Maybe Farmers should be required to print a photo of the actual living bird and their habitat on the packaging. When consumers would see those scruffy chicken for $2 compared to the healthy $7 they might choose the organic ones more often.
While I agree with the sentiment, in the long run that would just lead to quick-growing chickens that look nice but are as unhealthy as they are now. See "purebreed" dogs.
This reminded me of the "Colin the Chicken" skit on Portlandia where a couple ordering chicken gets to see its birth certificate, diet, emotional profile, heritage and family...
the trend to "free-range" chicken reminds me of similar half-hearted efforts against the climate crisis; we can't decrease CO2 levels just by collecting plastic trash separately if it is shipped to the incinerator all the same. And despite the animal welfare theatre, the organic farm chicken will be killed just the same. But we feel a bit better about it.
I think the point is it grew up eating weeds and bugs instead of corn meal byproduct. Maybe not better for the chicken spiritually, but a better choice for us to eat, nutritionally.
I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly.
Interesting stuff.
Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple hours from me.
It's really a fascinating but tragic history of the exploitation of "banana republics" where banana exports become so profitable that a US-based company owned more land in some Central American countries than anyone else. They had (have?) huge fleets of ships solely for the purpose of bringing bananas into the US.
It is quite a long and complicated story, and there are more than a few books written about it.
Bananas are very easy & cheap to transport which led to them becoming a more popular fruit, accelerating demand and supply, etc, etc.
They can be delivered while they are green and sturdy and then they are kept in ethylene atmosphere which makes them ripe so they can be instantly sold to the consumers.
Bananas in the U.S. come from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and a few others, but not from Brazil.
As for global production, India, China and the Philippines account for almost half of the world's production.
The majority of Brazil's production remains in the country.
Those bananas are transported from the tree to a hub, from the hub to another, and from the second hub to your shop. The price of transport is almost independent of the distance involved in the middle step.
The same reason a T-shirt made and shipped from China is cheaper than one manufactured next door to you.
The contribution of international transport to the cost of pretty much any consumer good is minuscule compared to other factors, so the starting premise that something should be cheaper just because it's grown locally is false from the outset.
Cheaper by what metric? Also, it depends on the variety. FWIW, my experience is that oranges are usually more expensive than apples, except for the few weeks that oranges are in season.
You don't know what the word monoculture means until you stand in the middle of a soybean field in the midwest and see nothing but more soybeans (from the same small handful of varieties provided by giant seed companies) as far as the eye can see. Please do not imagine for one second that a plant-based diet increases biodiversity.
You could pick any plant humans consume and it is inevitable that the vast bulk of it would be produced in large, efficient, monoculture operations. The delusion of small farms producing 'heirloom' vegetables in copious variety is a bourgeoisie fantasy of the western middle-class who has come no closer to a real farm than the local Whole Foods. The soy in your tempeh and tofu comes from those same farms, the same operations produce the feedstock of your kale chips and organic lentil puffs.
We have monoculture farming because it is efficient and people (not) surprisingly have decided that they have no interest in paying more for alternative production processes.
We can’t conclude that this is the only way, especially with advanced automation or subsidies for ecological and sustainable agriculture. Furthermore animal farming must be the least efficient way to provide calories. So I don’t understand how you can talk down solid alternatives like tempeh or tofu.
(BTW in the link i posted above it says human products take up 6% of soybean production.)
You can imagine any fantasy scenarios you want if it makes you feel any better, but nothing in the past century of agricultural progress has had a significant impact on the economic factors motivating the industry.
Animal farming is not the most efficient way to provide calories, but humanity does not lack for calories. Livestock (excepting ruminants that graze on land that is unsuitable for farming) is a caloric aggregator, turning a large chunk of calories into a smaller volume that is easier to transport and more desired by the market. If you want that to change you need to meet the market's demands (c.f. the unicorn valuations of a few new fake meat companies...)
