Food and drink accounts for a quarter of Italy's GDP. It's about money. Italy has a far-right government, which is extremely open to lobbying from that sector, and "heritage" is aligned with their nationalistic stance.
Try to look a bit deeper.
Which is exactly why Europe delocalised a lot of industries in the first place and is now mostly stuck with services, tourism and tech. And it's exactly what we should stop doing if we want to have anything of value left
I know it's hard to believe for a lot of people on HN but not every country wants to become yet another soulless cog of the globalized world
are you referring to Italy? a country where producers sell products all around the planet? where immigrants are almost 10% of the population? whose economy is tightly integrated into the globalised world?
> hard to believe for a lot of people on HN
You generalize a lot. The EU does far more than services, tourism and tech and you can't really know what a lot of people on HN find hard to believe, especially if you then throw up a strawman about their professed beliefs.
HN crowd is by large pro tech and "progress" with little to no concern about ethics, culture and other issues, reading this thread is a prime example of it actually
RE: 73% jobs - let the machines do the work so people have time to think - and to create culture - and to progress!! Yay HN, yay progress, yay culture!
If the future Google of lab grown meats comes in the game you'll get even more centralisation, less small/medium exploitations, and most likely 0 local production given the barrier to entry
This seems false, if there is uninterrupted farmland for hours, regardless of what % EU farms employed?
https://preview.redd.it/fmpg5f0i9bc31.png?auto=webp&s=96ce53...
One of my friends is an engineer for food manufacturing equipment. Another for payment processing, and another as a bike mechanic, and another builds gaming rigs (think sim rigs).
I don’t think I know anyone who works in tourism.
By car, yeah. By bike? You're crazy -- but totally doable.
If you wanted to hit all the major population centers (Maastricht, Nijmegen, Enschede, Groningen, Amsterdam, Den Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven), you'd be driving for about 10-12 hours ... with lots of boring farmland in between.
There is so much agriculture in western europe, look at net food exports by country. Germany, france, netherlands, uk...
Factory farming is an ecological and ethical dumpster fire. Animals take up a ton of land, feed, and water, and they're pretty terrible at turning feed into meat. The grain that livestock eats can feed more people than the meat from those animals.
Factory farming is expensive and unsustainable at our current population, and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.
Once the industry around lab grown meat starts to scale, the price will fall to the point that it's no longer economically viable to farm animals at scale. The lab grown meat will be cheaper, have the same or better nutritional content, and do it with a fraction of the land, water, energy, and feedstock input.
Given equivalent mass of organic matter as input, lab processes will likely output many times more edible protein. You have the extra benefits of not needing to wait years for an animal to grow up, you don't need to maintain acres of farm or clean up after the animals. You don't have to butcher the animal and deal with the waste products.
On the scale of a generation or three, factory farming is absolutely doomed. An unsustainable process can't compete with a sustainable one that operates at a fraction of the cost while producing many times more output.
Note that we're specifically talking about industrial factory farming. Small farms will likely always exist, and you can buy "real" meat as a luxury item at an appropriately high price.
If anything this should be protected just from a heritage perspective, like you protect an ancient castle or temple.
This might mean that food is more expensive, but I for one would pay more for it.
We don't have to burn everything good and old to the ground to make way for tech bros of HN creating fake meat.
No. But maybe we can become a species smart enough to avoid the suffering of other beings just for the joy of eating something that tastes nice.
I will add that if it were not for consuming animal proteins (real meat), our species would not have survived as long as it has. Clearly, you know what is best for everyone, so while I sink my natural incisors into the steak, I will carefully consider your emotional, unscientific, and agenda-driven propaganda and petty attempt at control over the lives of others. Again, no promises.
This pretty clearly indicates some kind of sentience, meaning a feeling of subjectivity (all of this is solidly backed science-wise, by the way) and emotions. Now those animals might experience reality very differently from us, but that doesn’t even matter. What matters is that they experience some kind of subjective reality.
