9 Charts that show US factory farming is even bigger than you realize

You can't justify your neoliberal capitalism on free consumer choice then just take that away as you please.

I suggest reorganizing society because there simply isn't another option. If meat were too expensive to eat, people would eat less of it, but it's not too expensive because capitalists can just outsource the cost of their destruction. This is fundamental to capitalism, which people forget is literally defined as an economic system that prioritizes the right of individuals to exercise their existing capital to accumulate more of it, above everything else.

I think I might be one of the people you describe, but I don’t think you understand the reason that people get offended.

I am not offended by the facts about factory farming, or that meat production releases methane. I am offended by the implication that someone will forcefully take away my ability to consume foods that I want to eat, and will use morality to justify it. Removing the freedom to eat meat is still taking away freedom no matter how you justify it and people will resent it.

If your goal is to improve the quality of life for livestock or reduce emissions from livestock, perhaps by changing the diet that animals are fed: nobody will have a problem.

As soon as you imply that someone’s way of life is immoral and their diet must be forcefully changed, you will encounter huge resistance.

>At this point pretty much everyone knows what’s going on in these horrible farms...

>Yet people still seem to get viscerally offended if you suggest that eating meat is an inherently evil act...

If you are eating meat that you raise yourself or where you are buying directly from small-scale producers, do you have this same view of meat? If so, why?

> At this point pretty much everyone knows what’s going on in these horrible farms, and knows the climate impact.

At this point the effects of this "knowledge" are neutralized by lack of trust in the sources of information and in one's ability to have any impact on the global issues.

It's not that people identify too much as meat-eaters, it's just that they don't trust the numbers or the solutions that are being sold to them, and so we become apathetic.

Everyone knows what it will take: cheap vegetable alternatives to meat that can be made at a small factory level or at home, don't have an unfortunate association with xenoestrogens, provide the right macros/amino balance/B vitamin supplementation, and are easy to cook.

I'm not convinced eating meat is an inherently evil act. Possibly most factory farmed meat from the US might be evil (depending on how you feel about chicken barns), but the assertion that raising and slaughtering your own animals is evil relies on the unproven assertion that animal deaths are inherently wrong even after a good life. That's not a universal belief and it's certainly not supported by these charts about industrial scale factory farming.

I don't hold opinions on this but I just watched this and I'm wondering what your (and others) thoughts on this is. Only 7 minutes, gives some interesting arguments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqRJsIiPTmg

There's no clear connection between the two parts of your statement here. If the problem is factory farming and climate impact, then eating meat is not inherently evil. If it's inherently evil, then factory farming and climate impact don't matter. Ten dudes throwing spears at a mammoth 15,000 years ago were just as evil.

That, I think, would be the source of the disconnect. Food is not just a core component of regional cultures and histories, it's a core identifier of all life. Species are known, in large part, by what they eat. Thankfully, for humans, because we populated the entire globe and have omnivore guts, that can be just about anything, but in many cases, particular animals, particular cuts, and particular methods of preparation, cooking, and flavoring are deeply intertwined with an entire group of people and their history. If you're telling people eating meat is inherently evil, you're well, one, telling them they're evil, so it shouldn't be a huge surprise they find that offensive. But you're also telling them their family is evil, their friends are evil, their ancestors and entire culture is evil.

Does it really not make sense that the reception to this may not be great?

For what it's worth, I don't even know that I disagree that eating meat in most circumstances, given the way it's being produced, is a morally worse option than other ways to feed yourself, and I've greatly reduced but not totally eliminated my own meat consumption, but there's also the element of "no ethical consumption under capitalism" going on here. Wheat harvests utterly obliterate small fauna. Your clothes and probably sewn together in sweat shops by child labor. The batteries in your electric car are strip mined in some poor victim of colonialism country where the land is owned by foreigners. Nonetheless, you have to consume something. People need food, clothes, transportation, housing, and it can be overwhelming to consider every step of every supply chain to think of all the ways in which evil may creep into the system. Historically speaking, we've mostly relied on governments to curb that kind of thing, not individual consumer choice. Rather than expecting every person downstream to know that their Nutella* has palm oil in it that decimates rainforests with soil-depleting monoculture, destroying the most diverse ecosystem in existence and also one of the world's great carbon sinks, and then opting to eat something else, we hope that national governments and international treaties prevent manufacturers from doing the worst things in the first place.

* Yes, Nutella the company claims it is sustainably produced and doesn't destroy rainforests, but are you personally confirming that?

I think you’re conflating two things that are different: factory farming, which is run by huge agribusiness companies, and eating meat. Small farmers can also raise animals for meat consumption, and they can probably do it on a smaller scale, with less environmental impact and less pollution than Cargill, Sysco, Tyson, and the rest of the cabal. There used to be rules controlling how much farmers could produce, and this kept meat prices higher, and benefited small farmers. But big ag got those controls removed in the 1970s, leading to lower prices paid to farmers, forcing them to get bigger to survive, or driving many of them into bankruptcy. Bigger farms require more chemicals and more pollution.

The problem is not meat production per se, but rather a distortion of the system by powerful large corporations.

> At this point there are also lots of plant based proteins available in many forms and flavors.

Which are highly processed and laden with chemicals.

> Yet people still seem to get viscerally offended if you suggest that eating meat is an inherently evil act

How can it be “evil” when we evolved to eat meat and our closest evolutionary relatives regularly eat meat? And what about chicken, which are dinosaurs and would eat you if they could?

It’s far more reasonable to conclude that “life” doesn’t have the intrinsic value you assume it does.

Meat is tasty and nutritious, and eating it is fine, actually.

I don't feel like I can go into any random restaurant and get the same calorie per dollar food from a vegan entre as you would a meat entre. It's almost always paying more for less, and sides-only. There is a supply-side problem that the morality argument isn't addressing.