Please don't move discussion onto well-trodden, general ideological grounds unless you have something truly new to say. There's plenty to discuss on the specifics of the submitted piece.
I just spent a half-hour reading this very well written article. Very cut and dry explanation of the livestock system. Highly recommend everyone to read.
Interesting tidbit: "But a lot of it has to do with the way we grow our food, and the fact that we mix 100 different cows in a single burger. We never used to do that. The butcher used to take the scraps from that one animal and make his hamburger right in front of your eyes. ... Now, you get one infected carcass, and that meat can spread all around the country, because we have this centralized national system."
All living creatures occasionally get sick. You don't see a lot of health issues in your meat only because of quality checks on the way of the meat to you, and also partially because the animals that you eat are young.
Brown meat is much much more delicious; why would anyone prefer white meat is beyond me.
And the irony is that, in buying "heavy breasted chicken", customers pay for something they can't consume (assuming chicken is priced by the pound in the US).
I'm afraid you're mistaken. It's because Bush organized humanitarian help to post-USSR countries in tge early 90s, which risked hunger because of the awful economic conditions.
They're called "red meats" and while i agree with you that white meats are generally tastier, some dishes lend themselves better to white meats than red.
Yeah, I know what red and white meats are. They're pretty common terms which I'd expect most people to be aware of. It was "brown meat" which I was oblivious to. It's possibly not a term commonly used in the UK (or if it is then I've clearly lived in a cave most of my life :))
Brown meat refers to poultry's legs, it's different from red meat (beef). I'm not aware of any study that shows brown meat to be more dangerous than chicken breasts?
Humans and many other animals have been eating meat for billions of man-years (this is a software site after all), I kinda doubt "actually quite dangerous" is a fitting description. Bungee-jumping without a rope is "actually quite dangerous", for example.
No they haven't. Red meat is not dangerous. Cooking red meat the way Americans tend to (disgustingly fried everything) is, but disgustingly frying anything is bad for you.
Slightly OT, but Is this a language thing? In the UK frying in this context means in a flat frying pan with a very small coating of oil. This is perfectly normal for a steak. Deep fat frying, where the meat would be submerged in hot oil would be out of the ordinary.
It's not as common, but yes. One example found in Southern cuisine / Texas / etc. is called either chicken fried steak or country fried steak. Although often pan fried, some restaurants deep fry them.
> A key statistic provided by the infographic is that if everyone stopped smoking, there would be 64,500 fewer cases of cancer a year in the UK, compared with 8,800 fewer cases if everyone stopped eating processed or red meat.
This is for a country with a population of 60m to 70m people.
America is the only country I've ever been to where white meat cost more than dark meat.
For me it was an early lesson I learned in cooking, thinking I was improving a recipe by using breast when a recipe called for thigh simply because skinless boneless breast was more expensive.
>>America is the only country I've ever been to where white meat cost more than dark meat
This is because legs and thighs are fatty, and Americans have come to associate animal fat with health problems. White meat is leaner, and is therefore perceived to be healthier and more expensive.
Not just health problems really - it just tastes gross, a much less pleasant texture and consistent flavor.
Especially when prepared in a sandwich or in chicken nuggets the white meat is much nicer - chicken nuggets the ooze fat and leave your mouth and hands greasy have horrified me too much.
Fat is what gives meat most of its flavor. We aren't talking about deep frying as in your chicken nuggets example. We're talking about fat that is naturally on the meat.
Not talking deep frying either, I don't deep fry nuggets. Dark meat gives it a bad, inconsistent texture and taste and a generally greasy feeling in your mouth even when eaten on its own. If you like that, you go right ahead, but I'll stick to the white meat - it makes sense that it's priced more to me since it may not be more flavourful, but it's more versatile and more pallatable. No marketing needed - it's just better.
White meat I agree is better in chicken tenders and nuggets. But dark meat is tastier in nearly all other dishes in my opinion. Chicken Kiev is the only other dish I can think of where dark meat isn't an improvement
Have you ever seen chicken thighs? They are very fatty,you usually need to trim it off before cooking. Breasts aren't, but chicken has more edible parts than just breasts.
They are fatty, but it's fat you can eat (do you remove it when you roast a whole chicken?)
Compare that to the fat of most parts of the pork, which is usually so tough you can't chew it (so you have to remove it with a knife as you eat it) or to a veal, which sometimes has that yellowish fat that even tastes acidic. It's awful.
Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonder if it was painful for the bird having this tough dead tissue at the core of its breasts.
And here I was thinking "(true) free-range as the norm can't come soon enough".
I'm very skeptical of fake meet insofar as nutrition involves highly complex systems. Surely the risk of a trans-fat-like health debacle is non-negligible ...
tl;dr: fake meat isn't a problem per se, but I sure as hell won't be the first one to eat it. I'll consider it when there's >50 years of hard data on the record.
Cell expansion already has decades of science behind it. There isn't anything hard about it, either. You or I could expand cultures in our kitchens with minimal difficulty as it is.
The hard part of 'fake meat' (which isn't fake, it's real muscle tissue, it's just grown differently) is that muscle alone doesn't taste good, or have a pleasing texture. You need connective tissue, fat, blood vessels... The whole lot, really. And that is a much more difficult problem.
I'm with omginternets on this one. On a spectrum of "herbivore that has roamed relatively freely and eaten a variety of vegetables according to it's nature" to "animals raised in factory farms, fed defect candy, and grown to 3x it's natural size before reaching physical maturity" to "lab grown muscle tissue" I'm sticking as close to the first one as I can, and I'm going vegetarian before making lab grown tissue a part of my diet.
Not for meat, but we've been eating yeasts, algae, bacteria, and other cellular cultures for thousands of years. It's not like the concept is new across the board.
That's not quite what we're talking about though. We're talking about synthetic meat, not meat-substitutes, i.e.: lab-grown muscle tissue with (something like) cow-DNA involved.
Expanding animal cells really isn't all that different than expanding anything else. It was expensive because the details needed to be refined, but what cost $250,000 a couple years ago costs ~$8 today.
Like I said before, I really don't want to push anyone to try anything they don't want to. But people know how hot dogs are made ( https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAm... ), and it hasn't stopped them, so I expect cultured meat will probably take off pretty quickly once it becomes cheaper than farming.
Yes, and changing fat molecules into trans-fat molecules isn't all that different than any other chemical reaction.
The devil is in the details, and nutrition touches upon highly complex systems. The point being, we've already seen how seemingly simple, innocuous changes to nutritional substances can have nasty consequences. To think this time is different is pure hubris.
I get your point, but you seem to be missing mine.
I think you're overstating the risk of cell culture. Trans fats, to take your example, are a side chain reaction from the hydrogenation of vegetable oils, and results in fats that were never a significant part of our diet.
Cell culture is growing more of what we've already evolved to eat.
Do I want all food tested for safety? Of course. If they were creating a brand new cell line from scratch instead of using cells we already know we can eat, I would share your concern to a much greater degree.
>I think you're overstating the risk of cell culture. Trans fats, to take your example, are a side chain reaction from the hydrogenation of vegetable oils, and results in fats that were never a significant part of our diet.
And I think you're understating the risk of side-effects, i.e.: understating the immense complexity of biological systems.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product.
As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before putting them to death.
Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."
Not if we're talking about advances in textured vegetable protein. When I read "fake meat" I take it to mean that it's not animal derived. Otherwise it'd just be meat.
Still, we can do something about it right now. We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal; if we reduced the consumption of meat, we could conceivably switch to more expensive, less efficient, more humane ways to grow animals.
If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together.
I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.
I absolutely agree. Reducing consumption is a win on pretty much every front. Another thing to do is diversify what is eaten. Have some (sustainably sourced) fish or shell fish a couple of days a week.
"We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal"
Is it still a common belief that we 'need meat'? I thought it was well established that humans in normal health do not _need_ meat to thrive - especially with our current technology and industry. We can easily meet all of our nutritional needs without any animal flesh.
I agree we don't need to eat meat, and I'm a vegetarian, but I'm around... 80% sure.
I'd rather use the less-strong statement I need to make a point. It is still a common belief that not eating meat is in some way less healthy, because plants have lower-quality proteins.
What would you consider synthetically produced 'meat' that wasn't part of an animal?
Are there any other salient variables for classification which come to mind?
In my opinion, structured growth of 'muscle tissue' disconnected from any animal is still "fake meat". Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, it is either still science fiction or too expensive (otherwise I'd have heard about it from places that aren't scifi).
The fake meat of the future will not be just sophisticated pressed tofu but rather a manufactured protein more closely simulating the original animal variety.
Imitation meat would be a protein altered to resemble the meat of a particular animal. This is not necessarily vegetarian, as insect protein might be altered to resemble beef. Certain types could have problems with allergens.
Cultured meat would be grown from animal cells without developing an entire, independently viable animal. This is what "vat-grown" meat would be.
Synthetic meat would be processed polymerized amino acids that are chemically and structurally similar to animal meat. This is the holy grail of meat substitutes for vegans. No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
"Fake meat" would be imitation or synthetic. Cultured meat wouldn't exactly qualify as "real meat" to me, but it isn't quite "fake meat", either.
> This is the holy grail of meat substitutes for vegans.
Hi, vegan here! I already get all this from plants.
> No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
Where do they come from, then? There is already enough plant diversity to not need to manufacture cells this way. In fact, fermentation of foods brings us many nutritional gifts, and I do actually kill these organisms when I eat them, but I'm ok with killing some yeasts over cows (grey line, I know! :)
Amino acids, being chemicals with a particular arrangement of atoms, are completely untraceable if they are pure.
As such, they could come from full organic synthesis from ethane feedstock, or from cultured microorganisms, or from plant protein, or from animal protein. They could by produced as a by-product of some other industry. If the company producing the synthetic meat is not particularly cautious with respect to sources, the vegan pedigree of its product could be questioned.
From the HN conversations about Soylent and Soylent-like products, I have been made aware of religiously-motivated vegans that even feel vaguely guilty about having to kill plants for their food. Those and the vegans motivated by supposed health benefits would not give a fig about the "meatiness" of any synthetic meat, caring more about its nutritional qualities. Those motivated by ethics would likely only care insofar as the existence of a full-synthetic meat could help encourage others to give up animal-harvested meats. If you don't proselytize veganism, you wouldn't care (nor should you).
From my own shallow study of nutrition, the height of my bar for going vegan is the chicken egg. If anyone wants me to stop eating animal products, they must necessarily produce something of equal nutritional convenience to a chicken egg, at a lower price. By my "holy grail" statement, I meat that specifically for proselytizing ethical vegans (i.e. PETA members), as an "Aha! With this, the meat-eaters can no longer argue in favor of their destructive lifestyles based on nutrition or culinary experience!"
I was thinking about your comment for a few days now and I realized that the from the natural world, the avocado best fits your Aha! egg substitute fairly well. While in terms of vitamins it won't be the same, but:
1. They look very similar! Both have a large egg/seed in the middle of the white/fruit. Look is important for a substitute, e.g. all of the faux meat products.
2. Nutritionally they're also very similar in terms of fat and protein.
>Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."
It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.
Absolutely. That's the crux of the issue: do chickens' lives and feelings have any value? If so, how should society impose that value system on an enormous industry that optimizes to extract value from chickens' suffering?
I think the move to free-range farming has helped a lot to improve the situation. The majority of shops near me stock primarily free-range eggs and chicken due to consumer demand.
Be aware that 'free range' and ('organic', FWIW) are close to meaningless in terms of animal welfare. Both give a set of definitions for what meets the label, which is then achieved by farmers by the most cost-effective means possible.
E.g. 1 - 'free range' chickens have almost no extra space per chicken compared to battery-farmed chickens, and many die after being trampled by the others. They are at least a breed which can stand on its own legs - battery chickens can't even walk.
E.g. 2 - 'organic' animals must not be fed antibiotics (which means their general conditions must be good enough for not too many to die from disease, which is otherwise avoided by routine antibiotics in feed). This means sick animals are generally left to die rather than be treated, since allowing antibiotics would lose organic status.
E.g. 3 - For eggs: no matter how good the conditions are for the hens, egg-laying chickens are a different breed to chickens-for-meat. Ergo, all male layer chicks are redundant, and are killed immediately on hatching (normal method is to grind the chicks en masse).
Eating animals is not a pleasant thing. Definitely worth reading up on.
(FTR: I eat animals, eggs, and dairy. I'm struggling to find out how to do so ethically, given the current 'ethical' labels are so close to meaningless.)
Re: your 2nd example, that's generally not true. Sick animals are usually given treatment including antibiotics. If the treatment disqualifies them from organic status they're moved into a different food stream. This is done for economic reasons, not care for the animal's welfare. Despite the image of a quaint family farm, most organic food is still a product of large industrial operations; someone like Tyson foods prices chicken similar to airline seats
I find it hard to believe a single chicken, out of thousands, could receive individual attention at all (after they are sexed[0]). I could be wrong though.
I think that depends on the country you're in - AFAIK the UK has quite good standards for products bearing the "free-range" or "organic" labels. The UK has also seen a wholesale consumer rejection of battery farming and a lot of shops now stock free-range eggs and meat by default.
You should be looking for eggs marked with the keyword "pastured", which is what you actually envision would be expressed by the deceptive "free-range". Pastured eggs are quite a bit more expensive of course.
> Food animals should always come from a farm, obviously.
I am a vegetarian, and I disagree with this. I feel that it is more ethical to kill and eat an animal that has at least been given a chance to live a free and natural life, vs. confining it to a prison from birth.
Of course, it would be impossible to maintain humanity's current level of meat consumption without animal farms. I would prefer that people dramatically reduce their meat consumption, and eat only hunted/caught animals.
America isn't the only country where slavery existed, and both slavery and animal welfare can be tackled in a region without having to change the entire world at the exact same moment.
If enough people in, for example, the US felt as strongly about not eating animals as they do/did about not having human slaves, they could have another "quaint" civil war (or maybe a political argument that could achieve the same thing without bloodshed) and get to a point where it would be illegal to eat animals just as it's illegal to have slaves.
Maybe that problem gets substantially easier to solve if we start educating people (and children) about what they're actually being fed, as well as imposing basic decency rules on how slaughterhouses and aviaries operate.
I don't buy or eat cheap chicken because I know how it is bred/produced and it's both miserable for the animal as well as for anyone who eats it. I prefer paying twice as much for chicken and having it less often, which is what I do.
In absolute numbers there are more slaves today than in any moment in history of humanity.
Speciesist and anthropocentric mentality that is reinforced by world's most popular ideologies - shallow postmodernism, christianity and other religious ideologies - is what keeps this stuff alive.
