Bacon may disappear in California as pig rules take effect
fox5sandiego.com
fox5sandiego.com
This is wonderful news. We're finally putting an end to an unethical factory farming practice - forcing animals to live in inhumanely cramped conditions.
There's little chance bacon will disappear from California. Instead, the price will probably go up:
"If half the pork supply was suddenly lost in California, bacon prices would jump 60%, meaning a $6 package would rise to about $9.60, according to a study by the Hatamiya Group, a consulting firm hired by opponents of the state proposition."
I'm totally fine with paying more for bacon if it means that pigs will be treated more humanely.
The problem is that these price increases are regressive, and disproportionately affect the poor.
Humans' rights to luxury meats should not exceed animals' rights to a humane existence.
As a sibling comment says, disadvantaged families could receive additional benefits to offset meat price rises.
You could subsidise welfare improvements but pushing costs up has the benefit of allowing more environmentally beneficial alternatives to break through on value for all consumers.
If a similar rule were adopted nationwide, I'm sure they could make changes and pass the price increases along to the consumer.
(also, I note Google translates "the meat-bosses" into "the butchers")
Thanks, I needed a good laugh today.
I certain bacon's popularity is safe everywhere outside CA.
Obviously for firearms the federal government takes a pretty heavy involvement. I wonder where the line should be for food? Animal welfare is a pretty contentious issue.
In this case, California is restricting trade in pork not raised to their opinions of what constitutes humane treatment. Federal standards are obviously less restrictive.
It's within federal jurisdiction to override the California law to permit California people to buy non-CA-compliant pork from Iowa.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out if California continues on its "ban everything" trajectory.
Bacon may not be the hill to die on, but food trade in general is possibly one of the things that could trigger federal intervention if enough leaf nodes get perturbed.
Interesting fact, the Federal government doesn’t have the power to make marijuana illegal, so instead the federal government taxes it, you just don’t see them offer very many tax stamps for it. That said the federal government does in fact grow and distribute marijuana to select individuals they approved under a compassionate care program. Few patients under the program are still alive, but one patient I knew received 300 pre-rolled joints from the federal government every month for over 3 decades.
>It's within federal jurisdiction to override the California law to permit California people to buy non-CA-compliant pork from Iowa.
That is a big legal “maybe”. The federal government can usually set regulatory minimums and the states usually have the right to set higher standards. If the federal government can show California’s law effects interstate commerce then the federal government might have supremacy under the commerce clause, but these cases are typically always decided 5-4 by the Supreme Court (and if the learned Justices can’t agree it is unlikely we would make much progress here on HN). Not coincidentally the commerce clause is how the federal government finds its power to regulate marijuana too.
It does and it has, under the Controlled Substances Act (or, at least manufacturing, distribution, moving across state lines, selling, etc., or possession for any of those purposes.)
> so instead the federal government taxes it
It used to under the Marijuana Tax Act, which the Controlled Substances Act replaced. But that was motivated more by leveraging propaganda about marijuana as an excuse to destroy the hemp industry than as a backdoor ban on marijuana (though it was also that.)
If the people of California, through their democratically elected government, establish stricter rules to protect the air they breath or animal welfare, then it’s all working as intended.
Guns really are the counterexample here, as plenty of communities, including the US as a whole according to polling, would chose to restrict private gun ownership to varying degrees. It’s prevented from doing so by a minority that is opposed and a Supreme Court that suddenly decided a few years ago that when the constitution talks about “well-regulated militias”, it really wants to establish an individual right.
Additionally, the "minority that is opposed" is only a small minority. It's not clear cut. Gun rights will ultimately be a good test of US democracy in the long run.
I don't think they're a counterexample because when you trade in firearms between states, the actual interstate transfer must occur between federally licensed entities. The seller takes the gun to a federal licensee in their own state, who mails it to a federal licensee in the destination state, who transfers it to the purchaser. The federal government is expressly authorized to regulate interstate commerce.
Voters in California can't regulate animal welfare in Iowa; all they can do is ban trade in out-of-state animal products that are not compliant. The federal government can override those in-state decisions via the commerce clause, as I (not a lawyer!) understand it.