"Animal farming is not the most efficient way to provide calories, but humanity does not lack for calories."
Actually, a lot of humans do go hungry. The inefficiency of using land for crops to feed to livestock means that the price of staples is higher than it otherwise would be.
While meeting market demands is a large part of what will change things I think you're missing a piece on how this will come about. If there were no vegans, the chance of vegan unicorns succeeding would be much smaller. If some people did not harp on about the inhumanity of industrial farming, others would be less motivated to try alternatives and the chance of vegan unicorns succeeding would be reduced.
> Actually, a lot of humans do go hungry. The inefficiency of using land for crops to feed to livestock means that the price of staples is higher than it otherwise would be.
I'll posit that even if you made grain free at the docks in the US, there would still be people in the world going hungry. (Fewer people, certainly) Transportation and distribution is just as large a problem as production at this point in history.
Not OP, but land use due to animal feed is relevant to mono-culture because reducing land use for animal feed would free that land up for other uses (besides soy beans), either for other crops or to leave the land unutilized and left to nature.
The land would not be left unutilized or left to nature, and those same practices are used to produce all of your food. Take a drive down the central valley of California and the vast lettuce and fruit farms will have less genetic diversity than your backyard garden. Monoculture production is a consequence of efforts to increase production efficiency, regardless of the actual crop being produced.
Chickens are one the most successful animals on earth! By evolving to become fatter, more succulent, and delicious, they have convinced humans to feed and house them, and in doing so have multiplied to vast numbers and spread their genes almost everywhere across the globe.
The desires of a chicken are to eat and make more chickens.
The desires of a human are more complex. For this example we don't need to list out what they are.
So let's say you are offered the opportunity to go to space as in your scenario. And your desires are met. But at the age of 40 you are painlessly killed and eaten. And you are assured of having lots of children.
What do you think? Would some people agree to this?
And to make the example more complete, the alternative is not a comfortable life on Earth, but rather war where lots of people are killed young and the rest have very difficult paintful lives of constant fear.
I’m not sure chicken desires are quite that simple, nor that many humans would accept your deal. But even if we take all of that at face value: would you describe the result as “successful”?
I'm not sure what the goal of the chicken is except maybe to make more chickens, and if that's the goal then yes chickens were successful.
If your goal as a human is to explore and pass on your knowledge to your children, then yes, that could be considered as successful as well.
Also, it depends in large part on if your goals are personal, or generational. If personal then you could argue both ways. But if generational then yes definitely a success.
I would consider chickens held in captivity comparible to humans held in captivity. Holding a human in captivity is forcing someone else's will on that person and not giving them the opportunity to be free. I call that slavery.
You need to breed out intelligence in humans. Because that comes with boredom etc. Its also why we're not farming any intelligent animals. Hunting them ie dolphins, etc doesn't count because the process cannot be industrialised unless they can be farmed.
And were selected by us, which is more precise and relevant. You can replace "force fed" with just "fed" when it comes to foie gras and be both still correct and missing the key point.
Once again, humans are a part of nature. Chickens exist in a symbiotic relationship with humans. Would you describe the fungus grown by certain ant colonies as having been 'bred' by the ants or as co-evolving with them? Chicken evolution is only artificial if you consider human desires and motivations as being outside of nature.
What I'm saying is that scientists and dictionaries literally define "artificial selection" to mean a process where people (instead of nature) select which organisms get to reproduce [1].
Chicken farmers breeding a fast-growing chicken is a textbook example of artificial selection.
And while humans are part of nature, nobody would call a car crash a "natural disaster" just because it was caused by humans.
Evolution is designed to increase the chances of survival by introducing genetic diversity and adapting to an environment in order to maximize life expectancy.