It is a shame war is necessary to force people to abandon congitive dissonance and start making a better place of this world. At least we in first world countries have all the time to make the change and be the role model, but we seem to be doing business-as-usual, at least the majority of us.
> It is a shame war is necessary to force people to abandon congitive dissonance and start making a better place of this world.
Yeah, there's nothing cognitively dissonant about the idea of making the world a better place through mass slaughter. You know, while we're talking of ideology keeping terrible ideas alive.
What is the biologic incentive for a homo sapien to give up 100% of all animal based foods based upon the pain and suffering of some animals used for food?
Avoiding guilt (if one feels it for being non-vegetarian) feels like it should count towards biological incentive; assuming the guilt felt is significant enough to cause stress, etc.
That's a pretty weak incentive. Even among people who actually choose to experience it, it's far too recent to have exerted any meaningful selection pressure on a species with generation intervals measured in decades - especially given the correlations between the kind of guilty vegetarianism you describe and Western affluence, and between Western affluence and reduced reproductive rate.
Humans have more or less empathy for other animals. Some humans (me included) feel enough empathy for other animals, that they choose not to eat them, in order to reduce their suffering. I assume empathy is important evolutionarily to humans to ensure the society survives.
As to "why have empathy for non-human animals?": I don't know, but I guess having a somewhat-arbitrary rule of which animals it's ok to eat, and which not, can lead to a certain amount of congnitive dissonance.
There are also health issues with meat, that don't exist (or don't exist to the same extent) with a vegetarian diet.
Except as far as I understand it, there seems to be a significant utility to fake meat (and it is more of a distinct possibility than zombies):
For many, there are few ways of consuming a balanced diet without meat. Take low-FODMAP diets [1] for example, which are becoming very popular with people with IBS, a condition some ~15% of the U.S. population suffers from [2]. For many, coming up with enough sources of protein while satisfying their dietary restrictions is not easy without meat.
On an individual level, picking the "harder" way for its ethical advantages is definitely the right thing to do.
For the scientist working on fake meat, their work is probably essential here.
> For many, coming up with enough sources of protein while satisfying their dietary restrictions is not easy without meat.
I'm not sure this is true. I know it's a pretty common argument, but in reality, it's not particularly difficult to hit your protein requirements on a plant-based diet. Even if you take a relatively low protein food, like brown rice, and eat your required daily calories worth of it in a day, you'll hit your protein requirements for the day.
Consider that most people don't eat just rice all day, and toss in some beans, spinach, nuts, seeds, etc., and it should be clear how easy it is to get enough protein (assuming you're eating enough calories).
Huh? 2200 calories of Brown rice would give only 50g protein, and 400g carbohydrates. It's not that you it's impossible to get lots of protein on a vegetarian diet - the issue is that it's very difficult to maintain a high ratio of protein to carbs and fat, since even 'high protein' beans and seeds etc have less than a 1:1 ratio.
Brown rice alone (at 1:8) has only a _slightly_ higher carb ratio than is typically recommended. Adding tofu, seitan, nuts, legumes, seeds, etc. will easily get you within a healthy ~2:5 range [1].
In the meantime you might find vegetarianism surprisingly easy - I know I did. It is initially a bit of extra effort because you need to learn brand new recipes and depending on where you live you might have limited restaurant selections but I mostly gave up meat 18 months ago and was surprised at how easy it was.
Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone but maybe worth thinking about? :)
Beans and tofu are the obvious ones. Stuff like quinoa and nuts are good too. Even green vegetables are good, you just need to eat a lot of them which you can because the calorie density is typically so low.
Here are a couple of posts that I wrote when about my fitness routine and diet when I transitioned from being an omnivore to a vegan. Hope it helps even though I am not a great writer. Happy to answer any more questions too :)
Lentils (any kind of beans/peas) and rice will give you complete proteins. When I was vegan (gave it up when I got married, like many things ;-) ) I didn't eat much tofu mainly because it has a huge amount of fat. I actually eat a lot more now that I'm not vegan.
Vegan is a bit challenging for nutrition because things like zinc are fairly hard to get. Although the UI is fairly poor, I recommend using nut [0] to help you calculate how you are doing. I haven't actually seen anything else even close for a nutrient calculator (which is strange since you would think it would be an obvious piece of software for people to write).
Also take this advice from the Vegan society on vitamin B12 [1]. There is a lot of dangerous information out there, so be careful.
I really enjoyed being vegan. Unlike many vegans, I was not an ethical vegan. I just like eating that way. I actually became vegetarian to save money when I was young and poor (meat or beer was an easy equation for me to solve). After a while, I just found that the foods I enjoyed the most and that made me feel the best were vegan. YMMV :-D
No reason to go crazy at first, though. Just start cooking vegan meals. If you become vegan full time, you'll be cooking a lot in most countries, so be prepared for it.
cronometer.com is an excellent and complete nutritional calculator. it calculates your individual amino acid requirements so you can get your complete protein for the day. your liver actually stores amino acids to form complete proteins so it doesn't matter if you eat incomplete protein one meal as long as your overall diet is balanced. complete protein is just a term for the amino acid makeup of human tissue, so technically the only complete protein out there would come from cannibalism.
I can't stress this enough: learn how to cook tofu. I held off on being a vegetarian so long because I had a bad tofu experience, but I eat it 2-3 times a week now and I've grown to prefer over chicken. Fry it, braise it, bake it... there are a lot of options. Mushrooms are a similar story.
My diet is primarily: Rice, beans, tofu, mushrooms, and various greens. I've never really been a salad person, and even as a vegetarian that's still generally true.
Unless one is producing their own vegetables, industrial production of them is no different than meat.
I know of local farms where getting above average cabbages, from little seed to the nice looking one on the market stands, takes little more than one month, thanks to the chemicals they get.
It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.
Well, there's Tool's "Disgustipated", about the carrot harvest. And some people do think that plants can suffer. Indeed, some Buddhists only eat food that would otherwise be thrown away.
But yes, the relevance of suffering seems proportional to relatedness with the sufferer. Or maybe the ability to identify with the sufferer, based on perceived intelligence and self-awareness.
But we do have a lot of reasons to believe that animals can and do suffer, but no, or very few, reasons to believe that carrots can.
It's also not so black or white. Does a cow have greater "capacity for suffering" than an oyster? Does this have ethical consequences? I think it does.
And yes, maybe oysters are closer to plants than cows, in that regard.
But it's not just about suffering. It's about the morality of killing other lifeforms. Personally, I'm OK with it. I'll be eaten after I die. Indeed, I'm always under attack from bacteria, yeast, molds, etc. But I won't eat anything that I wouldn't kill myself.
Unless one is producing their own vegetables, industrial production of them is no different than meat.
There's an enormous difference between eating grains directly and using them to grow animals which eventually become meat. Industrial meat production has a greater negative environmental impact than agriculture.
> Unless one is producing their own vegetables, industrial production of them is no different than meat.
This post lacks common sense. Processing and feeding animals uses far more resources than processing crops (especially since crops are often processed in order to feed animals...).
"The efficiency with which various animals convert grain into protein varies widely. With cattle in feedlots, it takes roughly 7 kilograms of grain to produce a 1-kilogram gain in live weight. For pork, the figure is close to 4 kilograms of grain per kilogram of weight gain, for poultry it is just over 2, and for herbivorous species of farmed fish (such as carp, tilapia, and catfish), it is less than 2. As the market shifts production to the more grain-efficient products, it raises the productivity of both land and water."
That's great and totally not the point I was making. My point was to counteract the claim that animal and crop production are equivalent in their impact on the environment, which is not accurate.
Whether it is worth the environmental impact is a different issue. Interestingly, googling 'vegetarian diabetic diet' suggests that a vegetarian diet may be healthier for diabetic people:
"Vegetarianism excludes high-calorie foods and animal products laden with saturated fats. It instead concentrates on foods that give necessary minerals and vitamins that help give diabetics a better chance of blood glucose control."
1. Who said it was? But it's clear it benefits the environment and individuals.
2. Hmm, I keep reading things saying that vegetarian diets can be healthy for people with diabetes. Even on the official American Diabetes association website [1]. But if it truly isn't then it is a special case.
3. I agree that shame and embarrassment is not a good way to persuade people. However, there are lots of genuinely good things about a vegetarian diet that people might want to think about.
[1] http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/planning-meals... -
"A vegetarian diet is a healthy option, even if you have diabetes. Research supports that following this type of diet can help prevent and manage diabetes. In fact, research on vegan diets has found that carbohydrate and calorie restrictions were not necessary and still promoted weight loss and lowered participants.
"Vegan diets are naturally higher in fiber, much lower in saturated fat, and cholesterol-free when compared to a traditional American diet. The high fiber in this diet may help you feel full for a longer time after eating and may help you eat less over all. When fiber intake is greater than 50 grams per day on a vegan diet, it may help lower blood glucose levels.
"This diet also tends to cost less. Meat, poultry, and fish are usually the most expensive foods we eat."
1. Who said it was? But it's clear it benefits the environment and individuals.
I'll give you good for the environment. I know animal protein costs more resource than plants do. Good for individuals? Nope. You're going to have to defend that claim.
2. Hmm, I keep reading things saying that vegetarian diets can be healthy for people with diabetes. Even on the official American Diabetes association website [1]. But if it truly isn't then it is a special case.
You undoubtedly triggered my disdain and hatred for the American Diabetes Association. It is my opinion, backed by my own personal data as fact, that they are peddling false medical science.
ADA claims that a diabetic can have 60g carbs per meal. Sure. And I'm sure they say testing 1x a day is fine as well. Instead, if you test regularly around the day, you'll find that certain foods cause significant blood-sugar issues. For me, harder squashes, potatoes, carrots all cause problems. I know the foods that cause spikes for me. I avoid them, or eat them very sparingly to level out any spikes.
Beer. Same. You're told by doctors that Guinness is fine. 7.5g carbs. And the docs never say to graph your blood sugar from before first sip to end. You can see your own results.
In the end, a diet high in fiber (types of carbohydrates that cannot be easily digested, and are good for many things), fats, and proteins are the healthiest for us diabetics. I only have my blood sugar reports to point to.
Yet, ADA recommends way too many carbs, and more drugs. Metformin is great... until it doesn't work 8-10 years later. Is it resistance, or bad eating that makes metformin not usable? Who knows. So I'm doing both. Taking Metformin when I know I cannot easily control my food, and eat very low carbs/day. I've already lost 80 lbs, and feel better than I have in years (well, not not, caught a cold at work, sigh).
And per note, I ALSO eat vegetables. I won't eat potatoes, certain squashes, and other high starch veggies. I also limit how much sugar containing veggies to my personal limits (which amounts to no higher than 140mg/dL glucose - the point of neurological damage).
Yet you accused people trying to reduce their impact on the environment as doing it just to 'feel good'; why do you assume they need to feel good about anything?.. I don't think it's constructive to disparage people who are attempting to reduce their impact on the environment.
No, my point even if badly worded is that I usually see this arguments as if eating meat and fish is bad, but everything else is perfectly fine without any kind of industrialization, chemicals, antibiotics or genetic modifications being used on vegetables.
Closing the eyes to the vegetables industrialization is what I meant by feeling good.
Also even if you aren't necessarily willing to be vegetarian all the time you can have say one or two nights a week where you prepare a vegetarian meal.
This introduces you to new ingredients and recipes without adding immediate restrictions to your diet and life.
Even if you never go full vegetarian, just cutting back on meat consumption still has an effect.
Aside from some devout paleo people, I've never known a single omnivore who doesn't routinely have meatless meals, without even giving it much thought. Having meat with every dinner seems rather obsessive to me, or (in my biased view) reflective or someone who isn't very creative with their diet. There are so many awesome foods out there for which meat is a minor, optional detail. I suppose some people always find a way to insert some meat, even when it adds nothing to the meal as a whole.
Like "Chicken Little" from "The Space Merchants" (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth [1]:
He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.
It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.
Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9)
Also [2]:
Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing.
In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families:
Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished.
The real, human equivalent is "HeLa", taken without her consent from Henrietta Lacks in the 50s and grown endlessly since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
It was not "taken without her consent". It was part of a biopsy. And while it was kept without her consent, almost nobody has consent over what happens to removed body chunks. They're simply taken away no matter what the wishes are.
I recently read The Space Merchants for the first time. It's astonishingly prescient.
Just replace New York with San Francisco, and "ad agencies" with "tech companies who derive their revenue from ads"... And the book is a surprisingly accurate satirical portrait of what we're living today. (You can also see a shadow of Donald Trump in the book's portrayal of the U.S. President.)
most of us in hacker news aren't most of the world.
also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad.
medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?
given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and by "heading toward" i mean we already don't and it's getting worse), grass fed anything is totally unsustainable. lab grown meat, or lab vegetables might be our best option, and i'd go with that over a tortured chicken any day
> medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?
Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor.
"Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
> Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help
How many is 'many'? 50%? 25%? Or simply 'more than zero'?
> but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
I assume that you would prefer an 'unnatural' vaccination to the 'natural' disease it prevents. If so, which categories of 'natural' do you prefer?
grass feed beef/lamb, forage egg/chicken ... I buy a lamb from the farmer living next to my father
As far is 'happy cow' goes, there still can be a huge difference between both cases in how they live and die. Firstly, a 'grass fed' or 'forage chicken' label can cover a whole lot of different things. I don't know which country you're from, whether those are the official definitions nor what they mean. But I do know countries where something like 'forage chicken' depending on exact translation and law doesn't even mean they ever saw any daylight or living plants in their life. Just that they got like 1 square meter to live on instead of 1/4. But it doesn't end there. Take the grassfeeding: even if it actually means they could range free on nice green fields, from the moment production starts being all about the money and goes into the direction of industrial-scale it is unfortunately not unlikely their last hours on the way to and in the slaughterhouse were stress, torture and immense pain. Refer to e.g. the recent (very graphic) movie which popped up in Belgium where you could see what goes on in a slaughterhouses processing thousand of pigs a day and how far it deviated from what the laws for it prescribe.
I'd really like to understand these statements - You seem to care about the well-being of the animal while it is alive, but then decide to kill it (or let it be killed) for its meat.
What's the point?
You understand that this animal is happy and thus does not want to be killed, but you value it being happy.
It does not want to suffer. Not wanting to die has more to do with avoiding suffering/pain than it does with the dying itself.
Ideally I could eat animals that are happy and content then instantly dead without ever knowing what's happening. If we could breed them with little switches in their brain stems that can be turned to Off via a wireless signal ...
