Hacker News Reader

Comment by rooster8 | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a more compelling reason to become a vegetarian.

There are farms that aren't like that. If you truly care about animal welfare make a point of only buying meat from these farms and be willing to pay the higher price.

This is true, and you're absolutely right, however: This is way less convenient than it should be. Buying meat from individual farms is impractical on a day-to-day basis for most people.

The problem is the anonymity of meat that is sold in grocery stores. You literally have no idea where your meat came from, how it was treated, how it was raised. Organic/free-range labels give you a little bit more info, but not a lot.

Improved labelling would go a long way toward solving this problem for me. Perfect world: I'd like to be able to scan a barcode or QR code or something and see a basic chain of custody. Where the animal was raised, where it was slaughtered, where the meat was packed, etc.

* EDIT: typo.

Completely agreed. The selection of good, humanely raised meats at most supermarkets is basically non-existent, and as you say it's basically impossible to tell where it came from. I think better and more rigorous labeling laws would solve many problems.

If everyone did that, there would not be enough meat to around. Something has to lose, either the animals or our meat diet.

Define "enough". Prices would go up, meat consumption would go down, not all meals would include meat, but I doubt people would be forced to go completely without meat.

Meat in the USA is made in the Farm Industrial Complex, sure. But so is all the mass market food; becoming a vegetarian doesn't change that. And I am a vegetarian.

Meat in a wold with 6-billion+ will come from the FIC, in the USA or elsewhere. Heard about the horsemeat swap in the EU, or the tainted (with industrial chemicals and or cardboard) meat in China?

It's not a US or EU or CN thing. It's a feeding 6-billion+ people on-the-cheap thing.

Meat persists not because it's "cheap", but because it's an ingrained part of society. Consider the feed conversion ratio. [1] There's an high cost to feeding livestock in the form of wasted food calories that could be avoided if humans consumed that "feed" directly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

Right, but to ignore that as people have more purchasing power they tend to buy more meats is to ignore a large part of the issue. It's really beside the point. People want meat and they want it cheaply. If you could steer (no pun) them away from meats, that'd help a lot, but in the mean time, there is a demand. Given the large demand, the only way to satisfy it is the FIC.

If the world consisted of 100 million people, and everyone one wanted to eat half a kilo of meat per day, there would be little problem satisfying that need without a FIC.

there are 2 aspects: 1) health 2) compassion

"FIC" is a very broad term, encompassing a range of greater and lesser evils.

Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian. Most of India's food is vegetarian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com