Selective breeding actually reduces the chances of survival and introduces massive defects. It's much more likely all of the chickens will die of a single disease with selective breeding, while evolution allows them to survive.
black people, too! we were so strong and resilient and good at labor that humans paid for our travel across the seas and gave us the opportunity to help build America! we were fed and housed and everything, oh my! gosh
> Shadow with me while I'm steppin' on my own resentment
> Life scatter in all directions, I was overzealous
> Overcurious, Momma worry her days get better
> I know she heard me, a timid voice in her stormy weather
> And Poppa taught me our ancestors were tarred and feathered
And brought across the sea, bodies swinging from poplar trees
> I wore a modernesque version, my burden haunted me
I cautiously approach the rather daunting sea
> By nightfall I face the man I'm 'sposed to be
All this grief, been eatin' away my stomach lining
> It's hard to eat when my poppa image stuck inside me
Animals are categorically not humans. This is a scientific fact which you can quantify and measure. Blacks are humans. That is another scientific fact which you can quantify and measure.
blacks being humans didn't stop us from slotting them into an inferior moral category. and back then, we asserted as scientific fact that they were inferior. the apparatus of justification is something which changes over time. it is interesting to me to observe your invocation of our present day apparatus of justification. :)
Yes, but we came to see blacks as equal because they are, in fact, humans, just like whites. Animals will never be humans, no matter what. They will always remain a separate moral category. Here's a simple thought experiment that should illustrate this:
Imagine a scenario in which you can save one of two lives: a human or a dog. You can't pick both. Just one. The question is not, "Which would you save?", but instead, "Would you final moral fault in a person who chose to save the dog?". Almost everybody would hold a person who chose to save the dog morally culpable for the death of the human. But they would not hold them morally culpable for the death of the dog if they chose to save the human.
That will never change. Because animals are not humans.
Why would I be persuaded to change my mind when you A) won't answer a simple question, and B) think it's reasonable to take the position that I am wrong because I won't spend several hours digesting some link you've provided, which you can't be bothered to spend three sentences summarizing?
My premise is simple: almost every single person would find a person who chose to save the life of an animal over a human morally culpable for the death of the human. Whereas they would not find a person morally culpable for the death of the animal if they chose to save the person instead. That asymmetry directly speaks to the different moral stations that animals and humans occupy.
You have yet to level a single actual argument against that premise.
I realise this is satire, but the quality of life of Africans living in the USA now is substantially higher than their ancestral cousins who remained in Africa.
I always found it a bit tacky to call it an "achievement" for the animal/plant that humans farm it. Same with "evolutionary" changes due to selective breeding. Both said in the video.
Always feels like someone is trying to spin reality on me. "What? The birds love it! Instead of living in nature in a part of Africa, they are suffering worldwide to the tune of billions!" Their hard work paid off!
What sort of lives do you think birds living "in nature" in Africa have?
Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they leave the nest.
Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives of wild animals.
This discussion really depends on how animals experience the world, if we can assign them consciousness and value to their experience, etc. But if we give them some degree of conscious experience, it seems the jungle is far preferable to factory farming.
Would you rather live in a tiny cage stuffed with other people, doing nothing during your short life except eating, or living with a tribe in a jungle/savannah (more or less our natural habitat) ? Remeber you'd not be teached anything, learn no language and wouldn't experience much about the world (its richness) -- the cage is your entire reality. I'd very much prefer the jungle. For the free animal the gruesome death is just an episode to a rich life of hunting, fleeing, nurturing, seeing nature, communcating with others; for the caged one the painless death is just an end to a joyless existence.
That said, I think there are kinds of acceptable compromises... not extremely intensive farming seems reasonable to me. Again, dependent on their ability to experience the world. Chicken seem to have less cognitive experience then cows, for example, so it should be acceptable to not spend as much per individual in controlling their environemnt.
And this line of reasoning suggests a (ethically delicate, but interesting) solution: Should we select (breed) animals for lower cognition, thus making factoring farming acceptable? (or equivalently making acceptable farming practices more efficient) It seems logical. If the animal ultimately has no brain (as weird as that sounds), in principle there doesn't seem to be much difference from lab-growing meat.