I'd want that. That would be great. Press button, chicken drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.
The more important question is how self-aware is the chicken? Does this self-awareness give it rights? Do rights stem from self-awareness, or from humanness, or is it arbitrary based on a wishy washy feeling of "Hm, that looks too severe. Oh but that other thing, that's okay". Or is how we treat them based purely on how much they can take before the taste becomes too poor for us to bear?
Personally, I follow the "rule" of:
What you don't want done to yourself, don't do to others.
Would you mind dying right now? Or would you prefer to stay alive?
Sure, one might argue that once you're dead you don't mind anymore, but while being alive, you usually strongly prefer staying that way.
It's that simple.
It certainly is difficult to determine wheter or not something wants to live, but in the case of chickens we can be fairly sure, as they display somewhat intelligent behaviour, and actively avoid harm.
> Would you mind dying right now? Or would you prefer to stay alive?
Sure I'd prefer to stay alive because I'm curious what happens next. But realistically speaking my death is other people's problem not mine.
Dying is easy. It's other people that suffer the consequences.
Although the process of dying, if drawn out, sounds hella unpleasant. I wouldn't want that part.
If we're talking step into the street and get splattered by a runaway 18-wheeler, instant brain death ... fuck it, not my problem.
If we're talking 8 months of ineffectual chemo followed by 10 hours of drawing my last breath ... I'd rather just shoot myself.
If we're talking normal life vs "eat this pill and aging becomes so slow you will be physically and mentally young well into your 90s followed by death of old age at 140" ... yeah I will definitely take that pill.
I'm not sure that really answers your question but there you go. My views on life and death.
If it was only about avoiding suffering/pain and not the dying, would you be okay with farming children for eating?
They will live happy lives pampered and cared for, running around in the backyard until you press a button and child drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.
It's obviously absurd, but you're making that decision with the animals you eat all the time. A chicken (probably) is less self aware than a cow, but we do eat cows.
But how do you decide that another being is un-self-aware enough to be eaten?
Which takes me back to the absurd. If human meat was tasty (I read it isn't), would someone with downs syndrome be morally ok to eat? How about someone in a vegetative state?
If the sliding scale of self awareness is the deciding factor, we might as well eat less aware humans.
Yeah. I find that when you really think about the ethics of eating meat, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify a position somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It's similar to the abortion debate, I've adopted a position (pro-choice) that I can't fully defend. The catch is that the sliding scale isn't a strawman, it's incredibly hard to justify an arbitrary line where one side is okay and the other isn't.
I understand it's an absurd argument but children are sentient and has far more potential than a chicken by being allowed to live out their natural life.
If a child grows up and does nothing more than put together a single shoddy chicken coop that lets water in and falls over in a mild breeze it has infinitely out-performed the chicken. People with disabilities are still infinitely more capable than chickens, cows, most any animal we eat.
There's also the problem of disease transmission too if you really want to hash out the idea. Most diseases don't transfer between species (at least not in catastrophic ways), if we were eating other humans there would be a lot of new diseases we'd need to fight or die from. See also BSE [1] and CJD [2] as examples of problems that occur through cannibalism.
We have things that put things to sleep. Anastasia. I don't hear people complain about operations (except those rare cases). The other option would be C4 that should also be painless. Although you could argue that the pieces of brain still suffer for a moment.
Not the OP, but a meat eater. I think it's obvious for most people that they want to eat meat but they don't want to cause unnecessary suffering. Those two sentiments aren't just not mutually exclusive, they complement each other.
I know people who keep animals for their meat- chickens, ducks, goats, pigs and a cow or two. I've seen them really care for, and about their animals, and I couldn't miss the big, loving smiles on their faces when they're around them, particularly the younger ones. I'd call those smiles almost parental.
The same people have no compunction about killing those same animals, even the younger ones (that have the most tender flesh). I'd even go as far as to say that some part of the love they feel for those animals may actually come from knowing how they taste.
It might sound a bit crazy, but I think it's actually natural to love your food, rather than hate it and wish to hurt it.
I also think other animals have similar feelings. For instance:
I'm going to eat bacon. Why? Because it's tasty and I enjoy it. Om Nom Nom. I'm aware that an animal died for my tasty bacon sandwich. I'm ok with that, because I rank the animal's life as less important than my morning.
I'm not going to torture an animal because I derive no pleasure from it. Given the choice, therefore, I would rather the pig lived a happy enough life in a field with little pig huts to live in before it was slaughtered. I'm willing to pay more for that to be the case, because I think it's the decent thing to do.
I don't love animals in general, heck I barely love any humans...
If someone enjoys torturing animals for fun do you feel fine legalizing it?
Dog fights used to be very popular, but for some reason most people find it unacceptable even though those dogs probably had/have better lives than most farm animals.
>> Am I so wrong in the assumption, that if someone claims to love something, he won't hurt it?
In principle, maybe. In practice, we're really good at dealing with contradictory and even conflicting emotions.
For instance, in the past people used to beat up their kids to teach them things. Today, we generally don't- but that's not because we love our kids any more, or less. We just find it unproductive.
So, yes, it's perfectly possible to dearly love an animal and want to eat it- because, after all, that's why we keep farm animals in the first place: to kill them and eat them (and also for their milk, wool, eggs etc). The relationship that makes us love animals is the same one that makes us kill and eat those same animals.
Edit:
>> A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother, just because there is someone who wants to eat him/her/it?
If we didn't do that something else would. Animals kill and eat each other all the time and most of them die when something else eats them.
Of course we're special- but even in our specialness we can only subsist on food that is alive- if it's not a calf, it's an egg that cold have hatched into a chicken, or a fruit that could have grown in a beautiful plant. Calfs and lambs can scream and run away but a cabbage is no less alive.
> Am I so wrong in the assumption, that if someone claims to love something, he won't hurt it?
Not directly relevant to farm animals, but how many married couples don't have fights? I don't think that assumption is right.
And when considering raising and killing an animal vs. never having any animal at all, consider the quote "'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".
> And they still cause suffering. A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother
Unless you have the cure to aging, that's going to happen no matter what. In fact, slaughtering means that more of them die at the same time and don't have to go through this suffering.
> this animal is happy and thus does not want to be killed
You're assuming this as a premise, which I think may be the root of the problem. Plenty of people don't believe that livestock is intelligent enough to comprehend the idea of death, or really anticipate the future in general. How then would it have a desire about future events?
> Don't these two sentiments exclude each other?
Wanting something to be happy whilst not respecting its autonomy is common amongst humans, so I'd say no. Additionally, killing an animal humanely doesn't cause it to be unhappy, since dead animals are incapable of experiencing emotional states.
I feel like this argument collapses when given any serious thought. Mainly because even without experiencing either, I'd consider drawing a warm bath and cutting your own wrists a very different experience compared to hanging upside down and somebody else cutting your throat.
I've never cut my wrists, but I have experienced substantial rapid blood loss. The injury itself wasn't at all painful, in the moment. Not until much later, waiting to heal. And the experience was actually rather peaceful, rather like methaqualone or diazepam. Except for the freakout about stopping the bleeding, anyway.
It's my understanding that proper kosher/halal slaughter is supposed to be non-traumatic. Because trauma makes the meat taste bad.
Plants are very lowly sentient through structures that are the plant-counterparts to animalian neurons.
They communicate with other plants and they sense what can be described as "pain."
But, I don't think arguing on the sentience of an unprotected kingdom will further this discussion.
The discussion on animal welfare seems to be an emotional one alone. As long as our mirror neurons aren't firing in response to the perceived pain animals feel, all is millhouse.
This is why, I believe very few care about plant welfare. They have no mouths with which to scream, so we believe (or make ourselves believe) that they aren't in pain. That they are too dumb to feel pain (this parallels sinisterly with the cruelty of psychological medicine in the 20th century).
Not to mention how silly it is to care about plant welfare... or is it? There have been little studies done on how the constant slaughter of plants affects the secondary factors (maturation speeds, yield, etc. -- as apposed to the primary: deforestation, etc.).
However, I don't think there ever will be such advances in this field. Perhaps because they have no way of polluting this discussion with emotions, unlike their animal counterpart.
Ive always found in the quieter parts of Silicon Valley and areas, there does exist a merge between the technological and something else. I've seen this something else be called luck, magic, parapsychology.. Many names. But I've also found that it is indeed whispered and talked of behind the scenes.
I've learned these arts as well, to hear the ebb and flow of what goes on around me. Many times, I can feel the data going on the wire, and the emotion it carries. Standing in our data center's networking room, I can feel thousands of voices, like a cacophony all unawares that they too are projecting emotions. Some of us can hear.
But in learning how to hear, I also learned how to listen to other things we wouldn't normally consider sentient. Plants. I found I've been able to hear them, and their talk. It's not words per se, but more of word-pictures. And the more I do so, I come to the understanding that Chomsky was indeed correct, but also wrong: emotion is the underlying language.
How do I prove this? I don't. I can't, at this time. These techniques were taught to me, along with my innate abilities. I doubt even an fMRI would be able to pick up on these, until long after my brain processed them. But what then?
I've also been attempting to find a way to connect whatever that emotion energy I'm feeling is. If it's not matter, it must be energy.. or something else. I'm not ready to say there's a something else yet... So it must be a type of energy that we can measure, no? I know I've pissed off enough other pagans and occultists, but my primary goal is to bridge these two disparate (scientific vs esoteric) into a unified theory. Or barring that, a way to "view" this energy. Because once we can sense it, we can manipulate.
But alas, I figure I'll be downvoted or worse yet, ignored. I certainly don't hold a publicly acceptable view for sure.
From my viewpoint, the practitioners have all but secluded themselves for the time being, away from all public scrutiny. Very seldom do I hear of them mentioned, and of those very few are intelligent.
And I believe this is what could hold you back, atleast in public acceptance (if you're even aiming for this -- and not just discovery among the "initiated").
I'm sorry I can't offer you anymore words, getting a taste of the esoteric after all of this time away has left me in shock.
So, may you succeed in your journey and if there's anyway I may assist, I would oblige.
> From my viewpoint, the practitioners have all but secluded themselves for the time being, away from all public scrutiny. Very seldom do I hear of them mentioned, and of those very few are intelligent.
They still are out there, but most have gone the anti-technology, anti-science.. almost hippie like. To most of them, it's all flowers and happy auras, and vibes. That sort of stuff. In my opinion, they are a dead end. It's all circle this, good vibes that. And absolutely no proof, no scientific work on understanding the underlying nature. Nothing.
> And I believe this is what could hold you back, atleast in public acceptance (if you're even aiming for this -- and not just discovery among the "initiated").
Nahh, I obviously don't talk about this at work. It can easily be seen as "Religion". No sense in alienating people. If they are intent on discussing it, I invite them to a coffee shop, a bookstore/cafe, a quieter bar and talk.
Then again, I do have to be careful in whom I talk with. Obviously, these ideas are exactly mainstream. And, many of them can have very deleterious paths (cults, single-mindedness, magus-itis). Last thing I want to do is get someone who is weaker-willed into something they cannot handle. Primarily, I don't want to be responsible for someone else's failures.
> I'm sorry I can't offer you anymore words, getting a taste of the esoteric after all of this time away has left me in shock.
> So, may you succeed in your journey and if there's anyway I may assist, I would oblige.
Thank you much for the kind words.
There are a few ways to help, and they be primarily information. I'm blessed with an ample amount of money and goods. It's mind I need.. Thought. Ideas. Creativity.
Primarily, this "woo woo" area, Ill call it magic. The problem is that the only way to sense it is to be trained in it. And how do you know if someone is trained? Its a chicken and egg problem. The way out of this, is to develop some sort of sensor that can "sense" whatever this is. Once a sensor is made, then ideally it would provide a way to prove/disprove these claims. Not only that, but we in the engineer class (yes, systems engineer as well) would also be able to experiment in making devices to manipulate this energy. With appropriate feedback from the sensors, we could start mastering this other realm.
I've a few ideas how to do this.
1. Auras. Some people see it naturally. Some can be trained to see it. What is it? Is it EM? What frequencies? Is it magnetic domain, or electric domain, or both? Could a camera detect this? What if you could adjust the response frequencies in the CCD to different areas?
2. Remote sensing. This would require time and lots of money at an fMRI. Would entail in self-selecting people whom claim to have these gifts. Fraught with false positives, given fMRI tech. Open ended investigation on peoples' brains. Not likely.
3. Emotion. Is it possible to sense emotion? I believe yes. We all have felt it, someone staring at us. Someone angry, and we don't know why. Dread that makes a room thick. What's going on, and why? Is this measurable? If no devices, can we use people to detect (and then measure with equivalent of lie detector electronics, to bypass verbal means)?
But these are diffuse ideas, and none are terribly good. But given my computer science, engineering, IoT sensor net, and biological backgrounds, It's all I have. If you have other ideas, I'd be very much interested in knowing or collaborating. I don't even need much of citation. I'd rather enable the occult for the masses, by means of science.
If you'd like to get ahold of me, you can email me clow_reed@protonmail.com
My study of these energies so far points toward body language, posture, empathy, intentional breath, hypnotic trance and synesthesia as being the major drivers. The calmer you are and more relaxed you are, the easier it is to sense. I've read theories around how the nervous system normally deals with too much background noise, and by calming the mind you can free up bandwidth for the esoteric. I'm not convinced of there being any relation to the EM realm and as I'm sure we all know, psychedelics seem to increase one's sensitivity to these things.
Sometimes people confuse what they envision with what they perceive.
But given that what we perceive is in most cases so heavily filtered through what we believe, I'm not sure this is necessarily a conceptual mistake.
Envisioning something in the minds eye isn't necessarily a sense but it's pretty close. I do think it's a good idea to regard envisioning as property of our own mind however rather than relating it entirely to external phenomenon. Which should also be more widely practiced with perceptions in general IMOP.
I had considered that to be a plausible avenue - that it was all just in my head. Indeed, I could just be self-selecting phenomenon that I've done as proof that something else exists.
The key out of this mind-trap is unbiased 3rd parties.
For example, consider this. You're by yourself. You do something "magical". It conjures an invisible dragon around you. It has a distinct shape and look. Ok. So this is in your head, as per your comment above.
Now, you go to the local book store, and you meet some friends. You're not talking about any of your private practices. One friend looks at you and your shoulder and says, what's with the dragon thing around you?
Is it really there? Someone else selected 2 unique details about it out of nothing. Or, did your subconscious chose the reality that someone chose to say that to you, reaffirming your belief? Or what? Mere coincidence? (There is no such thing as coincidence in this world, only the inevitable.)
