

Only if your goal is to not think about it.

I mean if we're going to engage in silly pedantry, critter means animal.

Also, ethics aside, the comment above was referring specifically to processing, not the act of killing. Killing is comparatively fast and far less messy. Butchering/processing a 300lb carcass is where the real effort lies.

That's fair, it just sounded a bit too clinical.

The cost would be non-zero, so it won't be done. In fact, it would be very much higher than non-zero. You can't just march these animals down the road to the market one morning and give them away. Just because there are sentient beings involved you shouldn't think that this is any different from any other huge industrial operation. A car manufacturer can't expect to be able to liquidise a bunch of parts. Without the correct tooling it's worthless to anyone. Meat is the finished product, not animals. And those animals have no more rights than a hunk of metal.

People, this is a descriptive characterization, not a normative one. It's perfectly sound.

All communication has a normative component. The normativity of a description is what it considers relevant and what it considers irrelevant.

>The cost would be non-zero, so it won't be done. I would be willing to bet that the largest factory farms would be able to file an insurance claim for this type of thing (or get a large government subsidy) such that the cost will be negligible/zero/net positive.

Because of the extent of regulations on processing, chances are every part of that transaction would be illegal; from transferring the animals, transporting them, processing them (the thing we're lacking the capacity for, that is causing this need). Even if you could competently process them, you almost certainly would not be able to legally process them.

There's a lovely book called Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal that I think every American who eats food or votes should read.

So reading the blurb for that:

"Drawing upon 40 years' experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex."

from https://www.bookdepository.com/Everything-I-Want-Do-is-Illeg... makes me think, given the implied negatives of child labor regulations and food inspection, that anyone reading that book should follow up with a quick read of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the same way that I found Oliver Twist a useful tonic after my first exposure to Atlas Shrugged.

> makes me think, given the implied negatives of child labor regulations and food inspection, that anyone reading that book should follow up with a quick read of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the same way that I found Oliver Twist a useful tonic after my first exposure to Atlas Shrugged.

It's amazing how quickly you assume that the way those laws apply to Joel's farm is reasonable, or that what Joel is doing is the sort of thing the public were interested in interfering with when they supported those laws.

Your reflex to defend the application of laws by their title is why no matter how much stink is made by people who actually read the US PATRIOT or EARN IT act for example, or any number of other brilliantly-framed pieces of legislation, there is always a gallery of opinionated people who will gladly judge a book by its cover with no less certainty, and with even more smug self-importance, than they would by its content.

If it has never occurred to you: not everyone impacted by the law is a crook.

Steady on my friend. OP just doesn't know who Joel Salatin is.

wow I didn't even consider the legal part, interesting

and processing comes before transportation concerns right

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