After reading the above and an article by Glenn Greenwald [1] on ag-gag laws and the mistreatment of industrial animals, I've stopped eating meat unless I've met the farmer and (ideally) seen the farm.
I'm vegetarian outside the house, and our family ordered a half a cow from a farmer who lives ~30 minutes away. It was butchered by a small shop. I received something like 200+lbs of meat from a single animal, raised well, grass fed at a cost of around $8/lb.
The lifestyle change has been far easier than I expected, and it feels like a decision that actually has a local impact. (As opposed to, say, tweeting outrage.)
There's a whole bunch of support for making this change that I wasn't aware of. If you are in the NW, Seattle Tilth puts out a guide to all the regional farms [2], and most of them have websites and email contact info.
> I received something like 200+lbs of meat from a single animal, raised well, grass fed at a cost of around $8/lb. The lifestyle change has been far easier than I expected
I think this illustrates why it's so hard to make any large-scale progress on industrial animal welfare. I'm glad that this works for you and you're able to make a difference in your own life, but spending $1600 on meat, even 200lbs of meat, is not an option that most people have.
Giving up meat entirely is an option everybody has. Plant based diets are not only cheaper but healthier. I switched to a plant based diet in 2017 and it's the best decision I've made in a long time. I feel better physically and mentally and feel better about the role I play on the planet too.
Everyone who just switched to a new thing, vegetarianism, p90x, atkins, paleo, crossfit, standing desk, node.js, whatever, will tell you it's the greatest thing ever. You "switched in 2017", it's 2017 now. It would be more impactful if you said this 5 years on, and a lot of other people who'd been doing it for 5 years said the same.
There's a lot more to not-plants than a steak, though. Fish and milk and eggs and cheese and shellfish and who knows. That is a huge variety of food, of flavors, of sources and methods for farming, giving it all up is arguably as-healthy, not healthier, and certainly much, much more boring. Also, harder to sustain, it's easy to find food with meat in it, plenty of places have few vegan/vegetarian options.
Plant based diets are nothing new. We have plenty of data on the long-term health benefits of this diet from many studies and many populations. There are Olympic weight lifters, triathletes, world class tennis players etc that have followed this diet for years.
It's true it can sometimes be hard to find vegan options, depending on where you live, but the situation has improved massively in the last few years. The number of vegans in the UK has almost quadrupled in the last 10 years, for example, with a corresponding rise in products, restaurants etc:
Actually, moving entirely to plant-based diets is not feasible for everyone due to allergies and other food-related issues.
For a certain subset of the population, getting the appropriate amount of protein and other nutrients would be nigh impossible since those foods could make them incredibly ill or kill them.
Sure. Many people are allergic to meat or fish too. 65% of the world population is intolerant to lactose. There will never be a single diet that works every single human on the planet. But the overwhelming majority of us can not only live but thrive on a plant based diet.
People also mistakenly put way too much emphasis on protein and not nearly enough on other nutrients. The average American, for example, gets way more protein than they need and not nearly enough dietary fiber.
My basic issue with sweeping diet generalizations is that it often excludes many people. As someone who has this very problem, I am confused by the strange diets everyone is on. If only I had that choice! (I generally dissociate myself from vegetarians and their ilk because I loathe talking about it)
Regarding the topic of too much protein, nutrition doesn't quite work that way. You can't go tick-tock on your diet just because you have too much protein today; you will need protein until the day you die. You also need suger, fat, salt, and yes, fiber.
It's also quite wrong to say everyone could be on a vegetarian / vegan diet because you well know that it's quite dangerous if it isn't followed correctly, and lo and behold, the average American is overweight.
We can sort of blame the new trend diets for the lack of fiber.
Heart disease is the leading killer in the US right now, the risk of which is almost zero on a whole food, plant based diet. Your risk of cancer and diabetes also go way up on a diet rich in animal products. Vegans are also the only demographic with a normal body mass index, and obesity is linked to many other health issues.
Which diet is dangerous again?
Unless you're eating a really weird diet it's almost impossible to get enough calories but not enough protein. Eating a healthy vegan diet is easy and easier now than it's ever been with the wealth of information out there.