How many times one must go through with "interesting" happenings with others, whom have no clue what you're doing? We will never receive 100% proof.. But then again, a zero knowledge proof doesn't provide 100% certainty.
There's a lot we don't understand about how things relate and how our minds work and the deeper nature of reality sure.
But also we sometimes correlate things that aren't necessarily correlated because we are just walking talking shitting correlation machines and it's what we do.
I don't mean to say "all in your head" like it's a bad thing though. My opinion is that most things are at the end of the day so I hope it's not offensive.
> But also we sometimes correlate things that aren't necessarily correlated because we are just walking talking shitting correlation machines and it's what we do.
Heh :) I don't quite attribute humans to a complicated form of a calculator, but I get the sentiment. People thought back in the early 1900's, that people were not much more than really complicated mechanical systems, like clocks. Now, It's computers. I still think that's too simplistic.
> I don't mean to say "all in your head" like it's a bad thing though. My opinion is that most things are at the end of the day so I hope it's not offensive.
No, not at all! I had to first consider that wasn't the case for me. Consider it a sanity check. "Am I just seeing bullshit because I want to?" Probably. Can I disprove this? Yes. The key to disprove, is kind of a double blind test - you don't say anything, and someone else confirms... The only better test I could think of, is if someone else devised a ritual for you, and you conducted it, and you noted effects and happenings.
I disagree with you quite strongly on this (and I don't believe there really is enough of a dialog to 'rashly reject'), however, if plants do indeed 'feel pain', so what? Humans can live off fallen-fruit and seeds, but the acreage required would prohibit human populations above hunter-gatherer densities, and in almost all areas of the planet this method of eating would produce severe malnutrition.
They "do" see other reply.
Questions is: at what point do we consider it suffering ?
When there is a reaction to harm ? When it has a brain ? When it has consciousness ? And what about a virtual brain, does it suffer ?
I don't think there is currently any way to know this objectively. That's why I framed it as a matter of belief. Based on what we know about the similarities of animal nervous systems (including humans) and the dissimilarities of plant nervous systems (so to speak), I personally believe that animals are sentient to one extent or another but I find it hard to imagine that plants would be.
I don't know where you live but in the UK, dogs are (in law) personal property and discounting welfare issues, you can do what you want with them if you're the owner.
Furthermore, farmers can kill your dog (humanly) on his land if it is causing distress to his animals. In law this is a lawful excuse to cause criminal damage. There are all kinds of lawful excuses. For instance, a person (usually a farmer) is free to kill your horse, humanly, if keeping it alive is causing a material financial loss.
I thought you were going to say that in the UK, you can't just chop down a tree on your land - there are often legal barriers preventing the felling of listed trees!
Being listed would seem to imply a tree was specifically selected by a town for historical or aesthetic qualities. They would seem to be on conservation or public land most of the time, no?
> discounting welfare issues, you can do what you want with them if you're the owner
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "discounting welfare issues". Sure, if you discount the laws that protect dogs, they're not protected, but The Animal Welfare act (2006) does exist, very much does protect dogs from people "doing what you want with them" and is enforced.
Of course, that protection is not offered at all costs. If a dog attacks a person, or invades farmland and attacks an animal, then the priority of that person/farm animal takes precedence over the dog.
In other words, people can do what they want with their dogs. They just need to kill them first. There are lots of ways you can do that, but starvation isn't one of them, because that's a welfare issue. Seems pretty obvious.
I guess you're assuming that I'm okay with killing rats, chickens, and cows?
I'm a vegetarian, so dogs are not special to me in that regard. I only mentioned dogs because I was replying to a comment that mentioned dogs specifically.
Yeah, I meant that we kill rodents and pests easily. But are sentimentally attached to dogs and try to rationalize it. I am not attached to a dog, and if I wanted to eat it, I should be allowed to.
This isn't a response to anyone in particular here, just pitching my 2¢ among these comments;
Regardless of whether anything "feels pain" or not, I, personally, would choose to not destroy anything I don't have to, even if it's a uniquely-shaped rock.
I mean, look at [0]. It's probably universally safe to say that the absence of these formations would not adversely affect anyone or anything. Yet, a sapient being would agree that the world would somehow be less, in some intangible metric, without them, even if they weren't the result of a million years of forces..
I hear this kind of argument pretty often. It's bizarre, because debunking it is pretty trivial. Even if we assume destroying plants is 100% equivalent to destroying animals (this is obviously a position not many would agree with), destroying animals is worse because animals require plant food to grow. And since animals burn calories that don't go directly to growth, it's an inefficient means of producing food (beef is especially inefficient).
So the choice is: destroy a plant to eat directly OR destroy an animal who needed n plants destroyed to grow sufficiently large to eat. Option A definitionally requires less destruction.
If you do assume animal life is equivalent to plant life, all you're saying is that consuming animals is less efficient. It would be like saying we shouldn't consume icecream because drinking milk directly saves more milk (not sure if this example is true).
The assumption I pose is that (given the very generous notion) if plant life is equivalent to animal life, and destroying life is undesirable, then eating animals is worse (in this regard) than eating plants because it destroys _more_ life.
Its pretty complex. For instance, growing plants means essentially sterilizing the ground under them, killing tens of thousands of small rodents. Millions of insects. Billions of soil microorganisms.
I'm not sure the comment you're replying to is saying to choose between one or the other (eating animals or plants) but perhaps rather that sustainable eco-friendly production is what is important regardless of the product.
If you assume that we evolved (this is a position some do not agree with) then you would realize that we are nothing but the top of the food chain and whatever the flip we decide to do with animals doesn't matter--regardless of how much pain it causes them.
> Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive.
It's really interesting to me that you reached for fake meat instead of better farming practices.
It is interesting and I believe a lot of people view this vastly differently.
I'm vegan, I've decided against the current practices. I applaud any attempt to move towards or support better practices. But I don't think eating meat from previously living creatures is for me.
But I am seriously undecided for lab meat. I don't really mind the chemical components of meat, some of them seem really useful. And no animals were harmed, it could probably be a lot more energy efficient. Also, there is the potential for serious scale I imagine, which interests me. Not sure when it could get there though.
If that happens I think "real meat" might end up being the fancy expensive stuff :)
This is not a problem caused by antibiotics. Is a problem of genetic nature that happens because broilers are inbreed for growing big and fast. The same birds in true range with plenty of food would face exactly the same problem, with or without antibiotics. They are too heavy and often tend to have cardiac diseases, but they live short lives and are delicious so they are the most sucessful bird in the planet.
On the other hand, we are a paradoxal species. Able to feel horrified by this, whereas happily petting our distorted-faced bulldogs, persian cats, caesarean born bullterriers, extra-dwarfed toy Yorkshires, ponies and toy mini pigs, without any trace of moral conflict...
"the most successful bird on the planet" is an interesting line considering that they are all killed and eaten.
I guess the obvious line of reasoning is to talk about how GDP is less than perfect for measuring economic success, etc. Sometimes large numbers are not a sign of success.
""the most successful bird on the planet" is an interesting line considering that they are all killed and eaten."
Moral questions aside, from the perspective of evolution theory breeding and passing of genes is pretty much equal to "success". So yes, in that regard, chickens are indeed successful.
Aren't most animals killed and eaten? Some die from disease and then are eaten by bacteria, but I was under the impression that death from old age was a rare event in the wild animal world
Not all are killed. Millions of captive chickens live much longer and peaceful lives than its wild counterparts (They do not need to care for the danger of being burned alive in an indonesian fireforest for example). Many laying and pet hens die for natural causes after ten years or so roaming around some garden or farm. This is a lot of sun-bathing, clucking and scratching time to enjoy for a middle sized bird with plenty of predators that normally would not reach its first birdday. Even broilers live longer than most wild chicks.
Agreed. Folks forget that the wild population, if stable, implies that almost all hatched chicks are horribly killed and eaten by predators in their first year.
Of course the moral issue of "should I cynically raise billions of birds because they're tasty" is real.
I don't even want to imagine the kind of emotional baggage that comes with eating tortured, genetically modified and drugged animals. Why can't anyone see that this is just a step in the race to condition the masses to accept treating any living being the same way? Corporations don't give a shit about living beings except as means to make a profit, human or otherwise makes no difference.
And I don't get the excitement over fake meat, or how they managed to get the masses so convinced that they "need" meat to live a fulfilling life that the only choices left are animal concentration camps or synthetic bullshit.
Millions of people are just fine eating organic veggies, fruits and grains with maybe a bit of organic dairy thrown in. What makes you special?
I'm not convinced about the emotional baggage. I do agree that corporations above a certain size completely lose their morals.
I get excited over synthetic meat, it is interesting tech, it has the potential to provide some healthy stuff to my diet if I decide to eat it. It can also be a good way of reducing the reliance on the terrible industries you mention.
I'm fine eating a vegan diet and I wouldn't want to change that. I know people that couldn't because of allergies and what-not, I also know that some people aren't willing to make that change.
I think good things can be done in many ways and I'm sick and tired of seeing people with good intentions go so hard on polarizing these issues. Better farming practices are still an improvement in my eyes. They are still doing a net bad as far as I am concerned but I want to see an improvement, so I'll encourage it.
But I guess it also depends on varying levels of empathy. I know people that are much more emotionally troubled by the cruel industries than I am. I just happen to agree that it is terrible and I try to live accordingly. Maybe I just don't feel it the way you do?
My bad, apparently they followed my advice anyways.
Jokes aside, eat more veggies for your health, the health of those poor little things that are fed shit and antibiotics daily in very bad environements, and last but not least for the health of the earth.
Umm, I've seen plenty of balanced views in this thread. I'm a vegan, partially for animal rights but I still encourage meat-eaters that are concerned to go for the better stuff. I don't believe it is the best solution, but I applaud anyone willing to attempt to make things better.
"the animal rights people" is a pretty broad brush, I know that quite a few can be completely impossible to discuss the nuances with but honestly, there are so many vegetarians for ethical reasons around that just don't say anything or go "cool, that's better than industrial farming". I also encounter a good part of meat-eaters that become incredible defensive and almost hostile if they find out about my dietary choices.
Always frustrating to see black and white grouping when the truth is incredibly nuanced.
> I also encounter a good part of meat-eaters that become incredible defensive and almost hostile if they find out about my dietary choices.
Yeah after someone found out after kinda knowing them for a couple years they said "Fuck You" and we haven't spoken them since then. I wonder what their problem was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Who are these "animal rights people"? Do they really all think as a monolith? Is it fair to characterize each individual with any concern for animal rights as "one of them"?
People just eat way too much chicken. The numbers of chicken consumed every year in most western nations is astounding. And those poor birds, the way they are packed to the point of not even being able to walk while they are raised, it's really a lot more disgusting than the final product shown in this article.
Do you think red meat is better? I've been trying to avoid red meat lately for health reasons, and it is very difficult because for many restaurant major of the items seem to contain red meat. I end up eating lots of chicken and fish.
Here in Uruguay, cows are free ranging, and it's some of the best meat in the world (they're also individually tracked, etc... that means you can track the individual animal but it also makes it more expensive like most "organic" food :) ).
Animal welfare aside, I find people in North America really in favour of chicken breast, much more than other parts, say chicken thigh. Yet I myself think chicken thigh tastes much better, especially with the skin (yet again it is usually skinless in supermarkets here, unfortunately). Is it because of nutrition (percentage of fat/protein etc.)? On top of that, chicken feet are considered unacceptable by many...
I think it has to do with being told fat is bad for so many years. Obviously it is in excess, but now as people come more aware of carbohydrates and other issues with an unbalanced diet things may change.
My wife will only eat the breast, because she doesn't like the greasier feel of dark meat. I'll eat either but don't have a strong preference so we mainly just get breasts.
I strongly prefer chicken and turkey breast because it's easy to deal with because it does not have bones or cartilage. When it's cooked it usually doesn't have any weird colors and the taste is relatively boring but consistent.
Thighs, wings, drumsticks etc all have problems I just don't want to deal with as an eater.
Why not? I've been making stock from carcasses for years. Granted, most of the animals I eat are either hunted or some type of free-range/organic/what-have-you, but I've made stock from cheap grocery-store birds before too, and honestly I don't think that I could tell the difference.
Yeash, what do you do when faced with a lobster or whole crab? Or a whole fish! The cheeks on a grouper, mmmm. Not to mention that the scraps and pickings off a just carved bird carcass are some of the best eating on the thing.
On the bright side: I live in the US, I love the "dark"/fatty meat on chickens, and I don't mind that everyone else here prefers "white"/dry chicken meat because that means a) chicken thighs are often much less expensive, and b) I rarely have to fight over the thighs and other fatty meat when sharing a full bird.
Edit to add: As for why other people prefer white meat, people usually invoke that it tastes better, but I've always figured that this was an acquired taste and that decades of pressure to reduce fat in our diets pushed people continually over to breast meat.
And there I think you have it. I discovered as a parent the homogeneity is the key to "kid food", chicken breast being an excellent example. I remembered preferring Campbell's chicken soup, with its uniform little white cubes of chicken and homogenized fat to the version that my mother, where the chicken was raggedy looking and the fat floated unevenly.
I absolutely hate Campbell's chicken soup, but I think it has more to do with the high salt content, and the fact that it was what I was given by my mom to me when I was sick with the flu.
My wife's chicken soup, with dumplings, though? I'll have a couple servings of it no problem!
I agree, it's an acquired taste. I used to hate white meat chicken; I started eating a lot of it as part of an overall weight-loss program. Now, I actually prefer it. Dark meat seems oddly fatty, and has a weird texture. I don't really know why. I will say that learning to properly cook white meat chicken has contributed. A correctly-cooked chicken breast is very different than an improper one.
It's the effect of decades of advertisement. We've been duped into thinking that white meat is normal and good, when white meat in chicken breast shows a sedentary existence. Truly free range chickens do not have breast meat as white as those from factory farms.
It's the same way we've been duped into believing that we need to eat that bowl of cereal in the morning.
> We've been duped into thinking that white meat is normal and good
It's also why McDonald's McNuggets are now made with "all white meat" - except it isn't breast meat. Its a mixture of meat and meat by-products that have been blended and bleached. It has a mouth-feel unlike either dark or white meat chicken; it's a unique combo (I am not against McDs or their nuggets, btw).
I remember when McNuggets first came out - there were three distinct shapes. Only the "round" shape was white meat - and actual all-breast meat. The other two shapes were dark meat. Today, there are only two of the same three shapes that I recall, and both are of the blended "white" meat.
Which is a shame - I liked the variety more before.
