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You're making "consuming meat" equivalent to "consuming factory farmed meat". I agree with you on the horrors of factory farms, but farms like mine (https://mul

You're making "consuming meat" equivalent to "consuming factory farmed meat". I agree with you on the horrors of factory farms, but farms like mine (https://mulligan.farm https://mulligan.farm), wherein we raise our chickens on pasture, require vastly less pharmaceuticals (other than their Marek's disease leaky vaccine they get at birth, our chickens need no more antibiotics than simple sunlight and fresh air) than factory farmed meat. In the 50s, Americans on average spent ~20% of their budgets on food and 10% on healthcare. Today, it's about 18% on healthcare and 9% on food. If we swapped back to the model from the 50s, wherein our food was a bigger proportion of the budget and we were less fat and unhealthy as a result, we could easily have, say, 10,000 small farms supplying healthy, environmentally-sane, meat to local communities, rather than a concentrated agribusiness selling gross, tortured flesh to the entire country.

namdnay 5y ago
That's a good first step, but I feel you're skipping over some of the issues here... At the end of the day, you're still raping and killing animals. I love meat, but I'm pretty sure my grandchildren (or maybe their grandchildren) will look back at us in the same way we look back at public executions
- sjwalter 5y ago
  I have no ethical qualms with killing animals. I do all my own slaughter and processing and exclusively eat meat that I either killed myself (pigs & chickens on my farm), or that I traded with farmer friends for (sheep & beef) who have similar standards as we do. Once you are actually in contact with the food you're raising and agriculture in general, I think this becomes much, much simpler an ethical question. I mean, even just the animal impact on a vegetarian diet becomes much more questionable after you witness a finish mower grinding up a half-dozen foals during cutting, when you witness the mass habitat destruction wrought by GMO soybean monoculture, etc. It becomes even more questionable when you bring up livestoc raised on land otherwise unusable for agriculture--dryland farming in Montana, wherein stocking rates are very low, land is intensively managed, and the alternatives presented by the lab-grown meat folks tend to always rely on rowcrops destroying otherwise great animal habitats. Finally, the more we learn about plants, the more it seems they're far more capable of what we might call "cognition" than we did in the past. Nature is competitive, and we are the peak species of evolution on earth. To me, this doesn't mean we try to walk the lands while sparing all life possible. Rather, to me, it means we become stewards of the land and its inhabitants. Hunters are, to me, the prime example of this. Hunters are responsible for vastly more improvement to natural habitats and maintenance of trophy species than vegans, and I'd bet have a much greater positive impact on the environment than animal-lovers who eat tonnes of rowcropped vegetables.
farmyearn 5y ago
Your farm is an outlier though, not representative. The current consumption levels of meat can only be sustained with factory farming, it's impossible for your type of farm to contribute a meaningful amount of production. Meat is, in the context of mass consumption, factory farmed. Your farming method could not serve even a tiny fraction of demand, so while it is better than factory farming, it's not an alternative.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their animals. Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-raised, quality animal proteins. Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to Americans spending double on their diets and half on their healthcare. What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people? Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy. Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit, but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.
- jbotz 5y ago
  This is just not true, or at least extremely US-centric. In large parts of the world most meat consumed by the public still comes from small to medium farms and family agriculture. The globalized neoliberal agro-industrial complex has been whittling away at that, but it's still true in a lot of places, and it could be made true again in the US; the population density of the US is pretty low, there's a lot of land on which family farmers could produce meat humanely and sustainably. The only reason it doesn't happen is because agro-industry doesn't allow it, and they have captured the regulatory framework in their favor. If you changed the regulatory framework in a way that penalizes (or downright prohibits) a lot of these horrendous industrial practices sufficiently, then sustainable and human agriculture absolutely could fill the demand even of the very carnivorous American public (at somewhat higher prices, but not more than say double the price.) I'm not saying we shouldn't reduce mean consumption, just that the argument that sustainable and humane methods couldn't meet the demand are BS.
krsdcbl 5y ago
I'm afraid you on the other hand vastly underestimate what an outlier farms like yours are when taking the whole population into account. For the amount of meat that is consumed, such production also wouldn't be feasible to provide for everybody - that's why i think OPs point is very valid, without _reducing_ total consumption, there simply is no "not factory farmed meat". Considering the population has grown, and cost of life (specially rent) is inflated compared to the 50s, I don't really see any path to achieve what you propose without really reducing consumption.
criddell 5y ago
Do you think you are comfortable with your role in the food system only because the mainstream option is way worse? If lab grown meat becomes viable, aren't you next in line to be demonized?
- sjwalter 5y ago
  I think the notion of "lab-grown meat" is laughable. As mentioned in another reply, it seems to be based on this idea that we can somehow grow in a lab something that requires an incredibly complex environment to grow into healthy food, that we can somehow simulate these conditions, and that the result will somehow be just as good as, e.g., 100% pasture-raised Angus.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Impossible's rumored $10B valuation[0] and BYND's current market cap of $7B would say otherwise. Once you have a product, the only limiting factor is how much you can scale. 0: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/impossible-foods-ipo-spac-stock-market-listing-10-billion-valuation-2021-4 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/impossible-f...
    - sjwalter 5y ago
      These, I've learned upthread, are not "lab-grown meat" producers, at least not yet. They're in the factory-produced GMO soy-based, highly-processed meatlike substance business, currently.
  - harpersealtako 5y ago
    It doesn't need to be as good as the grass fed kobe beefsteak, it just needs to be as good as the feedlot mcdonalds hamburger. I'm optimistic about lab meat -- not because it will make everybody vegan (it won't), but because it might be able to create an alternative to the cheap factory-farmed meat we have today, enabling us to pass legislation to ban abusive factory farming practices without severely affecting consumers. The people who want quality meat will go to farmers like you, the people who want a chicken tender will buy it from the lab-grown folks, and the net amount of suffering in the universe decreases just a little.
judge2020 5y ago
Thanks for the good chuckle > Mulligan Farms, LLC maintains a copyright notice (below), though we're not sure what it really means for us from a legal perspective. What we do know that a bunch of small text in a page's footer lends an air of gravitas and professionalism. To boot, as far as we can tell, nobody reads this stuff, so we're rolling with this.