> Oral allergy syndrome (OAS) is an allergic reaction in the mouth following eating food.[1] It is a type of food allergy classified by a cluster of allergic reactions in the mouth in response to eating certain (usually fresh) fruits, nuts, and vegetables that typically develops in adults with hay fever.[2]
> OAS is perhaps the most common food-related allergy in adults.
> It is usually limited to ingestion of only uncooked fruits or vegetables
I'm actually susceptible to this to some degree during hayfever season too. Unfortunately I can't eat some fresh, raw fruit during that time without getting a very itchy mouth. It's hardly a dealbreaker for a plant-based diet though.
What sort of allergies or food-related issues prevent someone from going plant based? They'd have to be pretty severe, the sort of severe I've never met.
We split it with many families, each paying for a share of the larger amount. I recognize not everyone will be able to coordinate with a group of families, or have a local farmers market. But many of us do, and may not be aware this option even exists.
The vast majority of that "cheap" meat is heavily processed and extremely unhealthy for you. I would say that it is a major contributor to our obesity epidemic. The average american is consuming far is excess of the amount of protein they should be consuming. In reality, they should be obtaining their protein from plant based sources which are high in fiber and lack of negatives of meat.
It depends entirely on where you live. In rural Ohio, my parents have been buying farm raised cattle from family friends and having it processed locally for something like 4 decades. It's mundane, commonplace. But, where your absolutely correct, is that it's also _significantly_ cheaper than what I pay for it in California. The worst of it is that I have to source from north of the bay area and I live in Orange county. The farm I do business with (I did visit them once, many years ago when I first came to CA) has a processor on site and handles delivery, but my last order for a quarter came out to something like $9.80/lb. My parents are still paying under $3/lb. back home. I'd love to order a half but I can't afford it and so my wife and I just don't eat a lot of beef as a result.
If you budget properly, then it is no problem. If you say you are unable to budget because you are poor then you are just deluding yourself.
I have been well off and poor and if you look at what you are spending you cash on very carefully, you can make changes that allow you to get ahead, even if only a small way.
I just watched a local lady buy 3 packs of fags (30 per pack) and she spent $90+ on those items. That's the equivalent of a week's food for the five of us at home (youngest is 16, eldest is 58).
The process above of buying from a farmer and getting a butcher to slaughter and pack is something we have done over the years. I have even slaughtered and butchered sheep myself, an interesting task but well worth the effort to learn. Best mutton I have ever had.
> If you budget properly, then it is no problem. If you say you are unable to budget because you are poor then you are just deluding yourself.
I know people for whom $1600 is more than a month's pay. No amount of budgeting makes it reasonable or responsible to spend that on meat.
For that matter, I know people who work their asses off
and budget their expenditures down to the penny and are still living paycheck-to-paycheck. I think you're deluding yourself about just how poor "poor" can be.
Budgeting their expenditures down to the penny can be a problem in itself. It is what and how they spend their pennies that determine whether they live from one pay to the next. In many cases, it takes self-discipline to control what you spend your hard-earned pennies on.
In the case you mention, how much of that $1600 is spent of optional niceties and how much on actual necessities? I know of people (friends) who can take $100 and buy 2 or 3 weeks of food for a family of 4.
It take a lot of judicious planning to do so, but it is doable. If the area you are in does not allow such planning, then it is time to move away to a better place.
One can join other people and buy in bulk. One can use the base ingredients to make your own cereals. There are so many different things that can be done.
> In the case you mention, how much of that $1600 is spent of optional niceties and how much on actual necessities? I know of people (friends) who can take $100 and buy 2 or 3 weeks of food for a family of 4.
The person I'm talking about does that. I wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise. She feeds her family as cheaply as possible, pays the rent and the bills and the gas, and still struggles to save enough to keep the kids in clothes and school supplies. If the car breaks down, or someone gets sick, it's a disaster.
These are just numbers off the top of my head, but if you take home $1600/month and pay $800 in rent, $200 for gas and electric and water and a landline phone, $200 car payment, and $200 for gas to get to work, you aren't going to be saving much no matter how cheaply you eat. Budgeting is important, but it can't create money where there is none.
> If the area you are in does not allow such planning, then it is time to move away to a better place.