It may interest you to know that outside the US (in Australia at least), "white" and "dark" meat aren't differentiated from each other at all. I was quite confused when I went to an American chicken shop and saw "white" and "dark" meat with different prices.
There are plenty of Americans grossed out by chicken feet for sure, but to be real they're not convenient to eat. I suspect that's along the lines of the breast preference as well (no skin, bone to deal with for most sold in stores).
I cook mostly with thighs, for sure. Much prefer the flavor, but also they're 1/3 the price.
More anecdata:
I strongly prefer dark meat for taste, but I like that I can eat white meat without feeling like I need a shower afterward due to grease. Also I like having less fat (I get enough of that as it is).
So what it comes down to, is if we get a whole precooked chicken (roasted or fried, whatever), I'll go for the wings and thighs, but if we're just buying a big pack of something to cook at home, I usually just pick up a half-dozen breasts and call it good.
The preference for white meat is almost pathological. Constantly I hear (I cook and teach people to cook) people complain that they can't get chicken right, that it's dry or rubbery. And then they REFUSE to cook or try thighs instead, which are forgiving and tasty.
I've never liked the taste of chicken very much, especially white meat/eggs. The smell of normal eggs that have been cooked is nearly enough to make me vomit.
Despite this fact, I still ate chicken and eggs, because it can be rather healthy.
A couple of years ago I had an organic free range egg for the first time and it was incredible. It didn't smell anything like normal eggs, and it tasted like actual food. It's hard to describe, but normal eggs almost smell/taste like a hospital to me.
A little while after that I was picking up some chicken breasts, and the organic ones at the supermarket were on sale. Given my experience with the eggs, I thought I'd give it a shot.
The difference between the organic chicken breast and a normal chicken breast was incredible. For one thing, there was fat, and it actually looked like fat. And the breast was pretty small, but it was super tasty.
Altogether, that experience totally sold me on organic food.
When roasting a whole bird, I love to use the turn method. Some people turn the bird three times, I just do it once and find it's awesome (same for turkey).
Basically, cook the chicken upside down for basically half the time, and then finish it breast side up.
I smoke whole birds including turkeys in my Big Green Egg. When doing a whole bird - breasts get to temp much quicker so you can put ice packs on the breasts before you cook to try and get all parts to hit ~160 degrees at the same time. I don't turn it at all, I use a Sittin Turkey/Chicken ceramic holder to keep the bird upright and moist from the liquid inside.
You probably don't have room in your oven to do a turkey upright but it works well on a grill and you can easily do a whole chicken upright in the oven. You can pour beer or other liquid and spices into the center of it to keep it moist. It's just a better beer can chicken. Highly recommend.
Good suggestion on turning in oven though if you aren't upright - less is more. Same with steaks and burgers.
I prefer chicken thigh myself, but the best chicken I've tasted to date comes from the hands of an experienced chef who made the chicken breast the most tender and delicious chicken I've ever tasted. The dish also included the thigh, but it didn't come close to the breast. It's as if the thigh is much more forgiving but has a lower potential ceiling than the breast which is much less forgiving but can be insanely delicious.
Still waiting for Sous Vide machines to get cheaper! I know they're regularly between $100-$150 on sale, i.e. Anova, but it's still too expensive to take the plunge for me.
As well, you have really mess up to overcook thighs. They are one of the easiest/tastiest things to cook over charcoal. Meanwhile, a minute too long and you've ruined white meat. I've since learned that the guidelines for cooking white meat are very conservative and I can cook breasts to a lower temp than I'd thought[1], but then I have the opposite problem - some white meat eaters seem to prefer overcooked meat.
That is just... sad. Don't know if she's American, but Americans have a HUGE problem with food. The US was never a country with any unified culinary history. The culinary traditions that came with immigrants and slaves largely stayed in those communities and didn't leech out into the culture at large in their original and tasty forms. We've ended up with a culture of bastardized and homogenized factory foods.
You can find good food in most medium-sized and larger cities but you have to seek it out. And the local treasure may surprise you. Food trucks have been great for finding tasty fare the last decade or so.
That said, I do think there are two standout foods that are ubiquitous in America although they vary by region. 1) bbq; 2) the sandwich. Behold the great American sandwich in all its varied forms:
Really top-notch American barbecue really doesn't get enough credit. The best BBQ places deliver a head-trip, pleasure-overload, "this is so good I'm going to die" experience that matches any haute cuisine you can find.
So true. It doesn't get the credit because it's often eaten at a picnic table with lots of napkins. It also uses a lot of cheaper meats. BBQ doesn't apologize for that though. What it does to cuts like pork shoulder is magical though. I smoked a hand made pizza once with cherry wood at like 700+ degrees in my BGE and it was the best pizza I've ever had. I haven't been able to replicate it though because I haven't done it enough to be consistent.
I think BBQ will eventually get it's due. We're seeing a lot of chefs take common, cheaper dishes and make them more upscale and interesting to larger audiences and foodies. One of the best dishes I ever had was dinuguan [1] at Paul Qui's (Top Chef winner) restaurant in Austin.
I don't think Americans have a huge problem with food as the parent suggests. I'm biased of course but I prefer it how it is. We don't need a singular identity. We have places like Napa, Vegas, NY and San Fran that stack up against any city in the world, even though our history is short. We attract top talent from everywhere and the melting pot delivers vastly different experiences. You can come to the US and visit New York, New Orleans and the Pacific Northwest and get amazing food with completely different styles and cultural identities.
Why do we need a unified food? Why is that important?
I like to do pizza in my Traeger, usually with mesquite pellets. Best pizza always.
I also like to roast potatoes in it, as well as cook mac-n-cheese (in a shallow dish) to get that smoky flavor.
I'll never go back to a regular bbq or grill - even gas. The electronic controls of the Traeger (and I imagine other brands) make things dead simple; set the temp, throw on the meat, and let it go - return back after however long the meat needs. Don't peek under the lid. Remove, let rest, then enjoy. Best and easiest BBQ ever (I always hated having to babysit my bbq, checking temps, adding wood, making sure the water bath was right, etc).
Yeah true BBQ is the way to go. Some people think BBQ includes direct flames on a gas grill.
I do use a small propane grill during the week sometimes though (small Weber Q which I recommend for this purpose). I've taken it to the beach and to friends before.
Def shouldn't be peeking as you mentioned. As the saying goes -
if you're lookin you ain't cookin!
Ok, fair! Americans do truly excel at the sandwich and bbq. But speaking a little to my original point, bbq belongs more to the South than to any other parts of the US, though any American will recognize barbecue as something truly a part of their culture!
This isn't entirely true and it paints too negative of a picture. There are culinary traditions in the US just as there are anywhere else - traditional southern food is excellent:
Shrimp and Grits, biscuits, tasso and country hams, corn breads, fried chicken, country-fried steaks, pimento cheese, collard greens, fried or fresh oysters, pig ears, catfish, pies (some of the best in the world), buckwheat pancakes, etc etc etc.
Not to mention that American BBQ is revered pretty much around the world..oh and almost forgot, the regional cuisine in Louisiana is excellent, steamed shrimp, jambalaya, gumbo...I'll never forget my first bowl of real gumbo with it's strong punch of filé spice.
And that's only traditional southern cuisine that I'm familiar with, I'm sure the rest of the country has it's own traditions as well.
You want to really gross someone out? Serve them properly cooked pork - where there's just a hint of pink to it. They'll think you're trying to poison them.
/I've been served a pork tenderloin that was so brown I thought it was beef...yuck.
The preference for chicken breast in the US is because of the "low fat" focus of the past several decades. Chicken breasts have been promoted as a high protein/low fat cornerstone of a meat-eater's diet.
I also wonder if chicken breast consumption has been promoted by the poultry industry because it's easier to increase the size of breasts through breeding and injecting solution than it is other parts of the bird. That means they can produce more pounds of breast (at a higher price) for sale per bird than thighs, wings, or drumsticks.
I think it's both the 80s/90s low-fat push, yes, but also an aversion to eating anything that reminds us it came from an animal. Chicken breast, preferably breaded to make it look even less like something that was ever alive ("nuggets", even better!), pre-sliced turkey breast, cured meats, fish reduced to scale-free filet or stick form, all acceptable. Boneless steak cuts if we want to feel exotic and wild (cooked to medium if we really want that cave-man experience, of course—medium-well otherwise).
Bones, skin, limb-shaped things in general, organs certainly, blood, any recognizable bits really (heads on fish, oh man, that's right out) are to be rejected with expressions of disgust.
Outside the serious hunting/fishing set and self-identified (in their own minds at least) cultured and/or foodie folks, this is the norm as far as I can tell.
Convenience alone could also account for all of the examples you mention. You can see the same trend in non-animal products as well - my wife just brought home a pack of pudding twice as expensive because it's in an "easy to eat" pouch that doesn't require a spoon, unlike a normal pudding cup.
As a North American child, I grew up with hideously overcooked chicken and turkey from cheap supermarket freezers: the skin was always a crunchy mess of solid cellulose and burned glazes, the dark meat was a brown pile of fibrous sludge, and the dry breast meat had the only bearable taste and texture (and only after adding sauce...)
After I learned how to cook for myself, chicken became a completely different, wholy enjoyable food.
Interestingly, the marketing of the white breast meat was almost a problem but worked out well for Big Chicken: they overdid the marketing of breast meat and had a problem of how to dispose of the thigh meat (there's only so much pet food required) but nowadays most is exported to Russia where the bland breast meat is not desired.
One of the things I'm grateful to my parents for is teaching me where meat comes from. I mean, I knew it was a dead animal, but to really know...
We lived on a county island in our small city (now larger) in California; so we could have farm animals on our property. My parents raised ducks, chickens, rabbits, geese, pigs and one time a cow. We had "farm fresh" eggs every day; in fact, we had so many my mom would sell them from the house as a way of making some side money as a stay-at-home mom, while my dad worked for the county (road maintenance).
I was witness to numerous chicken beheadings, and know exactly where and why the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" comes from. I even help to pluck the carcasses with my mom.
I later watched my dad skin and gut our rabbits, which we later cooked and ate for dinner.
Same with the pigs and the cow (we had a local butcher come and shoot them, they were then pre-prepped for transport to the butcher's shop, where he aged and prepped/packaged them - we had a large chest freezer to hold the meat after).
I have no illusions about where our meat comes from. I have no illusions that it was once living and breathing. If there is anything that disturbs me about our current "factory farm" system of meat, it would be the occasional piece of chicken - almost always a wing piece - where the bone is broken, leaving me to wonder whether that happened pre or post-mortem.
I don't want any animal to suffer before death, even if I am going to be eating it later.
I have seen quite a few broken legs as well, and my mind goes to the same place as yours each time.
It must happen near processing time otherwise I suspect they would not be healthy enough for human consumption. There must be other ways to use the most damaged animals.
if this disgusts you for moral/guilt reasons there is a good solution. Eat less meat! You don't have to go full vegan.
I think people employ black and white thinking about this -- either I eat all meat or I become vegetarian/vegan and eat no meat. That's hard, and you're likely to fail (hard cutting to vegan would be quite difficult, regression rates after a few months are sky high).
Instead, simply resolve to eat less meat. Make Thursdays meatless. Opt for the vegetarian option when eating out. Slowly reduce your meat consumption to a level you're happy with. Learn about meat alternatives (which have gotten really, really good in the last few years).
If everyone in the US took one day a week to have no meat, the whole industry would change dramatically. Baby steps!
326 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interview...
Interesting tidbit: "But a lot of it has to do with the way we grow our food, and the fact that we mix 100 different cows in a single burger. We never used to do that. The butcher used to take the scraps from that one animal and make his hamburger right in front of your eyes. ... Now, you get one infected carcass, and that meat can spread all around the country, because we have this centralized national system."
And the irony is that, in buying "heavy breasted chicken", customers pay for something they can't consume (assuming chicken is priced by the pound in the US).
This is because legs are not in as much demand in the US, so they would rather export them to countries where they are in demand!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_legs
'White meat' is chicken, which comes in two varieties: white breast meat and dark wings and legs.
'The other white meat' is pork. The 'ultimate white meat' is lobster, although I'm not sure how that court case came out.
I have spent much time in the US, but I think I have never seen that...in restaurants at least. And I'm kinda glad I didn't.
[1] People who put brown gravy on chicken fried steak are heretics who should be deep fried themselves.
> > Red meat is not dangerous.
Pick one.
Because "might be a carcinogen along with basically every substance" only proves the former.
But the amount of cancer they cause is quite small.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/10October/Pages/Processed-meat-c...
> A key statistic provided by the infographic is that if everyone stopped smoking, there would be 64,500 fewer cases of cancer a year in the UK, compared with 8,800 fewer cases if everyone stopped eating processed or red meat.
This is for a country with a population of 60m to 70m people.
For me it was an early lesson I learned in cooking, thinking I was improving a recipe by using breast when a recipe called for thigh simply because skinless boneless breast was more expensive.
This is because legs and thighs are fatty, and Americans have come to associate animal fat with health problems. White meat is leaner, and is therefore perceived to be healthier and more expensive.
Especially when prepared in a sandwich or in chicken nuggets the white meat is much nicer - chicken nuggets the ooze fat and leave your mouth and hands greasy have horrified me too much.
Chicken for example does not have fat or any obnoxious connective tissue, no matter what cut you get.
Compare that to the fat of most parts of the pork, which is usually so tough you can't chew it (so you have to remove it with a knife as you eat it) or to a veal, which sometimes has that yellowish fat that even tastes acidic. It's awful.
Colon cancer?
I'm very skeptical of fake meet insofar as nutrition involves highly complex systems. Surely the risk of a trans-fat-like health debacle is non-negligible ...
tl;dr: fake meat isn't a problem per se, but I sure as hell won't be the first one to eat it. I'll consider it when there's >50 years of hard data on the record.
The hard part of 'fake meat' (which isn't fake, it's real muscle tissue, it's just grown differently) is that muscle alone doesn't taste good, or have a pleasing texture. You need connective tissue, fat, blood vessels... The whole lot, really. And that is a much more difficult problem.
I'm personally looking forward to it, though.
Not where nutritional epidemiology is concerned. Not by a long shot.
Like I said before, I really don't want to push anyone to try anything they don't want to. But people know how hot dogs are made ( https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAm... ), and it hasn't stopped them, so I expect cultured meat will probably take off pretty quickly once it becomes cheaper than farming.
The devil is in the details, and nutrition touches upon highly complex systems. The point being, we've already seen how seemingly simple, innocuous changes to nutritional substances can have nasty consequences. To think this time is different is pure hubris.
I get your point, but you seem to be missing mine.
