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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

Despite the optimistic tone this is rather depressing reading. This is the beginning of the industrial farming trend that has made all meat products rather tasteless.

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No, the reason many meat products are "rather tasteless" is due to the low-fat movement of the 1970's, when animals started being bred for more muscle and less fat -- particularly chickens (absurdly large chicken breasts) and pigs (pork chops used to be fatty and marbled like a ribeye, now they're dry and flavorless).

You can still get a fantastically flavorful pork chop anywhere in Japan, for example, where they didn't adopt the low-fat pig breeds. Chicken is far juicier as well. It's still just as industrialized, though.

Meat in the wild is generally gamier, which isn't what most people usually mean when they say more flavorful -- gamy flavors can be off-puttingly strong to a lot of people. I personally love those flavors occasionally, but not as an everyday thing. (Sometimes the "flavor" doesn't leave your breath/body for hours/days, it's so strong.)

Interesting, thanks. Speaking of "gamy": I found the halal market near me actually sells mutton, in sandwiches, kebabs, etc. I never saw it in the meat case so I didn't think they had it. Gotta try that.

> gamy

I think it might be ‘gamey’?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamy

gamy: adjective

variants: or gamey

You really threw me for a loop with the conclusion that industrial farming is bad because it made meat bland, rather than because of its profound environmental and humanitarian costs.

A thing can be bad for two reasons; to recognize that it's bad because of one of them is not to deny that it's bad for the other.

I kept thinking each "improvements" is likely making the animal miserable. e.g. making the cow extremely top heavy couldn't have been comfortable.

The continuation of this style of "improvement" of livestock brought us the meat chicken that quickly grows to a point where its legs won't support it. It's inhumane to keep them around for too long past slaughtering age (8-10 weeks) as they just suffer. You see people trying to "rescue" them in the backyard chicken groups and there just isn't a way to give them an acceptable quality of life.

Industrial farming is how humanity managed to avoid its constant companion — hunger. I would rather eat tasteless meat everyday than use bodies of my diseased children to feed surviving ones.

Industrial farming of meat has little to do with that, but instead sating the appetites of a minority of consumers in the US:

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd...

Other forms of industrial agriculture, sure, meat, not so much.

40% of the food in the US is thrown away every year and yet millennials suffer from obesity.

It's time to stop thinking like you’re in a wasteland because it’s the very way to make it so.

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