The video we're discussing talks about how it's an "achievement" for chickens that there's 23 billion of them at any given time, making them by far the most populous bird species. For comparison the red-billed quelea is the most populous wild bird species, with around 1.5 billion individuals.
So the question if you're going to pose an ethical conundrum isn't to suppose that all 23 billion would otherwise be living happily in the wild, but rather the antinatalists argument that chickens would be happier as a species if they were all dead instead (well, except maybe some low number of millions who'd make it in the wild).
Of course it's rather hard to have that conversation with a chicken. Assigning human motivations to animals of that intelligence doesn't make any sense. Would you rather spend your life as a bird eating trash from a landfill, or take your chances in the open skies?
We know what most humans would pick in that scenario, but we can also see that there's wild seagulls that voluntarily choose to live their whole lives doing not much of anything except eating trash in the same small place, and they're pretty intelligent compared to chickens.
As ethical trolley problems go comparing the intelligence of a single chicken v.s. a single cow doesn't make sense either, as you need a lot more chickens to produce the same amount of meat.
If we're going to suppose some linear no-threshold model of cognition for farm animals we'd thus be better off if we killed 100 human-level intelligence animals if they were so large as to give us the same amount of food as those 23 billion chickens. After all we're killing a lot more humans than that yearly just from exposure to a chicken population that large, nevermind the ethical calculus.
Can’t say that comparing the appalling conditions in bird factories with a life lived in the wild really compares here.
At least wild birds get to make a go of it, the factory birds never had a chance. Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their cage.
If I was given the choice I’d choose the life of the wild bird over the caged one any day.
Just playing devils advocate here, not actually arguing either way, but with the following you have actually described the life that some people choose to live (by some definition of the word “choose”):
> Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their cage.
Do they know that their liberties are not the same as in the wild? More importantly, do you believe it causes the chickens psychological pain? I'm not convinced you're not making a naturalist fallacy. Can you point to what is wrong with human's relationship with chickens in a factory farming model, assuming the animals have basic humane treatment?
Edit: I personally eat free-range chicken, but this is for aesthetic reasons. I cannot justify why free-range chickens have a better life than those in enclosures, any more than I can justify why a human farmer has a better life than a software developer.
I was hopeful that you were correct about chickens being gassed, but unfortunately that only seems to be the case[1] in the UK:
> The majority of poultry (chickens, hens and turkeys) in the UK s are now killed using gas.
> UK law states that animals must be killed, not just stunned, using this method.
From the same source, here is the method used most widely due to cut costs:
> Birds are hung upside down by their legs on metal shackles along a moving conveyor belt.
> They move along the production line to a stunning water bath; when the bird's head makes contact with the water, an electrical circuit between the water bath and shackle is completed, which stuns the bird.
> The conveyor belt then moves the birds to a mechanical neck cutter, which cuts the major blood vessels in the neck.
> Live bird shackling causes pain, and hanging birds by their legs is stressful for them.
I was able to find many sources that confirm this just by googling "how are chickens slaughtered." I'm skeptical of PETA and other radical-seeming groups, but I found a source that seems to be pro-chicken that acknowledges this, as well[2]. It says:
> Birds are stunned (rendered unconscious and unaware of pain) and then slaughtered with a quick, single cut to the throat.
However, researching this process reveals many articles about it's ineffectiveness - particularly in the stunning of the birds.
> Brain activity indicates that these animals may be capable of experiencing pain first when they receive a paralyzing electric shock that induces tonic muscle seizures, then when their throats are forced against a sharpened blade. [3]
Furthermore, sometimes the throat-slitting process, too, fails. The next step in the production line is the boiling of the bird carcasses to remove feathers, which means that many birds are boiled alive, hanging upside down from their legs. The Washington post reports the number to be around a million a year in 2013[4].
I always hope that animals are treated humanely, and until very recently I had few qualms with animal products. However, I personally have found that every time I investigate these matters, I am faced with a bleak truth - animals are being tortured constantly, in the millions.