Cell culture is growing more of what we've already evolved to eat.
Do I want all food tested for safety? Of course. If they were creating a brand new cell line from scratch instead of using cells we already know we can eat, I would share your concern to a much greater degree.
And I think you're understating the risk of side-effects, i.e.: understating the immense complexity of biological systems.
Yours is little more than a claim of faith.
As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before putting them to death.
Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."
If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together.
I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.
Is it still a common belief that we 'need meat'? I thought it was well established that humans in normal health do not _need_ meat to thrive - especially with our current technology and industry. We can easily meet all of our nutritional needs without any animal flesh.
I'd rather use the less-strong statement I need to make a point. It is still a common belief that not eating meat is in some way less healthy, because plants have lower-quality proteins.
ProTip: we don't need meat.
Are there any other salient variables for classification which come to mind?
In my opinion, structured growth of 'muscle tissue' disconnected from any animal is still "fake meat". Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, it is either still science fiction or too expensive (otherwise I'd have heard about it from places that aren't scifi).
Once we solve the minor engineering issues, we're good.
Cultured meat would be grown from animal cells without developing an entire, independently viable animal. This is what "vat-grown" meat would be.
Synthetic meat would be processed polymerized amino acids that are chemically and structurally similar to animal meat. This is the holy grail of meat substitutes for vegans. No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
"Fake meat" would be imitation or synthetic. Cultured meat wouldn't exactly qualify as "real meat" to me, but it isn't quite "fake meat", either.
Hi, vegan here! I already get all this from plants.
> No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
Where do they come from, then? There is already enough plant diversity to not need to manufacture cells this way. In fact, fermentation of foods brings us many nutritional gifts, and I do actually kill these organisms when I eat them, but I'm ok with killing some yeasts over cows (grey line, I know! :)
As such, they could come from full organic synthesis from ethane feedstock, or from cultured microorganisms, or from plant protein, or from animal protein. They could by produced as a by-product of some other industry. If the company producing the synthetic meat is not particularly cautious with respect to sources, the vegan pedigree of its product could be questioned.
From the HN conversations about Soylent and Soylent-like products, I have been made aware of religiously-motivated vegans that even feel vaguely guilty about having to kill plants for their food. Those and the vegans motivated by supposed health benefits would not give a fig about the "meatiness" of any synthetic meat, caring more about its nutritional qualities. Those motivated by ethics would likely only care insofar as the existence of a full-synthetic meat could help encourage others to give up animal-harvested meats. If you don't proselytize veganism, you wouldn't care (nor should you).
From my own shallow study of nutrition, the height of my bar for going vegan is the chicken egg. If anyone wants me to stop eating animal products, they must necessarily produce something of equal nutritional convenience to a chicken egg, at a lower price. By my "holy grail" statement, I meat that specifically for proselytizing ethical vegans (i.e. PETA members), as an "Aha! With this, the meat-eaters can no longer argue in favor of their destructive lifestyles based on nutrition or culinary experience!"
1. They look very similar! Both have a large egg/seed in the middle of the white/fruit. Look is important for a substitute, e.g. all of the faux meat products.
2. Nutritionally they're also very similar in terms of fat and protein.
It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.
E.g. 1 - 'free range' chickens have almost no extra space per chicken compared to battery-farmed chickens, and many die after being trampled by the others. They are at least a breed which can stand on its own legs - battery chickens can't even walk.
E.g. 2 - 'organic' animals must not be fed antibiotics (which means their general conditions must be good enough for not too many to die from disease, which is otherwise avoided by routine antibiotics in feed). This means sick animals are generally left to die rather than be treated, since allowing antibiotics would lose organic status.
E.g. 3 - For eggs: no matter how good the conditions are for the hens, egg-laying chickens are a different breed to chickens-for-meat. Ergo, all male layer chicks are redundant, and are killed immediately on hatching (normal method is to grind the chicks en masse).
Eating animals is not a pleasant thing. Definitely worth reading up on.
(FTR: I eat animals, eggs, and dairy. I'm struggling to find out how to do so ethically, given the current 'ethical' labels are so close to meaningless.)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_sexing
Same thing a sad or lonely chicken makes: food.
Since happiness is generally associated with good health I'd wager happier chickens are healthier, ergo, tastier.
Is it? Isn't human happiness associated with human good health?
After we left our hobby farm I decided to not eat anything smarter than a fish. (I don't eat octopus)
I like being Pescatarian.
I do try to avoid wild fish for ethical/environmental reasons. Food animals should always come from a farm, obviously.
The level of intelligence I will eat, between chicken and fish, is totally arbitrary.
I think this is true for anyone who is not actually vegetarian.
The next level down is insects and oysters, I suppose.
I am a vegetarian, and I disagree with this. I feel that it is more ethical to kill and eat an animal that has at least been given a chance to live a free and natural life, vs. confining it to a prison from birth.
Of course, it would be impossible to maintain humanity's current level of meat consumption without animal farms. I would prefer that people dramatically reduce their meat consumption, and eat only hunted/caught animals.
Don't eat octopus because they are smart
Eat fishes, even those able to detect, hunt, defeat and eat octopus (therefore smarter than them)
Forcing (?) billions of people to change their eating habits is a far more difficult task than a quaint little Civil War to settle slavery.
If enough people in, for example, the US felt as strongly about not eating animals as they do/did about not having human slaves, they could have another "quaint" civil war (or maybe a political argument that could achieve the same thing without bloodshed) and get to a point where it would be illegal to eat animals just as it's illegal to have slaves.
(I'm neither American, nor a vegetarian, FWIW.)
I don't buy or eat cheap chicken because I know how it is bred/produced and it's both miserable for the animal as well as for anyone who eats it. I prefer paying twice as much for chicken and having it less often, which is what I do.
Speciesist and anthropocentric mentality that is reinforced by world's most popular ideologies - shallow postmodernism, christianity and other religious ideologies - is what keeps this stuff alive.
It is a shame war is necessary to force people to abandon congitive dissonance and start making a better place of this world. At least we in first world countries have all the time to make the change and be the role model, but we seem to be doing business-as-usual, at least the majority of us.
Yeah, there's nothing cognitively dissonant about the idea of making the world a better place through mass slaughter. You know, while we're talking of ideology keeping terrible ideas alive.
That's just it it isn't a biological incentive, it's a moral one.
As to "why have empathy for non-human animals?": I don't know, but I guess having a somewhat-arbitrary rule of which animals it's ok to eat, and which not, can lead to a certain amount of congnitive dissonance.
There are also health issues with meat, that don't exist (or don't exist to the same extent) with a vegetarian diet.
For many, there are few ways of consuming a balanced diet without meat. Take low-FODMAP diets [1] for example, which are becoming very popular with people with IBS, a condition some ~15% of the U.S. population suffers from [2]. For many, coming up with enough sources of protein while satisfying their dietary restrictions is not easy without meat.
On an individual level, picking the "harder" way for its ethical advantages is definitely the right thing to do.
For the scientist working on fake meat, their work is probably essential here.
I'm not sure this is true. I know it's a pretty common argument, but in reality, it's not particularly difficult to hit your protein requirements on a plant-based diet. Even if you take a relatively low protein food, like brown rice, and eat your required daily calories worth of it in a day, you'll hit your protein requirements for the day.
Consider that most people don't eat just rice all day, and toss in some beans, spinach, nuts, seeds, etc., and it should be clear how easy it is to get enough protein (assuming you're eating enough calories).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16004827
Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone but maybe worth thinking about? :)
https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f...
https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15...
Vegan is a bit challenging for nutrition because things like zinc are fairly hard to get. Although the UI is fairly poor, I recommend using nut [0] to help you calculate how you are doing. I haven't actually seen anything else even close for a nutrient calculator (which is strange since you would think it would be an obvious piece of software for people to write).
Also take this advice from the Vegan society on vitamin B12 [1]. There is a lot of dangerous information out there, so be careful.
I really enjoyed being vegan. Unlike many vegans, I was not an ethical vegan. I just like eating that way. I actually became vegetarian to save money when I was young and poor (meat or beer was an easy equation for me to solve). After a while, I just found that the foods I enjoyed the most and that made me feel the best were vegan. YMMV :-D
No reason to go crazy at first, though. Just start cooking vegan meals. If you become vegan full time, you'll be cooking a lot in most countries, so be prepared for it.
[0] http://nut.sourceforge.net/ [1] https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...
You do, but as your gut bacteria changes you sort of stop craving meat so much and start craving the new foods you've been eating.
FWIW, plant-based complete protein groups are fairly inexpensive and easy to come by.
My diet is primarily: Rice, beans, tofu, mushrooms, and various greens. I've never really been a salad person, and even as a vegetarian that's still generally true.
I know of local farms where getting above average cabbages, from little seed to the nice looking one on the market stands, takes little more than one month, thanks to the chemicals they get.
It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.
But yes, the relevance of suffering seems proportional to relatedness with the sufferer. Or maybe the ability to identify with the sufferer, based on perceived intelligence and self-awareness.
It's also not so black or white. Does a cow have greater "capacity for suffering" than an oyster? Does this have ethical consequences? I think it does.
And yes, maybe oysters are closer to plants than cows, in that regard.
But it's not just about suffering. It's about the morality of killing other lifeforms. Personally, I'm OK with it. I'll be eaten after I die. Indeed, I'm always under attack from bacteria, yeast, molds, etc. But I won't eat anything that I wouldn't kill myself.
Have you actually, personally, killed a cow, chicken, or pig?
Granted, the fauna in question aren't living on the farm, but that's a distinction without a difference.
There's an enormous difference between eating grains directly and using them to grow animals which eventually become meat. Industrial meat production has a greater negative environmental impact than agriculture.
This post lacks common sense. Processing and feeding animals uses far more resources than processing crops (especially since crops are often processed in order to feed animals...).
"The efficiency with which various animals convert grain into protein varies widely. With cattle in feedlots, it takes roughly 7 kilograms of grain to produce a 1-kilogram gain in live weight. For pork, the figure is close to 4 kilograms of grain per kilogram of weight gain, for poultry it is just over 2, and for herbivorous species of farmed fish (such as carp, tilapia, and catfish), it is less than 2. As the market shifts production to the more grain-efficient products, it raises the productivity of both land and water."
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb2/pb2ch9_ss4
> It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.
Seems like you would deny reality in order to continue to 'feel good' about eating meat.
However, the fish, chicken, pork, or beef are not. I can eat them as I choose.
Whether it is worth the environmental impact is a different issue. Interestingly, googling 'vegetarian diabetic diet' suggests that a vegetarian diet may be healthier for diabetic people:
"Vegetarianism excludes high-calorie foods and animal products laden with saturated fats. It instead concentrates on foods that give necessary minerals and vitamins that help give diabetics a better chance of blood glucose control."
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/vegetarian-diet.html
1. Vegetarianism is not an end-all-be-all
2. Some people fare very badly on many vegetables. Potatoes, grains, rice, and those sort of things are effectively slow poisons for Diabetics.
3. No, you will not shame or embarrass us into not eating meat. I'd personally consider vat grown meat. We're not there yet.
2. Hmm, I keep reading things saying that vegetarian diets can be healthy for people with diabetes. Even on the official American Diabetes association website [1]. But if it truly isn't then it is a special case.
3. I agree that shame and embarrassment is not a good way to persuade people. However, there are lots of genuinely good things about a vegetarian diet that people might want to think about.
[1] http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/planning-meals... - "A vegetarian diet is a healthy option, even if you have diabetes. Research supports that following this type of diet can help prevent and manage diabetes. In fact, research on vegan diets has found that carbohydrate and calorie restrictions were not necessary and still promoted weight loss and lowered participants.
"Vegan diets are naturally higher in fiber, much lower in saturated fat, and cholesterol-free when compared to a traditional American diet. The high fiber in this diet may help you feel full for a longer time after eating and may help you eat less over all. When fiber intake is greater than 50 grams per day on a vegan diet, it may help lower blood glucose levels.
"This diet also tends to cost less. Meat, poultry, and fish are usually the most expensive foods we eat."
I'll give you good for the environment. I know animal protein costs more resource than plants do. Good for individuals? Nope. You're going to have to defend that claim.
2. Hmm, I keep reading things saying that vegetarian diets can be healthy for people with diabetes. Even on the official American Diabetes association website [1]. But if it truly isn't then it is a special case.
You undoubtedly triggered my disdain and hatred for the American Diabetes Association. It is my opinion, backed by my own personal data as fact, that they are peddling false medical science.
ADA claims that a diabetic can have 60g carbs per meal. Sure. And I'm sure they say testing 1x a day is fine as well. Instead, if you test regularly around the day, you'll find that certain foods cause significant blood-sugar issues. For me, harder squashes, potatoes, carrots all cause problems. I know the foods that cause spikes for me. I avoid them, or eat them very sparingly to level out any spikes.
Beer. Same. You're told by doctors that Guinness is fine. 7.5g carbs. And the docs never say to graph your blood sugar from before first sip to end. You can see your own results.
In the end, a diet high in fiber (types of carbohydrates that cannot be easily digested, and are good for many things), fats, and proteins are the healthiest for us diabetics. I only have my blood sugar reports to point to.
Yet, ADA recommends way too many carbs, and more drugs. Metformin is great... until it doesn't work 8-10 years later. Is it resistance, or bad eating that makes metformin not usable? Who knows. So I'm doing both. Taking Metformin when I know I cannot easily control my food, and eat very low carbs/day. I've already lost 80 lbs, and feel better than I have in years (well, not not, caught a cold at work, sigh).
And per note, I ALSO eat vegetables. I won't eat potatoes, certain squashes, and other high starch veggies. I also limit how much sugar containing veggies to my personal limits (which amounts to no higher than 140mg/dL glucose - the point of neurological damage).
Closing the eyes to the vegetables industrialization is what I meant by feeling good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This introduces you to new ingredients and recipes without adding immediate restrictions to your diet and life.
Even if you never go full vegetarian, just cutting back on meat consumption still has an effect.
Aside from some devout paleo people, I've never known a single omnivore who doesn't routinely have meatless meals, without even giving it much thought. Having meat with every dinner seems rather obsessive to me, or (in my biased view) reflective or someone who isn't very creative with their diet. There are so many awesome foods out there for which meat is a minor, optional detail. I suppose some people always find a way to insert some meat, even when it adds nothing to the meal as a whole.
He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.
It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.
Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9)
Also [2]:
Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing.
In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families:
Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished.
[1] http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her...
[2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBtsi3CkfBE
Just replace New York with San Francisco, and "ad agencies" with "tech companies who derive their revenue from ads"... And the book is a surprisingly accurate satirical portrait of what we're living today. (You can also see a shadow of Donald Trump in the book's portrayal of the U.S. President.)
