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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

For a slightly higher cost we can rear animals like cattle and chicken humanely and produce better quality eggs, beef etc. I don't understand this factory farm model.

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> For a slightly higher cost...

> I don't understand this factory farm model

Seems to me like you understand it just fine. Or maybe you are underestimating the cost difference or people's ability/willingness to spend more on these items.

IMO the only solution to the big "meat problem" be it CO2, land use, antibiotics resistance, ethics of slaughtering animals, treatment, is probably cultured meat.

More government sponsored investment is definitely needed. The CO2 externality alone of cattle is a significant portion of humanity's CO2 emissions, something like 15%.

The land use for meat production between feed and grazing is very large as well, google says 33% of farmland is dedicated to animal feed production. That's a huge amount of land consuming water resources, steadily losing topsoil, and removal of natural habitats and potential carbon sinks.

Grazing is 35% of US land. Again, just a huge amount of land that is denied natural habitats.

You don't fix industrial food systems with more industrial food systems. It's the industrial scale and the drive of capitalism to externalize costs and risks, and aggregate profits that is the problem.

I would prefer a traditional vegetarian diet to a "cultured meat" diet. I don't want industrial food poducts in my body.

At one point in my life I was an avowed socialist. It look years for me to see through the bullshit to understand that "Capitalism" is really just negotiated (unplanned) order and sometimes that order is high-jacked by moron's. In the case of food production in the US the USDA is severely restricting the ability for small to medium sized operations to survive in the market and have tipped the scales in favor of giant multi-national corporations. those company's can have the on-site inspection overhead. A small business cannot. Thus they cannot sell their product across state lines. And so you wind up with aggregated industrial food systems.

We run into that very issue in our local food system. It's a cap on the ability to grow the local food economy. The solutions people have tried include making shared USDA kitchens for food processing, but that is very complicated and I have heard more of them fail than succeed.

In capitalist systems, "sometimes" seems to be happening very often. Frequently enough now, and over history, that some very believable and actionable critiques of capital have been written, re-written, re-discovered and re-packaged -- at their root being the insight that this alienation, capture and monopoly is the result of class differentiation, capital accumulation, and production under the commodity form. That's not bullshit.

Well, another solution to the industrial meat system is the industrial fake meat system. That may be a lot more viable in the short term than cultured meat.

Vegetarianism is a far far harder sell to Americans than "give up your practically worthless pointlessly large Trucks/SUVs that you almost never use for what the advertising portrays you using them as". It may be harder than "give up soda", "use bikes more", "don't live in the suburbs", etc.

I like tofu and seitan and tvp, but my stomach has some limits on it's ability to process them. I really appreciate what vietnamese cuisine can do to imitate meat, but in general I find it best to not try and to let the ingredient do it's thing.

I know I'm talking about meat in this thread, and sourcing it, but just wanna also acknowledge that reducing intake of it, and making sure it's good is the strategy I think is best and scalable. Seems to be some consensus forming around it too.

You can buy meat sourced from ethical ranchers. You don't need to bite the bullet and be an early adopter for some science experiment. And you seem to have no issue with the millions of acres of land dedicated to growing genetically modified soy crops. That genetically engineered habitat killed off the original "natural habitat". And the answer to C02 has always been simple. Nuclear power.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

"More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh"

By all means start the business. You'll soon realize that the regulatory overhead is draining your resources (can't pay the bills) and the FDA doesn't have enough mobile inspectors available to inspect the beef. Of course these aren't problems for Tyson Foods Corp... Crony capitlism is heavily entrenched in the US.

this part:

> I don't understand this factory farm model

is prven by this part:

> For a slightly higher cost we can rear animals like cattle and chicken humanely

I think a better statement would have been, you know nothing about this topic but have strong opinions on it.

Take chickens, you can simply have them walk around in a yard and have a coop for them to go to sleep in at night, rather than keep them in caves their entire life and feeding them antibiotics. It's a bit more space, which there's plenty of in South Africa and the USA, but otherwise your capital expenditure shouldn't be more.

Add to that, practices like silviculture are proving to be very productive and actually beneficial to ecosystems rather than damaging. We could have net positive meat...

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