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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

I think that you correctly identify this as a privilege.

This points to another deeper problem that drives this. Americans expect to be able to eat meat, even when eating cheap food.

Historically the food of poverty has either not included meat, or has used less desirable parts of the animal.

If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat, or not often.

The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality

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I hear you, but I also think that something must be said for the fact that I am getting all the meat I want, at prices that are competitive with and in many cases cheaper than the heavily subsidized industrial farms, but I am doing it with a family that gets none of those subsidies, and processed at a butcher in my county that doesn't get those subsidies either.

This could not scale to feed my old neighborhood in Chicago, for example. In that place, sourcing this way would be so much more expensive. I pay other prices for living in a very small city in the mountains, but this is a perk.

I guess I just want to caution us from applying the usual "privilege" critiques and pretending like only super-scalar universal solutions are worth considering.

I agree with the whole of your comment. Subsidies of industrial food systems shape our collective diets.

My diet includes bulk purchased lentils and chickpeas, rice, home-ground wheat and other very cheap staples that are the majority of my calories. We're eating lentils, beans, rice, making our own bread, and the meat is in about 1/4 our meals. I feel like we eat very well, perhaps better than I have in my whole life if I measure it by health and ethics. I spent years in Chicago where my corner bar had a Michelin star, and there were dozens of equally good places and man did I enjoy my privilege of being a well paid single remote working hacker there.

>The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality

This right here is the key and its just not meat. So many foodstuffs are nothing but sugar and corn. It makes you think that you are wealthy since you have so much food to choose from. The reality is that it is disguising the increasing devaluing of the dollar + decades of income stagnation.

Now you got me on a rant:

With the rising costs of everything due to what CEOs claim is "inflation", we are seeing this reduction in quality in everything we buy.

I would protest this by only buying locally and spending as few dollars as I can just to stick it to the man and this captured government that we have but the fact that year after year the currency is being whittled away to 0 means I lose no matter what I do.

So what can I do to preserve the effort spent to earn that wealth? Can't invest in stocks, the market is down and so I could lose, don't want to spend the money and reward all these CEOs who have been price gouging and selling us products with quality fade. Maybe buy real estate? I will probably lose on that as well. There seems to be no escape, I am trapped with no recourse.

I think you are just recognizing that capital is not wealth, and that the instinct to grow and preserve it is alienating you from solving the problems and generating the wealth thru cooperation with your neighbors. Buying locally, keeps more money circulating locally.

It wont offset inflation, but it makes a bigger impact on the people around you, who grow your food, ship and transport your food, sell you food and goods, install your heat pumps or wood stove, maybe even build the wood stove. The fabric of social relations that drives modern production, light industry as they sometimes call it, is what makes us collectively wealthy.

Fair enough, I seen "money" as a store of the work effort that was done to earn it...sort of like storing energy in a battery. Yes the "energy" needs to be able to flow. And yes it is a net benefit of the community to circulate the money among itself. I didn't rule this out as in my comment I did mention buying locally.

However what you describe is largely out of my control and this is where my frustrations lie. The locally sourced money eventually finds its way heading in one direction: the portfolios of all these elites who have the capacity to shape policy and help accelerate this one way flow of capital. In my 30+ years of living I have not seen this trend reverse. Like I mentioned, any attempts to stem this flow is futile since even my outflow is reduced to 0, I lose that "energy" stored in the battery anyway in the form of inflation. I guess in a way if you think about it, a real battery cannot hold energy indefinitely (as far as I know) but still...how do I reconcile with the fact that the effort used to generate that money is either stolen by these people, either by it moving in one direction from me to them or by their monetary policy that makes it eventually worthless?

Yah, I mean, that's one take on it. A take that I still think confuses money with wealth and energy. That kind of metaphor works because it's still putting money as a stand-in, a generalization, an abstraction, for the social relations that reproduce our culture, that feed and clothe and educate and entertain us. It's a useful metaphor sometimes, but we should not mistake the map for the territory, the accounting for the experience.

The wealth is in the social relations and material goods even (you are not wealthy because you have the money to buy a house, you are wealthy because you have a well insulated, sturdy house). Turn the abstract capital into the means of production and (social) reproduction.

Just trying to give a pep talk, not disagreeing with your sentiment 8^)

"If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat"

We might eat less meat, but you can buy meat today that is humanely raised for marginally more expensive than the factory farmed stuff. And that's with the overhead associated with small producers in a niche industry. If we were to make humane standards universal, cost savings would obviously follow. Just look at Europe.

This is a solved problem that only persists due to mass American indifference to how our meat is tortured and poisoned before we eat it.

I think regulatory capture and the power of absolutely massive monopolies in our industrial agriculture systems are what makes the problem persist. Awareness of the issue is not the obstacle. We can all be aware of it, people regularly complain about this or that part of the food system, but when we organize and fight to improve it, we meet incredible power arrayed against us. We can win, and do, but that poeer, not our lack of awareness, is the problem, IMO

Meat production is not that much more humane in Europe to be honest.

It's difficult to humanely produce meat at the same scale and price as industrial meat production.

European standards don't allow many of the worst techniques that are used routinely in US meat production.

And everything is difficult until you do it. And everything costs more until its done at scale.

The definition of humanely includes compassion and sympathy.