Seems like a more natural evolutionary correct way to get our food rather than some kind of franken-meat grown i lab.
Every autumn I buy a lamb from the farmer living next to my father, I kind of like it when I can watch my food being happy before I eat it.
also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad.
medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?
given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and by "heading toward" i mean we already don't and it's getting worse), grass fed anything is totally unsustainable. lab grown meat, or lab vegetables might be our best option, and i'd go with that over a tortured chicken any day
Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor.
"Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
How many is 'many'? 50%? 25%? Or simply 'more than zero'?
> but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
I assume that you would prefer an 'unnatural' vaccination to the 'natural' disease it prevents. If so, which categories of 'natural' do you prefer?
The biggest problem is that its inefficient to feed meat animals grain. Instead we should be farming lots of insects for human and animal food!
Lab grown meat is a nice idea, but I don't see how it can scale.
As far is 'happy cow' goes, there still can be a huge difference between both cases in how they live and die. Firstly, a 'grass fed' or 'forage chicken' label can cover a whole lot of different things. I don't know which country you're from, whether those are the official definitions nor what they mean. But I do know countries where something like 'forage chicken' depending on exact translation and law doesn't even mean they ever saw any daylight or living plants in their life. Just that they got like 1 square meter to live on instead of 1/4. But it doesn't end there. Take the grassfeeding: even if it actually means they could range free on nice green fields, from the moment production starts being all about the money and goes into the direction of industrial-scale it is unfortunately not unlikely their last hours on the way to and in the slaughterhouse were stress, torture and immense pain. Refer to e.g. the recent (very graphic) movie which popped up in Belgium where you could see what goes on in a slaughterhouses processing thousand of pigs a day and how far it deviated from what the laws for it prescribe.
You understand that this animal is happy and thus does not want to be killed, but you value it being happy.
Don't these two sentiments exclude each other?
Ideally I could eat animals that are happy and content then instantly dead without ever knowing what's happening. If we could breed them with little switches in their brain stems that can be turned to Off via a wireless signal ...
I'd want that. That would be great. Press button, chicken drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.
The more important question is how self-aware is the chicken? Does this self-awareness give it rights? Do rights stem from self-awareness, or from humanness, or is it arbitrary based on a wishy washy feeling of "Hm, that looks too severe. Oh but that other thing, that's okay". Or is how we treat them based purely on how much they can take before the taste becomes too poor for us to bear?
Ultimately the point is that meat is tasty.
Would you mind dying right now? Or would you prefer to stay alive? Sure, one might argue that once you're dead you don't mind anymore, but while being alive, you usually strongly prefer staying that way.
It's that simple.
It certainly is difficult to determine wheter or not something wants to live, but in the case of chickens we can be fairly sure, as they display somewhat intelligent behaviour, and actively avoid harm.
Sure I'd prefer to stay alive because I'm curious what happens next. But realistically speaking my death is other people's problem not mine.
Dying is easy. It's other people that suffer the consequences.
Although the process of dying, if drawn out, sounds hella unpleasant. I wouldn't want that part.
If we're talking step into the street and get splattered by a runaway 18-wheeler, instant brain death ... fuck it, not my problem.
If we're talking 8 months of ineffectual chemo followed by 10 hours of drawing my last breath ... I'd rather just shoot myself.
If we're talking normal life vs "eat this pill and aging becomes so slow you will be physically and mentally young well into your 90s followed by death of old age at 140" ... yeah I will definitely take that pill.
I'm not sure that really answers your question but there you go. My views on life and death.
If it was only about avoiding suffering/pain and not the dying, would you be okay with farming children for eating?
They will live happy lives pampered and cared for, running around in the backyard until you press a button and child drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.
It's obviously absurd, but you're making that decision with the animals you eat all the time. A chicken (probably) is less self aware than a cow, but we do eat cows.
But how do you decide that another being is un-self-aware enough to be eaten?
Which takes me back to the absurd. If human meat was tasty (I read it isn't), would someone with downs syndrome be morally ok to eat? How about someone in a vegetative state?
If the sliding scale of self awareness is the deciding factor, we might as well eat less aware humans.
If a child grows up and does nothing more than put together a single shoddy chicken coop that lets water in and falls over in a mild breeze it has infinitely out-performed the chicken. People with disabilities are still infinitely more capable than chickens, cows, most any animal we eat.
There's also the problem of disease transmission too if you really want to hash out the idea. Most diseases don't transfer between species (at least not in catastrophic ways), if we were eating other humans there would be a lot of new diseases we'd need to fight or die from. See also BSE [1] and CJD [2] as examples of problems that occur through cannibalism.
[1] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
[2] Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise... - particularly the "Cannibalism" section of Transmission.
This is true for most people except that pigs are smarter than dogs and many people won't eat dog meat.
Relative intelligence is difficult to measure. Would I eat a person if they were actually dumber than a chicken?
In a survival situation, not having a choice, sure. I would eat the dumb person before the smart dog. That is a strange thing to say though..
Not the OP, but a meat eater. I think it's obvious for most people that they want to eat meat but they don't want to cause unnecessary suffering. Those two sentiments aren't just not mutually exclusive, they complement each other.
I know people who keep animals for their meat- chickens, ducks, goats, pigs and a cow or two. I've seen them really care for, and about their animals, and I couldn't miss the big, loving smiles on their faces when they're around them, particularly the younger ones. I'd call those smiles almost parental.
The same people have no compunction about killing those same animals, even the younger ones (that have the most tender flesh). I'd even go as far as to say that some part of the love they feel for those animals may actually come from knowing how they taste.
It might sound a bit crazy, but I think it's actually natural to love your food, rather than hate it and wish to hurt it.
I also think other animals have similar feelings. For instance:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2017/apr/07/...
[Picture of a lion keeping a zebra fowl alive in the wild]
Allow me to put this into a little statement: "I love you, but now I have to kill you, so I can consume you"
And they still cause suffering. A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother, just because there is someone who wants to eat him/her/it?
I'm not going to torture an animal because I derive no pleasure from it. Given the choice, therefore, I would rather the pig lived a happy enough life in a field with little pig huts to live in before it was slaughtered. I'm willing to pay more for that to be the case, because I think it's the decent thing to do.
I don't love animals in general, heck I barely love any humans...
Dog fights used to be very popular, but for some reason most people find it unacceptable even though those dogs probably had/have better lives than most farm animals.
In principle, maybe. In practice, we're really good at dealing with contradictory and even conflicting emotions.
For instance, in the past people used to beat up their kids to teach them things. Today, we generally don't- but that's not because we love our kids any more, or less. We just find it unproductive.
So, yes, it's perfectly possible to dearly love an animal and want to eat it- because, after all, that's why we keep farm animals in the first place: to kill them and eat them (and also for their milk, wool, eggs etc). The relationship that makes us love animals is the same one that makes us kill and eat those same animals.
Edit:
>> A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother, just because there is someone who wants to eat him/her/it?
If we didn't do that something else would. Animals kill and eat each other all the time and most of them die when something else eats them.
Of course we're special- but even in our specialness we can only subsist on food that is alive- if it's not a calf, it's an egg that cold have hatched into a chicken, or a fruit that could have grown in a beautiful plant. Calfs and lambs can scream and run away but a cabbage is no less alive.
Not directly relevant to farm animals, but how many married couples don't have fights? I don't think that assumption is right.
And when considering raising and killing an animal vs. never having any animal at all, consider the quote "'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".
> And they still cause suffering. A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother
Unless you have the cure to aging, that's going to happen no matter what. In fact, slaughtering means that more of them die at the same time and don't have to go through this suffering.
You're assuming this as a premise, which I think may be the root of the problem. Plenty of people don't believe that livestock is intelligent enough to comprehend the idea of death, or really anticipate the future in general. How then would it have a desire about future events?
> Don't these two sentiments exclude each other?
Wanting something to be happy whilst not respecting its autonomy is common amongst humans, so I'd say no. Additionally, killing an animal humanely doesn't cause it to be unhappy, since dead animals are incapable of experiencing emotional states.
There's an inkling of empathy there, I suppose. It's a start.
But consider that bleeding to death is also considered to be relatively painless, as a suicide method.
I feel like this argument collapses when given any serious thought. Mainly because even without experiencing either, I'd consider drawing a warm bath and cutting your own wrists a very different experience compared to hanging upside down and somebody else cutting your throat.
I've never cut my wrists, but I have experienced substantial rapid blood loss. The injury itself wasn't at all painful, in the moment. Not until much later, waiting to heal. And the experience was actually rather peaceful, rather like methaqualone or diazepam. Except for the freakout about stopping the bleeding, anyway.
It's my understanding that proper kosher/halal slaughter is supposed to be non-traumatic. Because trauma makes the meat taste bad.
We just disagree with you on the question of whether veganism is the answer to a very real problem.
The bird was not "encouraged to grow", it was forcefully bred by a corporation that treated it like trash to increase their financial gains...
>> I wonder if it was painful for the bird
I seems very safe to assume that it didn't have a remotely pleasant or normal life...
The same could be said for plants.
Plants are very lowly sentient through structures that are the plant-counterparts to animalian neurons.
They communicate with other plants and they sense what can be described as "pain."
But, I don't think arguing on the sentience of an unprotected kingdom will further this discussion.
The discussion on animal welfare seems to be an emotional one alone. As long as our mirror neurons aren't firing in response to the perceived pain animals feel, all is millhouse.
This is why, I believe very few care about plant welfare. They have no mouths with which to scream, so we believe (or make ourselves believe) that they aren't in pain. That they are too dumb to feel pain (this parallels sinisterly with the cruelty of psychological medicine in the 20th century).
Not to mention how silly it is to care about plant welfare... or is it? There have been little studies done on how the constant slaughter of plants affects the secondary factors (maturation speeds, yield, etc. -- as apposed to the primary: deforestation, etc.).
However, I don't think there ever will be such advances in this field. Perhaps because they have no way of polluting this discussion with emotions, unlike their animal counterpart.
I've learned these arts as well, to hear the ebb and flow of what goes on around me. Many times, I can feel the data going on the wire, and the emotion it carries. Standing in our data center's networking room, I can feel thousands of voices, like a cacophony all unawares that they too are projecting emotions. Some of us can hear.
But in learning how to hear, I also learned how to listen to other things we wouldn't normally consider sentient. Plants. I found I've been able to hear them, and their talk. It's not words per se, but more of word-pictures. And the more I do so, I come to the understanding that Chomsky was indeed correct, but also wrong: emotion is the underlying language.
How do I prove this? I don't. I can't, at this time. These techniques were taught to me, along with my innate abilities. I doubt even an fMRI would be able to pick up on these, until long after my brain processed them. But what then?
I've also been attempting to find a way to connect whatever that emotion energy I'm feeling is. If it's not matter, it must be energy.. or something else. I'm not ready to say there's a something else yet... So it must be a type of energy that we can measure, no? I know I've pissed off enough other pagans and occultists, but my primary goal is to bridge these two disparate (scientific vs esoteric) into a unified theory. Or barring that, a way to "view" this energy. Because once we can sense it, we can manipulate.
But alas, I figure I'll be downvoted or worse yet, ignored. I certainly don't hold a publicly acceptable view for sure.
And I believe this is what could hold you back, atleast in public acceptance (if you're even aiming for this -- and not just discovery among the "initiated").
I'm sorry I can't offer you anymore words, getting a taste of the esoteric after all of this time away has left me in shock.
So, may you succeed in your journey and if there's anyway I may assist, I would oblige.
They still are out there, but most have gone the anti-technology, anti-science.. almost hippie like. To most of them, it's all flowers and happy auras, and vibes. That sort of stuff. In my opinion, they are a dead end. It's all circle this, good vibes that. And absolutely no proof, no scientific work on understanding the underlying nature. Nothing.
> And I believe this is what could hold you back, atleast in public acceptance (if you're even aiming for this -- and not just discovery among the "initiated").
Nahh, I obviously don't talk about this at work. It can easily be seen as "Religion". No sense in alienating people. If they are intent on discussing it, I invite them to a coffee shop, a bookstore/cafe, a quieter bar and talk.
Then again, I do have to be careful in whom I talk with. Obviously, these ideas are exactly mainstream. And, many of them can have very deleterious paths (cults, single-mindedness, magus-itis). Last thing I want to do is get someone who is weaker-willed into something they cannot handle. Primarily, I don't want to be responsible for someone else's failures.
> I'm sorry I can't offer you anymore words, getting a taste of the esoteric after all of this time away has left me in shock.
> So, may you succeed in your journey and if there's anyway I may assist, I would oblige.
Thank you much for the kind words.
There are a few ways to help, and they be primarily information. I'm blessed with an ample amount of money and goods. It's mind I need.. Thought. Ideas. Creativity.
Primarily, this "woo woo" area, Ill call it magic. The problem is that the only way to sense it is to be trained in it. And how do you know if someone is trained? Its a chicken and egg problem. The way out of this, is to develop some sort of sensor that can "sense" whatever this is. Once a sensor is made, then ideally it would provide a way to prove/disprove these claims. Not only that, but we in the engineer class (yes, systems engineer as well) would also be able to experiment in making devices to manipulate this energy. With appropriate feedback from the sensors, we could start mastering this other realm.
I've a few ideas how to do this.
1. Auras. Some people see it naturally. Some can be trained to see it. What is it? Is it EM? What frequencies? Is it magnetic domain, or electric domain, or both? Could a camera detect this? What if you could adjust the response frequencies in the CCD to different areas?
2. Remote sensing. This would require time and lots of money at an fMRI. Would entail in self-selecting people whom claim to have these gifts. Fraught with false positives, given fMRI tech. Open ended investigation on peoples' brains. Not likely.
3. Emotion. Is it possible to sense emotion? I believe yes. We all have felt it, someone staring at us. Someone angry, and we don't know why. Dread that makes a room thick. What's going on, and why? Is this measurable? If no devices, can we use people to detect (and then measure with equivalent of lie detector electronics, to bypass verbal means)?
But these are diffuse ideas, and none are terribly good. But given my computer science, engineering, IoT sensor net, and biological backgrounds, It's all I have. If you have other ideas, I'd be very much interested in knowing or collaborating. I don't even need much of citation. I'd rather enable the occult for the masses, by means of science.
If you'd like to get ahold of me, you can email me clow_reed@protonmail.com
Sincerely,
But given that what we perceive is in most cases so heavily filtered through what we believe, I'm not sure this is necessarily a conceptual mistake.
