The way we treat pigs is a sin | Hacker News Reader

The way we treat pigs is a sin

noahpinion.blog

73 pointsthrow0101a27 comments

I like the point about not doing a terrible thing not being enough if I am passively tolerating other people doing terrible things around me. We are all complicit by either active participation in evil or by inaction. Factory farming is evil, there's no argument about that. And it's industrial-scale evil: billions of conscious creatures living their worst possible lives. And there is no argument about them being conscious too: anybody who's ever owned a pet knows that these creatures have rich emotional lives, personalities, fears and joys. And it's not a necessary evil too - there is plenty of protein and calories without meat.

So true. One of the smartest animals being treated in the worst possible way. You can't even justify it with some nutritional or health argument - there's nothing essential in pork that humans can't get from other sources. It's cruelty and torture that's happening out of habit, out of people being stubborn and not wanting to go without a taste they're familiar with.

If this topic interests you, I recommend reading “Animal Liberation” by the philosopher Peter Singer.

I discovered it during my philosophy classes at university, and eventually became vegetarian as a result of this about 15 years ago.

Honestly at this point I can’t remember the details of the book, only that it had enough of an impact to stop me eating meat.

As someone with farmer parents... please, don't drink milk. The saddest sound I have ever heard in my life is a mother cow calling for her calf after it has been taken away.

Yeah, milk is disturbing. Most people's intuition about what is most humane to eat does not match the objective cruelty of what they consume. The life of an average cow versus the life of an average chicken for instance.

Yeah milk is problematic. I don’t think people always realize that cows don’t magically generate milk, they need to be impregnated before you get to milk them. It sounds obvious but I’m not sure if it’s commonly known.

Also, milk has plenty of good alternatives (in my opinion). Give Soy or Almond milk a try if you haven’t. You can also substitute milk for milk alternatives in some recipes (coconut milk can be good as a replacement for cooking).

I heard almond milk is bad for environment though?

Always has been.

> The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state.

Interesting to think about this adjacent to the current availability of mifespristone by mail debate. They're not identical, but to what extent do the laws of one state impact the lives of those who reside in another?

Seems contrary to their supposed "states rights" philosophy.

Yeah, that's kinda where I am. States (for now) have the right to regulate what's for sale on their shelves.

This is a case where "the customer is always right" applies. CA and others have passed legislation for what kind of pork they will buy. IA is not compelled by those laws to fill those orders and doesn't have to rebuild out a new supply chain.

They may need to retool some of it if they want to capture these clear market demands, but again... nobody is compelling them.

"Furthermore, vegetarianism, though morally laudable, has an obvious economic limitation — when one person refuses to eat meat, it lowers the price of meat for everyone else"

I very much doubt that, I think the opposite is happening in the long term because of economies of scale.

So go ahead, become vegan! You already know you should!

Lowering demand doesn't always lower price. Assuming the industry is competitive, and capable of supplying all demand, which it usually is, the loss of demand mostly means less money for the producer, and more money for the former consumer to spend on something else.

I have so much hope for lab grown meat and animal byproducts, but between opposition to "gmos" and agricultural lobbying, I think it will take a century before it's the norm.

vegetable protein replacements are like 90% there tastewise as far as I'm concerned, the only time I feel a need to eat meat anymore is when someone would have thrown it out otherwise (an outrageous waste)

Vegetable protein is there in taste, but not macros and micronutrients. I think meat substitutes should first aim for the fat/protein/carb ratio of meat (i.e. almost no carbs and over 50% protein), then the micronutrient composition. Maybe it would be an acquired taste, but I think if it’s nutritious, the taste and satiety will come implicitly, better than any shortcut.

There are plenty of meat eaters with critical vitamin insufficiencies, even of B12. Animals that are fed mostly a corn diet aren't exactly going to contain much of micronutrients in their meat. Micronutrient supplements provide a much more reliable solution. I still rely on animals for hydrolyzed collagen and fish oil, but that's all.

Impossible burger is good. Everything else I’ve tried is rather mid or worse IMO. And I think this is born out by low adoption rates.

for many people you could put a gun to their head and they'd refuse to eat an alternative and swear up and down that it's inedible regardless of quality

the US has had a strong lobby propagandizing meat for a century (not to mention the fed subsidizing it) and it will take a very long time to make a considerable dent

there's already an organized resistance to vegetable based and lab-grown alternatives stemming from the same sources, it's nearly on the level of the oil industry which has been caught masquerading as anti-renewable activists

I can’t disagree that there’s a lot of bull-headed people out there.

But I have a pretty progressive social circle and many of them have tried to go vegetarian or been veggie-curious. And honestly I can’t think of a single one who’s stuck with it. (I know many other vegetarians for life).

So that’s my only point. Even among willing participants the acceptance rate is low. Meat is frigging delicious to those who have been raised on it and it’s hard to overcome that, and that’s not a propaganda issue. It’s a technology one.

Otherwise I agree the organized resistance is very frustrating.

there are hundreds of millions of vegetarians in india, so I think a lot of it is cultural context!

meat as status is almost flipped on its head compared to the US, which I will also note eats more meat than any other country per capita!

Totally context is huge. And unfortunately many Indian immigrants or their children become meat eaters in America, I have many of these in my social circle as well.

Even lab grown red meat will have major issues with inflammatory foreign sialic acid. That's unless a genetic strain is used that has only human-compatible sialic acid.

Red meat, meaning pork/beef/lamb/goat, independent of its source, contains human-incompatible sialic acid, which our immune system attacks. This foreign sialic acid even gets used up in our tissues, and then our immune system attacks our own tissues. It takes decades for this to become sufficiently inflammatory and destructive. Even cow milk is not spared. Only hydrolyzed collagen is likely to be very low in such foreign sialic acid.

To understand, these researched NotebookLM videos will explain:

https://youtu.be/PNg8370HN7k ⤷ Evolution and Legacy of Human Sialic Acids: Neu5Gc and Neu5Ac

https://youtu.be/wkmOKQZP_ak ⤷ Neu5Gc: Medical Mystery

That’s a very unsettled and debated topic. Speculative harms are not going to override very real daily pleasures from meat meals.

It's not that speculative, considering it the reason why in tissue transplants derived from animals, the transplants are specially engineered to not have this reactive substance. There is just no arguing with the hard data that the substance is foreign, is incorporated into our tissues, and is attacked by our immune system. The only debate is about the extent of the resulting inflammation.

Inflammation is a bit like nuclear fission, in that when a lot of inflammatory sources come together, the resulting runaway outcome is very bad, like civil war in the body. Rheumatoid arthritis, hard atherosclerotic plaque, and colorectal cancer are the result.

A carnivore diet leads to ghoulish dreams of mass murder. There only pleasure from is on the way down.

Interesting that this submission has been flagged. I suspect that "Check-out my intensive pig meat yield optimisation saas" wouldn't have been. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Funny that the only time this guys blog gets flagged is the one time he tells people something they don't already want to hear.

State's rights, amirite

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