Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have decided to eat less meat because I can't afford to consistently purchase cuts from pastured animals, and I don't have the capacity currently to hunt or raise animals myself.

I just can't afford to eat chicken that is pastured in the same way that I would eat the tasteless breasts and thighs that are 1.99 a pound. I haven't eat beef more than a few times since COVID. We eat less pork now, more for supply issues than cost issues. Fish is a delicacy.

Most people will not make these decisions. I still don't eat eggs from pastured hens, again because of logistical issues more than anything else. None of the cheese I eat comes from responsibly managed cows (maybe it is, but how would I know?).

The solution to these things is pragmatic regulations that are not ideological in nature. The level of care and respect we show for animals reflects a level of care and respect we have for ourselves.

But it's facetious to talk about this in the current US context. Because of the commerce clause, and the continually eroding protections at the national level, not only are we lowering the standards (for animal welfare, product quality, and safety) in the US, we are also exporting our already low standards to other countries.

Why the opposition to ideologically inclined regulations? Genuinely wondering. Is it just because it tends to make the issue so heated?

I think there are a lot of good reasons to continually regulate animal agriculture so as to be less pervasive because of the environmental impact alone, but the most important reason in my opinion is because it's just wrong to enslave sentient non-human animals.

Is it wrong to use that justification as the basis for change in the industry? Curious what you think.

We have been omnivores for tens of thousands of years. Part of the reason we were so successful at colonizing the planet was due to our omnivorous nature.

People with a vegan ideology (not just a vegan diet) have an exceptionally narrow comprehension of the nature of food as culture, as it relates to cost and convenience, and the true ecological impacts of any sort of agriculture.

Ideas like this:

> it's just wrong to enslave sentient non-human animals

Are so unfathomably ignorant in the context of the global human condition, both historically and in the current era.

I agree we have eaten animals for thousands of years, and large parts of our culture revolve around eating animals. But its sort of a fallacy to use that to explain why we _should_ do it it, or why it's morally permissable. There are loads of things we did for a long time that we stopped doing because they were bad. Simply put, just because we've done it forever doesn't mean we should anymore, as things have changed.

> so unfathomably ignorant in the context of the global human condition

How so? I'm not saying there aren't other issues, I'm just saying that this is _also_ bad. I'm curious what you meant, because I think you and I actually probably agree on a lot of stuff.

First of all - thanks for thinking about this critically and choosing to reduce your meat consumption.

Humans evolve and we create new technology that allows us to live better than we did in the past. We have reached a point where a lot of humans on this planet don't need to kill (or pay others to kill) to survive anymore. It's mostly about taste and pleasure - not survival.

Ethan Brown - founder of Beyond Meat - created his company because he knew you can't change culture overnight. But if you offer something that is like meat or better and cheaper then people would switch.

If you live in nature and you need to hunt or raise animals to survive - sure you got to do what you need to survive. But a lot of us are not living under those conditions anymore.

Factory farming is causing a lot of destruction and we need to find more sustainable ways to feed the world.

Factory farming is not tens of thousands of years old. Equating that to hunting and fishing (which I think you are doing, but maybe I'm misreading you) would be "unfathomably ignorant" as well.

That’s a very broadly generalization. I have a vegan ideology and I understand the culture behind food. But I also know that culture is constantly changing. We are also very aware of ecological impacts of agriculture (may not be the “true” ecological impact as I’m not sure if there are any long term studies on that). What I know is there might be some communities/ countries that can’t move away from animal based protein yet, but for a lot of people living in industrialized countries like USA/UK, eating animal bodies/products is not a necessity for survival (or a healthy life).

I really appreciate that you are not taking this issue as an ethical binary (100% vegan or "I could never do that"), but instead treating it as a spectrum on which our various competing values play out, with various costs and benefits. I wish our collective conversations about this took your tone more often.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com