Envisioning something in the minds eye isn't necessarily a sense but it's pretty close. I do think it's a good idea to regard envisioning as property of our own mind however rather than relating it entirely to external phenomenon. Which should also be more widely practiced with perceptions in general IMOP.
The key out of this mind-trap is unbiased 3rd parties.
For example, consider this. You're by yourself. You do something "magical". It conjures an invisible dragon around you. It has a distinct shape and look. Ok. So this is in your head, as per your comment above.
Now, you go to the local book store, and you meet some friends. You're not talking about any of your private practices. One friend looks at you and your shoulder and says, what's with the dragon thing around you?
Is it really there? Someone else selected 2 unique details about it out of nothing. Or, did your subconscious chose the reality that someone chose to say that to you, reaffirming your belief? Or what? Mere coincidence? (There is no such thing as coincidence in this world, only the inevitable.)
How many times one must go through with "interesting" happenings with others, whom have no clue what you're doing? We will never receive 100% proof.. But then again, a zero knowledge proof doesn't provide 100% certainty.
But also we sometimes correlate things that aren't necessarily correlated because we are just walking talking shitting correlation machines and it's what we do.
I don't mean to say "all in your head" like it's a bad thing though. My opinion is that most things are at the end of the day so I hope it's not offensive.
Heh :) I don't quite attribute humans to a complicated form of a calculator, but I get the sentiment. People thought back in the early 1900's, that people were not much more than really complicated mechanical systems, like clocks. Now, It's computers. I still think that's too simplistic.
> I don't mean to say "all in your head" like it's a bad thing though. My opinion is that most things are at the end of the day so I hope it's not offensive.
No, not at all! I had to first consider that wasn't the case for me. Consider it a sanity check. "Am I just seeing bullshit because I want to?" Probably. Can I disprove this? Yes. The key to disprove, is kind of a double blind test - you don't say anything, and someone else confirms... The only better test I could think of, is if someone else devised a ritual for you, and you conducted it, and you noted effects and happenings.
That's easy to prove. Have people send certain kinds of data and then name the emotion. You could upend several sciences and also be rich.
So why don't you?
What about a painless and euphoric death?
Furthermore, farmers can kill your dog (humanly) on his land if it is causing distress to his animals. In law this is a lawful excuse to cause criminal damage. There are all kinds of lawful excuses. For instance, a person (usually a farmer) is free to kill your horse, humanly, if keeping it alive is causing a material financial loss.
Well, that's the whole point.
I thought you were going to say that in the UK, you can't just chop down a tree on your land - there are often legal barriers preventing the felling of listed trees!
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "discounting welfare issues". Sure, if you discount the laws that protect dogs, they're not protected, but The Animal Welfare act (2006) does exist, very much does protect dogs from people "doing what you want with them" and is enforced.
Of course, that protection is not offered at all costs. If a dog attacks a person, or invades farmland and attacks an animal, then the priority of that person/farm animal takes precedence over the dog.
I'm a vegetarian, so dogs are not special to me in that regard. I only mentioned dogs because I was replying to a comment that mentioned dogs specifically.
Regardless of whether anything "feels pain" or not, I, personally, would choose to not destroy anything I don't have to, even if it's a uniquely-shaped rock.
I mean, look at [0]. It's probably universally safe to say that the absence of these formations would not adversely affect anyone or anything. Yet, a sapient being would agree that the world would somehow be less, in some intangible metric, without them, even if they weren't the result of a million years of forces..
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+rock+arch&tbm=isch
So the choice is: destroy a plant to eat directly OR destroy an animal who needed n plants destroyed to grow sufficiently large to eat. Option A definitionally requires less destruction.
Make sense?
It's really interesting to me that you reached for fake meat instead of better farming practices.
I'm vegan, I've decided against the current practices. I applaud any attempt to move towards or support better practices. But I don't think eating meat from previously living creatures is for me.
But I am seriously undecided for lab meat. I don't really mind the chemical components of meat, some of them seem really useful. And no animals were harmed, it could probably be a lot more energy efficient. Also, there is the potential for serious scale I imagine, which interests me. Not sure when it could get there though.
If that happens I think "real meat" might end up being the fancy expensive stuff :)
On the other hand, we are a paradoxal species. Able to feel horrified by this, whereas happily petting our distorted-faced bulldogs, persian cats, caesarean born bullterriers, extra-dwarfed toy Yorkshires, ponies and toy mini pigs, without any trace of moral conflict...
I guess the obvious line of reasoning is to talk about how GDP is less than perfect for measuring economic success, etc. Sometimes large numbers are not a sign of success.
Moral questions aside, from the perspective of evolution theory breeding and passing of genes is pretty much equal to "success". So yes, in that regard, chickens are indeed successful.
Of course the moral issue of "should I cynically raise billions of birds because they're tasty" is real.
And I don't get the excitement over fake meat, or how they managed to get the masses so convinced that they "need" meat to live a fulfilling life that the only choices left are animal concentration camps or synthetic bullshit.
Millions of people are just fine eating organic veggies, fruits and grains with maybe a bit of organic dairy thrown in. What makes you special?
I get excited over synthetic meat, it is interesting tech, it has the potential to provide some healthy stuff to my diet if I decide to eat it. It can also be a good way of reducing the reliance on the terrible industries you mention.
I'm fine eating a vegan diet and I wouldn't want to change that. I know people that couldn't because of allergies and what-not, I also know that some people aren't willing to make that change.
I think good things can be done in many ways and I'm sick and tired of seeing people with good intentions go so hard on polarizing these issues. Better farming practices are still an improvement in my eyes. They are still doing a net bad as far as I am concerned but I want to see an improvement, so I'll encourage it.
But I guess it also depends on varying levels of empathy. I know people that are much more emotionally troubled by the cruel industries than I am. I just happen to agree that it is terrible and I try to live accordingly. Maybe I just don't feel it the way you do?
> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.
(I also don't think your statement is particularly controversial.)
Jokes aside, eat more veggies for your health, the health of those poor little things that are fed shit and antibiotics daily in very bad environements, and last but not least for the health of the earth.
"the animal rights people" is a pretty broad brush, I know that quite a few can be completely impossible to discuss the nuances with but honestly, there are so many vegetarians for ethical reasons around that just don't say anything or go "cool, that's better than industrial farming". I also encounter a good part of meat-eaters that become incredible defensive and almost hostile if they find out about my dietary choices.
Always frustrating to see black and white grouping when the truth is incredibly nuanced.
Yeah after someone found out after kinda knowing them for a couple years they said "Fuck You" and we haven't spoken them since then. I wonder what their problem was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Going vegetarian would be probably best...
Here in Uruguay, cows are free ranging, and it's some of the best meat in the world (they're also individually tracked, etc... that means you can track the individual animal but it also makes it more expensive like most "organic" food :) ).
Going off http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/Greenhouse... chickens are far better than almost all other animals.
So if you're going to eat meat, chickens are a good choice in this way at least.
My wife will only eat the breast, because she doesn't like the greasier feel of dark meat. I'll eat either but don't have a strong preference so we mainly just get breasts.
Thighs, wings, drumsticks etc all have problems I just don't want to deal with as an eater.
So eat the meat and throw away the bones or cartilage. Then go grab the calcium caps afterwards.
Edit to add: As for why other people prefer white meat, people usually invoke that it tastes better, but I've always figured that this was an acquired taste and that decades of pressure to reduce fat in our diets pushed people continually over to breast meat.
One of the few downsides to shopping in an "ethnic" area in the USA is that chicken thighs are just as expensive per pound as chicken breasts
My wife's chicken soup, with dumplings, though? I'll have a couple servings of it no problem!
It's the same way we've been duped into believing that we need to eat that bowl of cereal in the morning.
It's also why McDonald's McNuggets are now made with "all white meat" - except it isn't breast meat. Its a mixture of meat and meat by-products that have been blended and bleached. It has a mouth-feel unlike either dark or white meat chicken; it's a unique combo (I am not against McDs or their nuggets, btw).
I remember when McNuggets first came out - there were three distinct shapes. Only the "round" shape was white meat - and actual all-breast meat. The other two shapes were dark meat. Today, there are only two of the same three shapes that I recall, and both are of the blended "white" meat.
Which is a shame - I liked the variety more before.
I cook mostly with thighs, for sure. Much prefer the flavor, but also they're 1/3 the price.
So what it comes down to, is if we get a whole precooked chicken (roasted or fried, whatever), I'll go for the wings and thighs, but if we're just buying a big pack of something to cook at home, I usually just pick up a half-dozen breasts and call it good.
Despite this fact, I still ate chicken and eggs, because it can be rather healthy.
A couple of years ago I had an organic free range egg for the first time and it was incredible. It didn't smell anything like normal eggs, and it tasted like actual food. It's hard to describe, but normal eggs almost smell/taste like a hospital to me.
A little while after that I was picking up some chicken breasts, and the organic ones at the supermarket were on sale. Given my experience with the eggs, I thought I'd give it a shot.
The difference between the organic chicken breast and a normal chicken breast was incredible. For one thing, there was fat, and it actually looked like fat. And the breast was pretty small, but it was super tasty.
Altogether, that experience totally sold me on organic food.
Basically, cook the chicken upside down for basically half the time, and then finish it breast side up.
Juicy breast meat every time.
You probably don't have room in your oven to do a turkey upright but it works well on a grill and you can easily do a whole chicken upright in the oven. You can pour beer or other liquid and spices into the center of it to keep it moist. It's just a better beer can chicken. Highly recommend.
Good suggestion on turning in oven though if you aren't upright - less is more. Same with steaks and burgers.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/complex-origins-f...
That said, I do think there are two standout foods that are ubiquitous in America although they vary by region. 1) bbq; 2) the sandwich. Behold the great American sandwich in all its varied forms:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/14/dining/field-...
I think BBQ will eventually get it's due. We're seeing a lot of chefs take common, cheaper dishes and make them more upscale and interesting to larger audiences and foodies. One of the best dishes I ever had was dinuguan [1] at Paul Qui's (Top Chef winner) restaurant in Austin.
I don't think Americans have a huge problem with food as the parent suggests. I'm biased of course but I prefer it how it is. We don't need a singular identity. We have places like Napa, Vegas, NY and San Fran that stack up against any city in the world, even though our history is short. We attract top talent from everywhere and the melting pot delivers vastly different experiences. You can come to the US and visit New York, New Orleans and the Pacific Northwest and get amazing food with completely different styles and cultural identities.
Why do we need a unified food? Why is that important?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinuguan
I also like to roast potatoes in it, as well as cook mac-n-cheese (in a shallow dish) to get that smoky flavor.
I'll never go back to a regular bbq or grill - even gas. The electronic controls of the Traeger (and I imagine other brands) make things dead simple; set the temp, throw on the meat, and let it go - return back after however long the meat needs. Don't peek under the lid. Remove, let rest, then enjoy. Best and easiest BBQ ever (I always hated having to babysit my bbq, checking temps, adding wood, making sure the water bath was right, etc).
I do use a small propane grill during the week sometimes though (small Weber Q which I recommend for this purpose). I've taken it to the beach and to friends before.
Def shouldn't be peeking as you mentioned. As the saying goes - if you're lookin you ain't cookin!
Shrimp and Grits, biscuits, tasso and country hams, corn breads, fried chicken, country-fried steaks, pimento cheese, collard greens, fried or fresh oysters, pig ears, catfish, pies (some of the best in the world), buckwheat pancakes, etc etc etc.
Not to mention that American BBQ is revered pretty much around the world..oh and almost forgot, the regional cuisine in Louisiana is excellent, steamed shrimp, jambalaya, gumbo...I'll never forget my first bowl of real gumbo with it's strong punch of filé spice.
And that's only traditional southern cuisine that I'm familiar with, I'm sure the rest of the country has it's own traditions as well.
/I've been served a pork tenderloin that was so brown I thought it was beef...yuck.
Given the above, enjoying the taste is right out. Pick your favorite meal, add a bit of poison, and try to enjoy it.
I also wonder if chicken breast consumption has been promoted by the poultry industry because it's easier to increase the size of breasts through breeding and injecting solution than it is other parts of the bird. That means they can produce more pounds of breast (at a higher price) for sale per bird than thighs, wings, or drumsticks.
Bones, skin, limb-shaped things in general, organs certainly, blood, any recognizable bits really (heads on fish, oh man, that's right out) are to be rejected with expressions of disgust.
Outside the serious hunting/fishing set and self-identified (in their own minds at least) cultured and/or foodie folks, this is the norm as far as I can tell.
After I learned how to cook for myself, chicken became a completely different, wholy enjoyable food.
Actually, a portion of it is bleached, and used as "white meat" for those frozen shaped chicken products like chicken patties and nuggets...
White meat is consistent, reliable, mild-flavored, and often is served such that it contains no clues that it came from a living animal.
Those not comfortable with murdering for food shouldn't do so by proxy.
We lived on a county island in our small city (now larger) in California; so we could have farm animals on our property. My parents raised ducks, chickens, rabbits, geese, pigs and one time a cow. We had "farm fresh" eggs every day; in fact, we had so many my mom would sell them from the house as a way of making some side money as a stay-at-home mom, while my dad worked for the county (road maintenance).
I was witness to numerous chicken beheadings, and know exactly where and why the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" comes from. I even help to pluck the carcasses with my mom.
I later watched my dad skin and gut our rabbits, which we later cooked and ate for dinner.
Same with the pigs and the cow (we had a local butcher come and shoot them, they were then pre-prepped for transport to the butcher's shop, where he aged and prepped/packaged them - we had a large chest freezer to hold the meat after).
I have no illusions about where our meat comes from. I have no illusions that it was once living and breathing. If there is anything that disturbs me about our current "factory farm" system of meat, it would be the occasional piece of chicken - almost always a wing piece - where the bone is broken, leaving me to wonder whether that happened pre or post-mortem.
I don't want any animal to suffer before death, even if I am going to be eating it later.
It must happen near processing time otherwise I suspect they would not be healthy enough for human consumption. There must be other ways to use the most damaged animals.
I think people employ black and white thinking about this -- either I eat all meat or I become vegetarian/vegan and eat no meat. That's hard, and you're likely to fail (hard cutting to vegan would be quite difficult, regression rates after a few months are sky high).
Instead, simply resolve to eat less meat. Make Thursdays meatless. Opt for the vegetarian option when eating out. Slowly reduce your meat consumption to a level you're happy with. Learn about meat alternatives (which have gotten really, really good in the last few years).
If everyone in the US took one day a week to have no meat, the whole industry would change dramatically. Baby steps!
Solution: oxygen masks for the chickens