Do you know how much it costs to move? Even aside from the monetary cost of transporting your possessions, and the difficulty of finding anyone who will rent to someone with no savings and little income, a single parent working 40-60 hours a week doesn't have the time to travel to a new city and search for a home and a job there. The kind of jobs that poor people do don't advertise on LinkedIn or let you interview over the phone; you need to walk in and fill out paperwork.
You said you've been poor, but I don't think you grasp just how poor many people are in America.
I started work at Crowd Cow earlier this year as a way to feel better about what I eat. Our goal is to let people know about their food and purchase from farms they like.
When talking about the ethics of eating meat, we often focus on the ethics of killing animals... but it's also worth talking about the ethics towards out fellow human beings.
In bullet form, it's worth thinking about:
* Swine flu killed an estimated 1 million people (and made many other sick for a whole week). Swine flu was directly a result of factory farming
* many of our antibiotics arent working any more and people are dying in hospitals because of it
* We are overfishing the entire ocean. Some communities are poor and rely on those fish to survive. Us rich people are taking food from the poor
* Slash/burn deforestation of rainforests has largely been from farmers who want to either raise beer or grow soy (to feed to animals). Those forests are often home to aboriginal people.
Not to mention massive greenhouse gas emissions and toxic runoff of animal sewage into rivers, lakes and oceans that makes people that live near them sick.
I grew up on a cattle ranch. We butchered our own cattle.
Please don't assume all meat comes from conditions described in this article.
Slaughterhouse / factory systems are disgusting. I don't eat meat that I know was sourced this way.
You can, fairly easily in most places, support your local farmers and ranchers and buy direct.
And if you want to know why it's not easier to get locally sourced meat from family farms / small producers, you can look to the government. They've done all they can over the last 30 years to make it next to impossible for the "little guys" in the business.
So yea, you can go ahead and focus on how there is a sliver of meat consumed that didn't come from horrid conditions, but you'd be minimizing the true reality
Farming this way is better for the animals and the environment but it can never scale to meet even current demand for meat. Farms like the one you describe are a tiny minority and there are even fewer small independent slaughterhouses. 99% of the meat people eat comes from places like the one described in this article. This book explains in detail why this is the case:
I just bought from a small farmer, the process was remarkably painless. I bought from them, they delivered the animal to the butcher, and I picked it up after it was processed and packaged. Maybe Washington/Seattle makes it easier, but it really wasn't a whole lot more effort than getting the meat from a grocery store.
Also cattle ranching is the largest source of man-made methane emissions as well as the leading cause of amazon rainforest deforestation. Since people don't want to discuss the meat issue, it is easy for Brazilian ranchers to burn down millions of acres of rain forest every year to create cattle grazing land.
Yeah, if anything is growing in the culture medium that isn’t part of the standard process that batch is waste. There are many, many more ways for growing anything relying on a bioreactor to go wrong than right.
I find that nauseating and gross. Maybe I'll change my mind if I've actually seen and tasted such a piece of "meat", but right now it's on the same level as Soylent for me.
I'm curious: What disgusts you about it? Assuming "meat is meat", is there a difference for you between "grown in a sunlit grassy field" vs "grown in simulated conditions"?
Going Further: in "Illegal Alien" by Robert J Sawyer, there is mention of "grown meat", basically meat "grown in and squeezed out of a tube" from a spaceship's bulkhead which crew-members slice out for personal consumption as needed during space flight. Would this also be disturbing?
One more reason to stop supporting the horrific animal agriculture industry in this country. You don’t need anything they produce and their business is morally and environmentally toxic.
OSHA = "Occupational Safety and Health Administration". The article says that OSHA fines are rarely above $20,000. Is that really true?
In the UK, I think the equivalent agency is HSE - Health and Safety Executive. These is the first things I found to demonstrate a possible difference:
"Martin McColl Limited and JMS Retail Concepts Limited have both been sentenced today after two members of the public tripped and fell over construction work outside a convenience store in Dinas Powys, Vale of Glamorgan.
...
Martin McColl Limited of Ashwells Road, Brentwood, Essex pleaded guilty on the first day of a two day trial after initially pleading not guilty to breaching Section 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and have been fined £600,000 and ordered to pay costs of £11,520.
