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Consumers are totally making the choice. You could make the same argument that the consumer's demand for lots of meat is causing the businesses to have to do th

Consumers are totally making the choice. You could make the same argument that the consumer's demand for lots of meat is causing the businesses to have to do this. In reality it's a chain of choices made by multiple groups of people. The consumers, the industry, and whatever governmental regulatory bodies are involved. One group can't just give up responsibility of the choices they are making. In the end, consumers drive the market. If there's no consumers of unethical meat, no one will unethically raise meat. Out of the groups of people involved, it's only the consumers participation that keeps the cycle alive. Eating meat isn't a required activity for humans. If the treatment the chickens are going through doesn't seem ethical to you, continuing to eat it is hypocritical. You can totally reduce your meat consumption in order to afford eating ethically raised meat, or just not eat meat at all.

mattmanser 5y ago
There are literally 10s of thousands of little things like this in your life. Most of them you will not be aware of. Some of them require huge amounts of effort to figure out. On top of that what you're saying isn't true for huge swathes of the population. They can't afford to eat ethically raised meat, they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so. Most people will think chicken is just chicken. They may be peripherally aware that there's some sort of intensive farming going on, but not really what that entails, or how horrific it is. And so some governments around the world have stepped in and stopped those practices. But not the US. Hence the trade arguments you may have heard about chlorinated chicken. It's not the chlorination that's the problem, it's WHY they need to be chlorinated. Because you need to do that to chicken to make it safe to eat if you grow them in those sort of horrific conditions. So next time you think about blaming the consumer, stop and think. You've been dead wrong once. Government intervention works. Are you wrong again?
- kapp_in_life 5y ago
  >they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so. Didn't know eating beans instead of meat for protein was a disproportionate amount of effort. It's even cheaper to boot. Those people are not invalids, they just don't care about the lives of farm animals. They may say they do, but their actions prove otherwise.
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    While you are not wrong about beans as a protein source, this argument always strikes me as a sort of "let the poor people eat bland mush their entire life, and if they want better food they can get rich like me and have meat from ethical sources." A large part of why factory farming exists is to drive down costs as demand rises, but you gotta keep in mind that the demand rises because eating beans and rice for every meal your entire life is miserable.
    - kapp_in_life 5y ago
      I'm a vegan so they would be eating the same food I do. I never eat out and barely ever try the expensive vegan faux-meats. Adding a few spices and a can of tomatoes make beans and rice delicious. Chana masala, black bean bowls, navy bean soup, the number of dishes you can create from a base of rice and beans is innumerable and they're all relatively simple. The same could be said about unseasoned chicken meat on rice.
      - belorn 5y ago
        I have a challenge for you. Try live a month eating nothing except for seaweed as your protein source and test how easy and enjoyable it is to completely replace one protein source for an other which has completely different taste, smell, texture, and cultural place in your diet. Bonus points if you actually do not like the smell and taste of seaweed and have to work really hard with seasoning to eat it. It is vegan. It simply just a very different diet from what you are used to.
        kapp_in_life 5y ago
        That's a hilarious false equivalency. Almost every culture has had a bean based dish, and eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent phenomenon in the last hundred years. There's a reason why I replaced meat with beans and thats due to the flexibility and variety of dishes you can cook with it, across and within cultures.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  If you can afford meat protein, you can afford protein from plants. There is really no excuse why anyone who is already able to afford a life of the basic comforts cannot do so on at least a plant-based diet, if not a vegan lifestyle. Plant-based diets being prohibitively expensive is a myth, and nothing more. We know this. Nutrients, proteins, etc. It's all there, and for the same price or less than animal products.
oivey 5y ago
Consumers have driven the market into a race to the bottom. There is effectively no way for the consumer to really know about the comparative difference in living conditions between two packs of meat. There is really no way at all to know the provenance of chicken from a restaurant. Expecting consumers to either do this research or not eat chicken at all is completely unrealistic. If we want to fix this problem it will have to be through regulation. A start would be nasty labeling on unethically generated foods, like the surgeon general’s warning on cigarettes.
N1H1L 5y ago
No they are not making the choice. There is way too little information to make that choice. Which chicken package tells you how many weeks the chicken lived? And this type of demand is pretty inelastic. You can make a pound of chicken 25 cents cheaper or expensive an demand won't budge at all. What you are subscribing to is market fetishism - something that works only in Econ 101 classrooms, not the real world. Consumers want rainforests to not be destroyed for example. But how many consumers know that they are destroyed due to palm oil production? And which customer has the ability to track down globalized supply chains when choosing an ice cream, when their kids are screaming nearby?
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
I'm on EBT (food stamps). So I can't always make the choice given a fixed income, even if I could find well treated chicken. So, is it the consumers fault here too?

