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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. With many others, the supply chain is opaque, and paying more gives absolutely no guarantee of better conditions. The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally.

So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition).

Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

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> For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options.

There sure are, e.g. anything plant-based! ;)

> Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

Produce animal welfare and environmental impact are orthogonal, and maybe even somewhat opposed. But both would indeed be better.

Meat from free-range chickens has an ecological footprint about 4 times higher (they grow slower, live longer, so need more water and feed, while excreting more methane, and use up more land).

It would indeed be interesting if packaging from supermarkets put some estimate of environmental footprint on the packaging. I doubt it will happen: It would thoroughly confuse many consumers that the product with the highest price has the worst environmental impact, and could reduce sales of their highest margin products.

That's considering that you only use the land for chickens, and that you get your feed from elsewhere. Multi-use land solves that problem, and can also reduce the need for feed (e.g. chickens in an orchard). Those systems can work really well when implemented & maintained by someone with the necessary knowledge and experience, and drastically reduce resource usage. However, most of those systems are not easily automatable, and thus require more human labour, which makes them more expensive overall (this might be solvable with todays AI & robots, but the resources needed to buid, use & maintain the robots would probably wipe out any resources gains). But they'd win the packaging war you mention hands down ;)

A chicken needs 4 m2 per bird to be called free range (in the EU), a battery chicken needs less space than a sheet of paper, and they can be stacked. Then you need twice as much land to grow their feed, or more if you don't want to use intensive agriculture. This is not something you can realistically offset with multi-use land usage.

I don't particularly care whether people choose to let the environment or animal welfare prevail, but the choice should be well-informed.

Yes, basically those are cheaper because they use less ressource and thus have necessarily less environmental impact. It doesn't make sense any other way. Capitalism has plenty of bad outcomes, but inefficient use of ressources not generally one of them.

All of this makes it very hard for people who are posturing trying to appear virtuous/moral in their choices (food, clothing, whatever). At the end of the day if you think you are a problem the best solution is to get rid of it...

All the studies about plant-based vs animal food are deeply flawed because they don't compare properly the nutritional profile and ressource intensity. Most of what we feed to animals is waste/byproducts or just not fit for human consumption, but conveniently can be grown in less arable land.

Still not much methane compared to cows. Also, methane doesn't persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does.

> methane doesn't persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does

Technically correct, but very very misleading. Yes, methan degrades quickly, but it degrates to CO₂.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Atmospheric_methane_an...

> The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally

This isn't as hard as people make it seem. I live in a city. Yet I participate in a local livestock farm share, the farm is about an hour away. They allow members & prospective members to come in and tour the farm, see the conditions, and their processes. They work to be transparent about everything that's going on. It took me about 10 minutes of googling 15 years ago to find it. The only extra work I've had to do since is once a month go about 30 minutes out of my way to the local pickup spot

Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Yes, it's a luxury. But still, people discuss these things like it's fantasy land and it really isn't.

> Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that.

Not immediately, but if the food-buying public started to prefer doing things that way, eventually the industry would reshape itself to accommodate. Over the span of decades, I figure.

Yes, it's more possible than most people realize. Where I live outside a town of 40,000, everyone could still buy meat and other food locally if they wanted to. Most just don't, and so many of the small farms have disappeared. But enough remain for everyone who's interested, and the farmers I know would like to sell more directly if they had the customers. (One problem is that farmers make terrible marketers and salesmen, generally.)

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