I know you never claimed that all chickens were painlessly gassed, but I feel that dismissing the issue as being more humane than nature (and I agree that nature is brutal) will only deepen the problem.
Whenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their skin and muscle look used and not atrophied.
I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?
It certainly extends to taste, I wouldn't be surprised if nutrition also.
I don't think you can be as simplistic as "US chicken bad" though. The US has a very well established industrial food chain that reaches everywhere, but it's not the only thing going on. The US industry has some economies of scale that work for it too.
Quick-cheap-and-nasty chicken in the UK is just as flavorless as in the US. And you can find better stuff in the US, albeit at higher cost. But the same can be said of flavorless but cheap Holstein milk & butter, or basically anything that has been subjected to aggressive optimizing for cost per unit/volume whatever. Applies to factory bred chickens, but also tomatoes designed to ship well.
The end result is usually pretty cheap, and pretty bland at best.
I've noticed the same thing with tomatoes and apricots. I've got a good friend whose family have an apricot farm in the Kurdish part of Turkey, and their apricots are amazing, but the same variety grown in Western Washington tastes like plastic. There's something seriously pathological with the "terrior" in the western part of north America. (Luckily it doesn't extend to wine.)
(A) The terroir for wine is probably the pickiest of all mass produced fruit, at least according to White’s Understanding Vineyard Soils.
(B) The soil of the Western US is extremely varied but it’s hardly the only factor involved in the taste and cultivation of fruit. The most obvious wildly differing factor is climate. The high deserts of E. Oregon would produce very different fruit compared to Washington’s coastal region even if you used identical soil, due to rainfall, mean/median temps, diurnal temp variation, etc.
It could be over-watering. Overwatered produce often looks the same, but lacks in flavor, texture, etc. Makes sense if you have cheap agricultural water and want to sell more low quality fruit.
The bulk of the video is a british chicken farmer explaining the economic realities. I don't think bad chicken is unique to the US; I suspect cheap meat is about the same everywhere.
It's about the same everywhere that has industrial scale farms that breed chickens through enclosed spaces with limited sunlight and processed feed :D. That's not every country.
However I suspect it's especially bad in the US as the video did casually mention battery cages were made illegal in the EU. Furthermore, that chicken farm was a lot less crowded than some of the Purdue farms filmed in activist videos.
Land usage per chicken, difference between free-range vs. intensively reared:
1/12 m^2 vs. 1/17 m^2
Consumer cost, difference between free range vs. intensively reared:
4 euros/lb vs. 2 euros/lb.
Does the difference in production costs explain the drastic consumer cost difference between these two methods? Why can't free-range farming be automated like it is in the intensive rearing model?
Chickens do not eat in the dark. That’s why the light in stables for intensively reared chicken is on way longer than the sun is up (I’m not up to date on what’s considered optimal today, but I think 24 hours a day was abandoned because it caused too much stress (and stress harms growth, or even kills chicken) for weird things such as “40 minutes on, 20 minutes off”)
Some of the large factors that affect production costs are feeding the chicken and e.g. capital costs of the stable, but optimizing production per dollar more or less boils down to getting the “feed conversion ratio” down.
If free range chicken makes up 4% of the market, perhaps it’s analogous to a Mercedes Benz...it’s not 4x more expensive to manufacture, but the people who buy it aren’t strictly cost-sensitive.
My guess is that free range chicken should be about 50% more expensive, but the market can handle some aspirational pricing.
Right, but why are they the cheapest form of meat? There’s probably some biochemical or energy utilization reason. Perhaps it has to do with chickens being fairly lean meat. I don’t know, but have often wondered.
The main reason has little to do with any of that, but just historical inertia.
There's a lot of species that could have potentially replaced the chicken if we unwind human history and started anew, but it's not a competition between wild species of birds today, but chickens with at least 5000 years of human-guided domestication v.s. most other species.