mattmanser 5y ago

There are literally 10s of thousands of little things like this in your life. Most of them you will not be aware of. Some of them require huge amounts of effort to figure out. On top of that what you're saying isn't true for huge swathes of the population. They can't afford to eat ethically raised meat, they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so. Most people will think chicken is just chicken. They may be peripherally aware that there's some sort of intensive farming going on, but not really what that entails, or how horrific it is. And so some governments around the world have stepped in and stopped those practices. But not the US. Hence the trade arguments you may have heard about chlorinated chicken. It's not the chlorination that's the problem, it's WHY they need to be chlorinated. Because you need to do that to chicken to make it safe to eat if you grow them in those sort of horrific conditions. So next time you think about blaming the consumer, stop and think. You've been dead wrong once. Government intervention works. Are you wrong again?

kapp_in_life 5y ago
>they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so. Didn't know eating beans instead of meat for protein was a disproportionate amount of effort. It's even cheaper to boot. Those people are not invalids, they just don't care about the lives of farm animals. They may say they do, but their actions prove otherwise.
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  While you are not wrong about beans as a protein source, this argument always strikes me as a sort of "let the poor people eat bland mush their entire life, and if they want better food they can get rich like me and have meat from ethical sources." A large part of why factory farming exists is to drive down costs as demand rises, but you gotta keep in mind that the demand rises because eating beans and rice for every meal your entire life is miserable.
  - kapp_in_life 5y ago
    I'm a vegan so they would be eating the same food I do. I never eat out and barely ever try the expensive vegan faux-meats. Adding a few spices and a can of tomatoes make beans and rice delicious. Chana masala, black bean bowls, navy bean soup, the number of dishes you can create from a base of rice and beans is innumerable and they're all relatively simple. The same could be said about unseasoned chicken meat on rice.
    - belorn 5y ago
      I have a challenge for you. Try live a month eating nothing except for seaweed as your protein source and test how easy and enjoyable it is to completely replace one protein source for an other which has completely different taste, smell, texture, and cultural place in your diet. Bonus points if you actually do not like the smell and taste of seaweed and have to work really hard with seasoning to eat it. It is vegan. It simply just a very different diet from what you are used to.
      - kapp_in_life 5y ago
        That's a hilarious false equivalency. Almost every culture has had a bean based dish, and eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent phenomenon in the last hundred years. There's a reason why I replaced meat with beans and thats due to the flexibility and variety of dishes you can cook with it, across and within cultures.
sweetheart 5y ago
If you can afford meat protein, you can afford protein from plants. There is really no excuse why anyone who is already able to afford a life of the basic comforts cannot do so on at least a plant-based diet, if not a vegan lifestyle. Plant-based diets being prohibitively expensive is a myth, and nothing more. We know this. Nutrients, proteins, etc. It's all there, and for the same price or less than animal products.

oivey 5y ago

Consumers have driven the market into a race to the bottom. There is effectively no way for the consumer to really know about the comparative difference in living conditions between two packs of meat. There is really no way at all to know the provenance of chicken from a restaurant. Expecting consumers to either do this research or not eat chicken at all is completely unrealistic. If we want to fix this problem it will have to be through regulation. A start would be nasty labeling on unethically generated foods, like the surgeon general’s warning on cigarettes.

N1H1L 5y ago

No they are not making the choice. There is way too little information to make that choice. Which chicken package tells you how many weeks the chicken lived? And this type of demand is pretty inelastic. You can make a pound of chicken 25 cents cheaper or expensive an demand won't budge at all. What you are subscribing to is market fetishism - something that works only in Econ 101 classrooms, not the real world. Consumers want rainforests to not be destroyed for example. But how many consumers know that they are destroyed due to palm oil production? And which customer has the ability to track down globalized supply chains when choosing an ice cream, when their kids are screaming nearby?

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago

I'm on EBT (food stamps). So I can't always make the choice given a fixed income, even if I could find well treated chicken. So, is it the consumers fault here too?