We are removing statutes of Confederate figures and slave holders now. Schools, buildings are being renamed.
I expect this list of schools named after Barack Obama to grow larger: https://www.google.com/search?q=schools+named+after+barack+o...
Here is Barack Obama ordering burgers at Five Guys burgers: https://www.google.com/search?q=barack+obama+five+guys&sourc...
It is well within bounds to imagine future generations being absolutely incensed that schools are named after meat-eaters consuming the end product of industrialized slaughter.
It is easy to imagine future generations seeing us as monsters.
Are we monsters?
I won't give up meat. I will however do everything in my personal power to vote to end such practices and buy local, even if it means paying more. I think we just need to show more people. The meat industries have done a great job of hiding their awful secrets, often at the legislative level.
Don't waste you're money buying local because it really means nothing with respect to welfare of the animal. Instead try to reduce your consumption.
If everyone reduced consumption just to reduce it, factory farms would still exist, just less of them. You didn't solve the issue, you just made it slightly smaller.
You're also underestimating the impact of modern animal breeds on the price of animal products. Broiler chickens are slaughtered at about a third of the age as chickens a century ago. All farms benefit from that kind of decrease and it's one of the things that turned chicken into a daily food. Without CAFOs, prices would certainly go up, but less dramatically than you thibk.
If Silicon Valley Buddhism (SVB, where this rhetoric comes from) was so effective it would have broader appeal. It’s useful to dissect why it works for HN people though.
SVB works because (1) Steve Jobs - it’s compatible with rich people crazy for whom limousine liberal is an insufficiently contrarian moral framework, and (2) it is a lot less partisan than all the other good reasons to not eat meat products, like your health and the environment.
Indeed the bigger story here is that anti-intellectualism has made it hard to be a vegan for health or environmental reasons around your Republican venture capitalists. However “minimizing harm to as many beings as possible” (as one Silicon Valley billionaire supervillain once put it to me) doesn’t sound like something couched in science. It sounds almost like pseudoscience, much like the bulletproof coffee or blue light avoidance crazes, something which specifically appeals to Republican finance types and therefore is an acceptable moral framework for SV’s only real god, the almighty dollar.
Fortunately the chickens could give less of a fuck why you stop eating them. So go “Buddhism.”
Similarly, on the human front, a Westerner deploying even a little cash in the poorest parts of the world can save hundreds of lives. But most people don't care. They have their lives to live, mouths to feed, their local homes and neighborhoods to take care of. Caring about the suffering of millions of strangers thousands of miles away, regardless of species, isn't something we're good at, or care much for.
BOCTAOE