Is it really too foreign of a thought to try and minimise the number of animals that have to live in agony until they are killed, just for that tasty steak on your table?
I don’t want to control your life. I believe this is a logical conclusion thinking will eventually get anyone to, given the effort - and moral integrity.
When an animal had the right age and weight, it would be shot and slaughtered. The process would then start over. Both then and now, I eat meat with the greatest pleasure and will continue to do so. Sorry, your anthropomorphism issues don't affect me and most others.
> I don’t want to control your life. I believe this is a logical conclusion thinking will eventually get anyone to, given the effort - and moral integrity.
How nice it must feel to be so superior :) I hope this will be enough copeism for you, to handle that 90% of the world population will continue to eat meat. As people are lifted out of poverty, they want to eat meat no matter how much you preach.
It's astonishing to me how the mere idea that beings other than humans do experience a subjective existence is so foreign, some people will instantly disregard it as antromorphism. Accepting that other species are not automatons doesn't automatically ascribe them human traits.
Even more astonishing to me is the observation that it seems to enrage people like you a lot to simply advocate (ie, "preach") for less cruelty towards animals; and how those people always drag the issue down to a meaningless personal level. This isn't about me, or you, or "winning" anything. I simply think less existences should have to end just so privileged people's taste buds can go nuts, so that's what I argue for.
In contrary to lions, you have the brain to think about this, the alternatives to choose from, the digestive tract to handle plant-based food, and the moral capability to understand why killing living beings is bad.
Why is killing a plant better than an animal? Because their chemistry includes some sort of pain hormone? So do some plants.
This is not an argument either of us can win, because it’s a morality question to which there can be many answers.
I simply don’t see how eating only plants is more moral. For all we know free grazing animals that we eat are way more happy and stress free during their lives than in the wild. Just like humans spent most of their last 50k years on the verge of starvation and barely surviving. Our current state of abundance is about 60-70 years old (20 for third world)
That is an example of assuming the worst about someone else with whom you disagree. Taste is not a minor factor. It is a major part of life. Life rituals, commmunity are built around it. It gives life much of its diversity.
But I still have self control, I don't have do do anything that feels good. I just don't want something sentient to die for my dinner, that's all it is.
That is all completely tangential to this atrocious law from an actually fascist government however. Banning animal-less meat is stupid, backwards, does nothing to protect the meat industry, and they shouldn't be artificially protected anyway. If animal-free meat companies can sell me a tasty steak for slightly cheaper then I will 100% purchase it and enjoy it, but I will likely still not be in favor of banning animal farming.
There is a huge difference between going out and killing something yourself, and shredding millions of chiclets a day for chicken nuggets thrown away half eaten. But that's how the majority of people get their meat.
I'm with you on the second paragraph, though.
I still consider it desirable to reduce the amount of rape to 0, regardless of how important it might feel to rapists.
> Rape feels good and no amount of preaching is changing that. Has similarly been part of human culture for time immemorial.
> [Meat] is tasty and no amount of your religious preaching is going to change that.
There is no ambiguity here? A rapist doesn't regard the feelings of their victims. Someone who eats an animal doesn't regard the feelings of that animal. In both cases, it's clear who enjoys that situation and who suffers for it.
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I roughly checked the french press (I don't read italian): there is no account of the "food heritage" argument, but I wouldn't be surprised if the right did put forth the argument.
https://www-ilsole24ore-com.translate.goog/art/carne-sinteti... Ctrl+F for "food culture"
Plenty of other bad takes though, the worst imho is: "[lab-grown meat] is anything but natural, and is therefore an enemy of the environment"
So when I hear "soandso European is far-right!" then shouldn't I be forgiven for thinking, "well, then it's no big deal."
If Mussolini III is indeed to the left of Joe Biden (as they keep telling me over and over and over and over and over) then...nothing to worry about, right?
Ah yeah the left never takes lobby money. If you want to make a point, try not to make your bias so clear.