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Comment by wingspar | Hacker News Reader

>> What would that better system look like, for his farm and others like it? He believes it would require consumers to favor food grown nearby, so they can understand and engage with it, see it, participate in it, question and challenge it when needed.

I’m not unsympathetic to the issue, but what does this even mean?

If I want to just get some yogurt, how do I “participate in it”. I “engage” with it when I eat it, but I gather that’s not what they’re mean.

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Everybody, in every field of work or hobby, insists that the public needs to understand and connect with it better.

If every part of your life got the attention it supposedly deserves, it would be a full time job, and I've already got one of those.

I'm a vegetarian because I wanted to be more ethical about food in the laziest way possible. So I'm the target audience for "thinking about ethical food". But no, I will not be participating in Jack squat.

I agree with you that it's arrogant for someone in a specialty to expect everyone else to invest into their specialty. I see this all the time from business initiatives saying that we need to integrate time tracking into the culture to make one teams job easier, everyone should learn security, accessibility, performance, compliance, internationalization. We should design for all of these things from the start and also deliver an MVP by the date that the sales person sold it for.

If software forced all instances of object lifetimes which weren't a tree with unique owners to be painfully against the grain, then you'd make a good deal of progress.

If your primitives acted on whole data structures rather than individual elements, you'd made a good deal of progress. E.g. 1. Partition this set of http requests by method. 2. What capabilities are available to this group of credentials? 3. Give me the set of k different fields which have the newest timestamp on their relevant keys but aren't in this blacklist.

If we made our password requirements to start with not being crackable with some basic software, you might not need rotation policies and strength requirements.

The easy answer is to say that everyone should participate and that many hands make light work. And it's tempting because performance certainly can hit a state where you have to make an architectural change to meet your requirements. (Presumably for other specialties as well) Having an expert do it also doesn't work because that can be adversarial.

It doesn't need to go that far, necessarily. Sometimes I get really into reading about a certain topic for a month or two, joining hobby forums, etc. to the extent that I feel "connected" to it for a long time afterwards. Suddenly I start noticing articles, videos, etc. about the topic that I wouldn't have clicked on before, and thinking about how it relates to my life.

I think, in an ideal world, we'd all have the time and interest to go on several of these short-term deep-dives per year. And ideally, local communities would serve as a funnel to get people engaged in a meaningful but time-efficient way.

That means “being willing to pay more” by understanding what goes into it (or just because it’s local).

Many of the “hardships” that local farms encounter stem from working to make their product nearly indistinguishable from the mass produced stuff. If you’re willing to take farm output that looks are tastes a bit different, it can make their life much easier.

Visiting the farm, meeting the people, understanding what they do, and buying from them directly.

Consider this: eating an animal is a sacred act, like marriage. This animal has been raised and cared for—think of all that goes into raising a child—in order to be slaughtered and consumed in a ritual "meal." That animal came into this world, opened its eyes for the first time, took its first steps, learned to eat, play and love its family. Farmers have taken on this sacred task of ushering the animal through its life and delivering it to you. They have held onto a dark secret: that the meaning of this animal's life has been to nourish and sustain you. Nevertheless, they've done their best to support a dignified life for the animal, treating it with respect and ending its life with grace. All for your benefit.

How would you like to treat people who raise and then kill living beings for you? And how would you like to treat things that live their entire lives in order to die for you?

If it were people instead of animals, would you prefer to remain uninvolved, or would you want to somehow participate in the ritual?

Well, that's one way to look at it, but as for me, I'm looking for a less sacramental approach to the morning bacon.

Who exactly are you talking about? Like, name someone who actually does this shit?

I've been a vegetarian for twenty years, but shit like like makes me want to go vegan.

What do you suppose a chimpanzee is thinking about when it devours a bushbaby alive?

>Visiting the farm, meeting the people, understanding what they do, and buying from them directly. Consider this: eating an animal is a sacred act, like marriage.

Yeah, it's not about that. It's more about knowing your local producers, what they feed the animals, the quality of meet, cheese, etc, they make, etc.

Not about checking whether the animals were loved and had massages...

That too, I agree

>If I want to just get some yogurt, how do I “participate in it”. I “engage” with it when I eat it, but I gather that’s not what they’re mean.

Well, if you were from e.g. France, Italy, or heck, even the rural US, you'd know (and probably in tons of other places too, just some I know of).

You can get to know your local producers, talk to them, know the quality of their meat, cheese, yoghurt, etc., know which varieties this or that producer deals with and so on.

It's pretty common in many places to know the producers of at least some of the local stuff you buy.

Now, if you live in e.g. NY, well, good luck with that...

It’s a good question. I don’t think these are good answers. I think the real answer is that you need to elect governments that are going to seriously regulate agriculture, and then you need to continue to support those policies when the price of food inevitably increases. And you need to somehow convince everyone else to do the same.

Perhaps buying at a farmers' market from local suppliers if available in your area?

I live in Texas. We do not have variety in our farms. There is not enough local produce for engagement here.

https://www.texasrealfood.com/community-supported-agricultur...

The local farmers' markets are only open at limited times when I have other commitments. It's just not realistic for a lot of people.

Fair. I'm certainly not suggesting it's a realistic solution for many communities and people.

Depending on the market's rules, farmer's market vendors are buying their produce from the same place the grocery stores are:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/farmers-markets-lies-market...

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/...

Although it looks like some of the Bay Area markets might be Producer Markets?

List of "Certified Farmer's Markets"

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/is/i_&_c/cfm.html

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