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Comment by subsaharancoder | Hacker News Reader

Now we add "State with the most expensive pork" to the accolades CA has amassed over time..as if things weren't bad as is...

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I'm all for the reducing suffering of any living animal when possible even when it increases prices.

Of course this increases the need to pay decent wages to employees too.

“State with the most humanely-sourced pork” seems like an accolade that’s just as fitting. Although I’m a vegetarian from a state that would rather shrink the size of pig cages than expand them, so maybe I’m too detached from the price of pork.

https://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/products-from-anim...

Pork products are used in a lot of other things than meat and hide.

> “State with the most humanely-sourced pork” seems like an accolade that’s just as fitting. Which no one can afford except the ultra rich in turn punishing the middle class who buy pork because its an affordable source of protein, but hey as long as the pigs are getting their additional space!

Why? Because everyone is entitled to cheap pork?

Nobody is entitled to anything other than an equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages.

Protein is prevalent in many forms and to exclude a significant portion due to dietary familiarity is the problem.

“I don’t care how much the animal suffers as long as it’s cheap for me at the end”?

California is well on its way into gentrifying such that only the rich oligarchs can live here.

If reducing suffering for living things is gentrification then where’s the line?

I mean I think that was the arguement for keeping slavery around in the south....

Vegetarian food choices remain the cheapest option for everybody. The people who base their personality on thinking tofu is icky have higher food budgets - the horror.

Based on what the pork producers were saying, this will have the effect of making all American pork products more expensive, since effectively all pork in the U.S. would have to be raised to CA standards in order to be sold to CA customers.

CA customers already pay more for their pork than most other states' residents (beef and chicken are a large part of CA agriculture but pork is not), so the practical effect is a small relative increase in pork prices for CA residents and a huge relative increase in pork prices for everyone outside of CA.

"since effectively all pork in the U.S. would have to be raised to CA standards in order to be sold to CA customers"

Couldn't producers decide not to sell pork to California? Or perhaps to segment production?

Presumably they could, but that's not what the pork producers were arguing in their lawsuit or in their briefs to the Court.

Pork producers argued in their legal briefs that CA was such a big market for pork that they would have to raise all pork in compliance with CA rules in order to sell to CA. Taking them at their word, this will mean drastic increases in prices for most of the U.S., with minor increases in prices in CA.

OTOH, if a producer chooses to forego the lucrative CA market, they could continue raising pork using local standards. Some smaller producers will leave the CA market. The big ones won't because CA represents a material portion of their revenue.

They also argued that segmentation through all stages of what is essentially a nationwide commodity market would impose significant costs.

> Some smaller producers will leave the CA market.

I suspect the smaller producers are largely already CA-complaint and just need to be certified as such. Small and medium scale outfits tend to have minimal issue with providing a whopping "24 square feet" of pen space per sow and the ability for said sow to stand up and turn fully around. It's the large corporate outfits running CAFOs that are most impacted by this - and their attempts to brand this as being hostile to "the poor small independent farmers" is as disingenuous as it is predictable.

I run a business and need to comply with California laws. By extensions really everyone benefits but it is a running joke that California is always problematic. These so far include stricter privacy laws, stricter automatic renewal and cancellation laws, stricter pollution laws on cars , better gas mileage, and of course the this product causes cancer prop 65 on many things. I’m with the Supreme Court on this one. If farmers in Ohio don’t want to make the changes they can forgo the market and sell to the other 48 states ( I think New York is similar ) or see where the next generation is probably going and move to a humanely raised pig. Obviously they are killed In the end so humanely raised is a misnomer. I do eat meat but am well aware of the downsides, especially as a pet owner myself. norm McDonald said it best - there is really no argument here except I like pork and want it cheap. If I set foot into a slaughterhouse or saw these cages in Ohio I can’t imagine I would be ok with it.

They could. They don't want to, because they'd rather have their cake and eat it, too: they want access to California's massive population as a customer-base, but don't want to be subject to the rules California has put in place as conditions of said access.

So we are subsidizing our pork consumption with animal suffering.

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