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I am pro-privacy, and generally agree with well designed and targetted regulations. There should be provisions for making it easy for GDPR compliance for the little guy. There are none.
This is a complete misunderstanding of GDPR, which carves out common-sense limitations for exactly this sort of scenario.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
> Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary... for compliance with a legal obligation which requires processing by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject...
A criminal in the EU can't go issue a "right to be forgotten" request to the prison system, for example. They have a legitimate reason to decline it.
> economically nonviable,
Please remember: Google was a massive success long before they started tracking people all over the web.
This isn't about being economically viable. This is to spite people because they are not content with not being able to squeeze the last few cents out each of us.
I saw this though memeorandum.com (still goin', still heavy on the right wing sources)
WARNING GRAPHIC: https://youtu.be/XPGIMCmpfxU
I do love me some bacon though.
Even better would be if they had to slaughter some animals themselves rather than simply paying people to do it for them.
Farmers and slaughterhouse workers get desensitized to the slaughter of animals, but I suspect that if people didn't do it all the time but just, say, once or twice a year and saw what actually goes on in slaughterhouses most people would be horrified and many of them would turn vegetarian.
Even a single field trip to a slaughterhouse as a kid would probably make lifetime vegetarians out of a lot of people.
Most people don't want to think about what they're doing to animals (and certainly not witness, much less directly participate in it), though, so it would probably never happen.
Yes, it’s terrible how animals are being treated and yes mass consumption of meat has some terrible side effects.
With that being said: do you think that in the wild a predator will think twice about killing and eating their pray? do you think that every person on Earth could turn vegetarian and be able to get a healthy diet tomorrow?
That’s an unrealistically high bar to set. Almost anyone can turn vegetarian and have a healthy diet today. Our agricultural sector regularly adjusts for changing tastes of the population, and while this adjustment doesn’t happen overnight it happens regularly.
Don’t get me wrong. Eating a mostly-plant based diet is okay and doable but I’m talking the last 5-10% territory.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're not willing to face up to the fact that you're killing a sentient animal to feed yourself, then you shouldn't be eating meat.
Now most people ask "who would choose death?". We'd be surprised.
I've watched and slaughtered animals since I was little and still eat meat, but others could change.
Logically we gain nothing from improving animal rights, except insofar as the meat may be healthier/tastier or that we don't feel so bad. The first may be worth it, the second can be achieved by hiding factory farming more efficiently.
Of course if you think animal suffering is bad, that is a different pov, but why should you?
Also, this is what kosher/halal rules about slaughtering are trying to do. (There is some debate about how effective those specific rules are.)
Not to mention the current (now-historical) market solution isn't an efficient allocation of resources by any means[3]. Livestock account for only 18% of global calories and only 37% of protein! It's a myth that eating meat is the way we get protein. To boot, 45% of crop yields go towards feeding that livestock[4].
I have nothing against eating meat as such, and I'm all for using grazing land for grazing. But the fact that we waste good crop land on highly inefficient food/nutrient/protein production is not good.
We have to use regulation to price in these inefficiencies and allow the market to deal with realistic pricing levels for meat.
[0] (graphic, but short and info-dense) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/4/19/8447883/milk-health-benefit
[2] <this is fine>.jpg
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
[4] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
(not thrilled about posting Vox links but they're just the tip of the iceberg if you start reading about this stuff properly)
> If half the pork supply was suddenly lost in California, bacon prices would jump 60%, meaning a $6 package would rise to about $9.60, according to a study by the Hatamiya Group, a consulting firm hired by opponents of the state proposition.
So let supply and demand work it out? If, as this pork industry PR firm claims, half the pork supply just decides to not participate in the California market, it's financially sensible on the margin for any individual pork farmer to sell meat for anywhere from 15% to 49% more. Note in particular 15% per animal means you're not counting fixed costs like labor, so probably the final price increase will be less than 15%.
(This does show the weakness of the California proposition system, though: it's impossible for the normal functioning of government to clarify this law etc. because it's the unchangeable will of the people.)
That's... misleading. Its true that there is more friction with, say, legislative revision. But its not immutable, the legislature would just have to refer proposed changes to the people. This is very much not an insurmountable barrier, such submissions are not uncommon.