JMS Retail Concepts Limited of Stump Lane, Chorley, Lancashire pleaded guilty to breaching Section 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and have been fined £40,000 and ordered to pay costs of £3,038."
"The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited Tampa Electric Co. and Gaffin Industrial Services Inc. after five employees were fatally injured, and one other suffered serious burns.
...
Proposed penalties for both companies totaled $160,972."
This reply might not be a popular (judging by the comments in this thread), but I worked in an abattoirs for 4 years and I want to point out that the article has a bit of an agenda:
> The only slaughterhouse job worse than eviscerating animals is cleaning up afterward. The third-shift workers, as the cleaners are often called, wade through blood and grease and chunks of bone and flesh, racing all night to hose down the plant with disinfectants and scalding water. The stench is unbearable. Many workers retch.
I should mention that I worked in New Zealand so YMMV, but this was never my experience. There was cleanup with high pressure hoses throughout the day, most of the time cold water to save power. No animals were eviscerated, they want as little wastage as possible; if it isn't consumable by humans it can be sold as animal food. The animals were knocked out (like a strong taser) before they were killed. Nobody was retching; it smelled bad (particularly pigs) but you get used to in the same way you adjust to any bad smell.
I agree with the comments here that we need to move quickly to lab-grown meat or a vegetarian diet. But I have to acknowledge that the abattoirs I worked at acted as responsibly and humanely as possible
Conditions in US slaughterhouses are considerably worse than a lot of other first world countries. And instead of cleaning up its act the industry is doing what it can to make exposing its practices illegal:
I would agree, TFA says much more about USA industrial organization than it does about butchering animals. After all, humans have butchered animals for many millennia. We recently had a cow slaughtered by local Mennonites. I can report that none of these awful things were going on there. There might be some "child labor", if one's definition of "child" is more expansive than that of the Mennonites. Still, they have none of these nightmare machines and anyway not even a Mennonite would make his own kids try to clean one while it was still running.
You don't necessarily need to clean the plant daily. Bigger ag producers (especially poultry) are protected from certain food-borne illness lawsuits because it is impossible to remove those pathogens from the food supply, even with cleaning. Salmonella is one of them and there is a new antibiotic resistance strain that is spreading.
The woman at the beginning of the article made $202 a week doing this work. Based on the danger, the potential impact on human health and the US food system, the limited job pool, it sure feels like this is the type of job that should pay more.
From a policy standpoint, a major issue is that meatpacking and the use of immigrant labor, can be compared to the rise of prisons, especially private prisons. These become entrenched in small town America, making huge profits for the local governments, and providing employment to a lot of people, especially union. Anything that might jeopardize that is going to face a lot of pressure from the congressional representatives for that area.
There’s no political consensus in the US on enforcing immigration laws. The only position that won’t get anybody condemning you in the Democratic Party is Open Borders and there are plenty of Republicans willing to support any local business.
Sanctuary cities exist. Large swathes of the US populace regard restricting immigration as immoral and plenty of the rest have no particular desire to do so. Why would there be consequences in those circumstances?
It is all about risk vs reward. Illegals are willing to work and do stuff that other workers won't do. So the owners end up saving money. If immigration busts them then they get fined and then they replace the workers. The amount saved vs the payment of the fine still nets them savings. Immigration does not enforce the law thoroughly.
Honestly I think I'd get used to the smell and the sight of animal flesh within a few weeks. But I guess the hard part, aside from the normal stresses and strains of low-paid work, would be wearing rubber gloves, plastic overalls, etc, in a humid environment.
TPTB have so perverted the Law that few of their subjects can bear it anymore. Now they must import new subjects, who will suffer all the depredations of a lifetime in the few years they manage to survive here.
I'm vegetarian outside the house, and our family ordered a half a cow from a farmer who lives ~30 minutes away. It was butchered by a small shop. I received something like 200+lbs of meat from a single animal, raised well, grass fed at a cost of around $8/lb.
The lifestyle change has been far easier than I expected, and it feels like a decision that actually has a local impact. (As opposed to, say, tweeting outrage.)
There's a whole bunch of support for making this change that I wasn't aware of. If you are in the NW, Seattle Tilth puts out a guide to all the regional farms [2], and most of them have websites and email contact info.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
[2] http://www.pugetsoundfresh.org/