Even if you raise a cow on a 'happy' farm, at the end the cow will end up in a slaughter house where the cow experiences immense terror and fear.

To be humane would mean not to eat animals if our survival doesn't depend on it and in most parts of the world we don't need to eat animals anymore.

I think 'less cruel' would be a more apt description - but eating animals that came from a happy farm is still cruel.

This is an important perspective. We all have to find our own peace with how the food we eat is produced.

Temple Grandin discusses this in "Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals" [1]. She discusses the distress she felt when the first slaughter house that she had designed opened, and she watched the cows calming going to be slaughtered. Even with the reduced distress, or perhaps because of it, that she felt like a betrayer. But she also talks about how she comes to terms with consuming ethically produced meat. Prey species like cattle — or the nearest wild equivalent — live with high stress levels, with threats from predators, and the constant search for food. On a farm the food is assured, and the environment is less stressful. Her thesis (which I hope I am representing correctly) is that this can be a trade. The animal lives a calmer safer life, without cruelty, and in return, we eat it.

Not everyone will be happy with that argument. The world would be arguably be a better place if more people thought about this

[1] https://a.co/d/bQwSb4q

Interesting. If all animals currently consumed would be treated like that - then yes suffering overall would be reduced. But it's not realistic to feed the world with these farming methods.

And 'ethical farming' is not without cruelty. Cruelty is still applied at the end.

And I wouldn't call it a fair trade either.

These cows are being bred because we want to eat them. If there wasn't a demand then the cow on the ethical farm wouldn't exist or experience cruelty.

Animals in nature are free and yes are being hunted by other animals who need to eat other animals to survive. It's the nature of things.

Most of humanity don't need to eat meat anymore and hence have the choice of not causing suffering or being cruel.

Interestingly, on my last visit to the farm stand picking up beef, the owner was talking about how made their choice of butcher based on those principals. They take them to one whose operation was designed with consultation from Temple Grandin. She takes the cows she has raised there herself, and witnesses the operation.

I've processed chickens and ducks that I have raised. Much smaller scale, and actually when it comes to duck I'm much more about the eggs than the meat 8^)

If there is no other way to survive - yes raising or hunting animals and doing the best we can to minimise suffering is essential.

There are videos of farmers who gave up farming animals because they realized 'there is someone in there'. In the BBC docu series 'dark side of dairy' a farmer starts crying when he's asked to explain what happens to the baby cow.

Chickens are deeply social animals and can create deep bonds with humans. You might have seen the video of a hen waiting for her human friend coming back from school and running towards him.

Or how about Monique - the hen that traveled around the world and 'kind of saved my life' [0] of her human friend.

Cows are these gentle and curious giant creatures and yet we betray their trust by killing them in the end. [1]

Also, why are we not using the actual words like killing and butchering vs processing. The meat industry comes up with all these words to soften what is actually happening to animals.

Humanity will eventually give up killing & consuming animals for pleasure and future humans will see what we are doing now to other sentient beings as barbaric [2]

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/21/why-did-the-c...

[1] https://moustache-farmer.de/en

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA

I disagree with your prediction about future humanity, but respect your perspective. I guess one way to put it would be to say that I have a bit more of a Tibetan Buddhist perspective.

I've had my hands in a carcass, pulling out organs. I have tried to make sure I made death and quick and painless as I could for chickens. I have not butchered anything bigger than that. I don't do that for all my meat.

I think we differ more about how much death and life are intertwined and inseperable, than we differ on how sacred and considerate that relationship should be.

> I disagree with your prediction about future humanity

In what way?

Humanity has agreed that human slavery is bad, so why would future humans not apply this same principle to other sentient beings - since the need to exploit and kill other animals becomes ever more redundant.

Most of us here in the West eat animals either because of culture or tradition and because we enjoy the taste, not because we need it to survive.

Will there be small pockets of humans in the future that still eat animals? Yes, tribal folks living with nature or people who choose to live in areas where there are no other food sources.

But I believe most future humans will reject the idea that exploiting and killing animals is necessary for our survival, when there are so many other food sources available. In the future we'll probably have meat substitutes that are healthier and with a smaller carbon and cruelty footprint than animal meat.

> Tibetan Buddhist perspective

I don't know what this perspective really means. I read some time ago the Dalai Lama was advised to eat animals, because his health depended on it. And maybe other Buddhists and people in Tibet have to eat animals because their survival depends on it.

Also my understanding of Buddha's teachings is to end suffering. A core principle of Buddhism is non-violence, kindness and compassion. Killing an animal when it's not necessary is neither of those.

I also understand that it's ok for Buddhists to eat animals if they weren't killed specifically for them. But buying animal meat from shops does not qualify that criteria. Eating roadkill does.

We can choose between causing suffering or not causing suffering. A tiger for example can't.

So when we can avoid the exploitation and killing of animals - why don't we?

This ex special forces guy perfectly sums it up. https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100

My grandparents ate tons of meat despite their income level. Why? Because they lived in a small rural town. City folks not wanting to pay the true cost of living in a city and be able to live like they live in a small rural ag town (while making fun of people who chose to live in rural ag towns) is just like meat producers not wanting to pay the true costs of creating antibiotic resistance, it is an unspoken cause of these sorts of discussions.

> a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat, or not often.

US has the highest obesity rate. Even more among the poor.

Eating healthier food sounds like a big improvement.

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