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Comment by cbrozefsky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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