The same can be said about pretty much anything people eat and farm. Most modern fruit and vegetables were pretty much inedible in their primordial pre-domesticated forms, it's only through thousands of years of effort that we have what we've got today.
In terms innate qualities making chickens suitable for domestication over other birds, some of those are probably:
1. They're pretty much flightless[1], even in the wild. This excludes most bird species right off the bat. Hard to domesticate something that'll just fly away.
2. They're comfortable in groups, and have a group hierarchy. This tends to be common among species humans have domesticated. Good luck domesticating e.g. birds of pray productively, they'll constantly be fighting each other for territory.
3. They're not picky about food, and don't require humans to actively feed them in the context of pre-industrial village life. Some birds only eat say insects, chickens can eat pretty much anything, even other chicken.
Separately, I’m more interested in why chickens are more economically efficient than, say, pigs or cows than why they’re more efficient than other birds. Any thoughts there?
How does that impact cost per calorie (or gram of protein or whatever)? Haven’t thought deeply about it, but this doesn’t seem like a fundamental constraint, though it would allow breeding (which takes place over generations) to find optimizations faster.
because they can eat almost everything, even if not bred in an industrial farm, you can let them roam free and they will live by eating insects or seeds they find around.
Some of my grandmas chicken used to eat the leftovers around pigs manger, but some of them became reckless and ate while pigs were eating and we started to find chickens with the heads chopped off, so we built a fence to keep chickens away from pigs food.
thanks to the bland taste of these factory-produced chicken, plant-based meat alternatives become more viable as an alternative. In asian dishes I started to replace chicken with seitan, the differences are too small to notice https://avocadosandales.com/2017/12/17/chickwheat-shreds/
When I went to America, I couldn't believe how cheap chicken was. I once found boneless chicken breast for $1.99/pound. Eggs were dirt cheap as well, sometimes less than $1.00/dozen.
I don't remember ever seeing prices like these in Canada.
My record for a dozen eggs was $0.37/dozen in summer of 2017 at an Aldi in a town go about it 30,000 in Iowa. It was roughly that price the whole summer.
From my understanding, that was below the price of production. 2017 was a very tough year for chicken farmers, with a huge oversupply. The chicken rendering (killing) operations were backlogged by many months. Farmers often had no choice but to raise the chickens they already bought, knowing full well they're going to be sold unprofitably.
My record for chicken is $.35/lb for chicken drumsticks. It was however from a wholesale store and came in a 40lb box. To me that's more frightening than anything. Like how is that chicken so cheap...
I don't know about the healthcare part. I basically paid full price for all healthcare I ever received past childhood. This includes many thousands in dental and vision. I still don't have a family doctor. Anything specialized (dermatology, psychology) has a 6-month waiting list, which is highly discouraging.
Last time I had to deal with the healthcare system was to get some vaccines. They couldn't give me a basic vaccine (tetanus) within 2 weeks of calling them. Most travel vaccinées were out of stock and in the $400/shot. I had to get my basic vaccines and travel vaccines in Thailand (less $100 for immunity tests + 7 vaccines).
Considering that income taxes are 25-50% and sales taxes are 15%, I expect better than that.
A lot of healthcare is about prevention. Lifestyle, habits, nutrition. For example, I think it's easier and cheaper to eat healthy in the USA. Whenever I go to the USA, I make sure to buy and bring back as much as I'm allowed ($800 total, $20 of dairy). The rest of the time, it's still cheaper to order supplements and ship them from the USA than it is to buy them locally. The range of products they have is also much better. For example, it's basically impossible to find grass-fed butter in Montreal. Looking at GoodRx.com, even medication seems cheaper in the USA.
Pretty much everything is cheaper in the USA. Restaurants, food, delivery, gyms, glasses, gas, Netflix, Internet, video games, houses, cars, electronics, second-hand goods, etc.
Yeah, my wife (who is Canadian) and I joke that Canada is like 5-10 years behind the U.S. in a lot of areas (cell phone costs, availability of Amazon Prime, availability of new consumer products, etc.).
That man and his automatic shed. How depressing. I'd much rather pay 3x as much, eat chicken 1/3 as often and actually enjoy it instead of eating it every day and hardly noticing it.
All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the enjoyment"
Our distant relationship with where meat comes from is one of the most bizarre things about humans. Especially next to our psychopathic relationship with our own pets.
I've seen people freak out with disgust because there's a tiny feather or some dirt in their carton of eggs. Or disgusted by the hanging, swinging corpses behind the butcher when they go to order something that's sliced off the corpse.
Hah! I used to give away my surplus eggs when we had too many. Once I asked a co-worker if he wanted any more since I figured he had used up the last dozen I gave him. He laughed and said "no thanks. The wife complained that they were muddy and probably weren't pasteurized and how did we know they were safe to eat. I told her that they were from free range chickens that just went outside and got muddy feet when they were looking for food, but she wasn't having it."
So that's my anecdote: give away delicious eggs (the taste really is night and day different from supermarket eggs) and people complain that they don't look like the ones in the supermarket!
Right now I have a basket of eggs on my kitchen counter ranging from spotlessly clean to 40% mud covered and some with a fair amount of chickenshit on them. It's all good: having this many eggs is an excuse to come up with new uses for them. Made a batch of lemon bars (filling is mostly eggs and lemon juice/zest) and they were awesome.
Interestingly enough, rural people (and earlier generations) with a closer relationship with their meat source and who see animals being slaughtered regularly (although perhaps not on industrial scales) seem to be more okay with it and see it as part of how life works.
I guess being distant from it creates more (theoretical) passion for animals, because you just haven't developed this "emotional immunity" due to everyday exposure as our ancestors did, and so you "humanize" them more.
My point is: pushing people to be more in contact with swinging pigs and feathers (especially in childhood) won't make them less likely to want to eat meat, it will just make them desensitized and used to it.
It's the other way around for me. I raise my own chickens and rabbits for meat because it allows me to make sure the animals had a quality of life that surpasses industrial farming by quite a lot. The chickens also keep the back yard fairly free of bugs and flies while they ignore pollinating insects like bees and bumblebees.
I eat less meat now since I don't really want to eat meat from the store anymore. Not only is the animals treated well (apart from the obvious killing part), but the quality of the meat is much higher, and obviously it's much fresher.
I heard some super markets put a feather or two on purpose in the package to make it look more authentic. I often find one or two (I live in Germany). But they’re usually clean.
There are quite a few (relatively) famous pigs on Instagram.
Try suggesting to someone that maybe they should be turned into bacon this Christmas. I'm not talking about vegans, but regular meat-eating people. Study reaction.
If you (the general You) are one of the people who would have an adverse reaction to the idea of eating a beloved pig from Instagram, but you eat meat otherwise, examine and consider carefully your preferences and opinions. Same thing if you feel outraged at the fate of Cecil the Lion or at the thought of other people eating dogs for example.
There is a contradiction there. Look at it carefully. Try to generalize that to other living things, for example humans.
Unless you mean that you don't find the pigs on Instagram entertaining, I don't see your point. Clearly there is no grave shortage of food pigs if you're eating one, so the marginal benifit of having a few extra food pigs is much less than the benefit of using those few pigs for entertainment. Kind of like how it's better to use marble for statues or architecture than for landfill, because there's plenty of landfill rock already available.
This is what free market capitalism ends up producing. Not just for chickens, but for any product really. And this man is open and honest about it. Why is this any more depressing than a person working two minimum-wage jobs and barely making due?
If you don't like this type of thing, the other option is to change the entire system, pay ordinary people enough for their ordinary jobs that they can afford to care about animal welfare and the environment and all the other things that get de-prioritized when the option is not putting food on the table for your family.
Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.