namdnay 5y ago

That's a good first step, but I feel you're skipping over some of the issues here... At the end of the day, you're still raping and killing animals. I love meat, but I'm pretty sure my grandchildren (or maybe their grandchildren) will look back at us in the same way we look back at public executions

sjwalter 5y ago
I have no ethical qualms with killing animals. I do all my own slaughter and processing and exclusively eat meat that I either killed myself (pigs & chickens on my farm), or that I traded with farmer friends for (sheep & beef) who have similar standards as we do. Once you are actually in contact with the food you're raising and agriculture in general, I think this becomes much, much simpler an ethical question. I mean, even just the animal impact on a vegetarian diet becomes much more questionable after you witness a finish mower grinding up a half-dozen foals during cutting, when you witness the mass habitat destruction wrought by GMO soybean monoculture, etc. It becomes even more questionable when you bring up livestoc raised on land otherwise unusable for agriculture--dryland farming in Montana, wherein stocking rates are very low, land is intensively managed, and the alternatives presented by the lab-grown meat folks tend to always rely on rowcrops destroying otherwise great animal habitats. Finally, the more we learn about plants, the more it seems they're far more capable of what we might call "cognition" than we did in the past. Nature is competitive, and we are the peak species of evolution on earth. To me, this doesn't mean we try to walk the lands while sparing all life possible. Rather, to me, it means we become stewards of the land and its inhabitants. Hunters are, to me, the prime example of this. Hunters are responsible for vastly more improvement to natural habitats and maintenance of trophy species than vegans, and I'd bet have a much greater positive impact on the environment than animal-lovers who eat tonnes of rowcropped vegetables.

farmyearn 5y ago

Your farm is an outlier though, not representative. The current consumption levels of meat can only be sustained with factory farming, it's impossible for your type of farm to contribute a meaningful amount of production. Meat is, in the context of mass consumption, factory farmed. Your farming method could not serve even a tiny fraction of demand, so while it is better than factory farming, it's not an alternative.

sjwalter 5y ago
It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their animals. Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-raised, quality animal proteins. Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to Americans spending double on their diets and half on their healthcare. What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people? Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy. Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit, but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.
jbotz 5y ago
This is just not true, or at least extremely US-centric. In large parts of the world most meat consumed by the public still comes from small to medium farms and family agriculture. The globalized neoliberal agro-industrial complex has been whittling away at that, but it's still true in a lot of places, and it could be made true again in the US; the population density of the US is pretty low, there's a lot of land on which family farmers could produce meat humanely and sustainably. The only reason it doesn't happen is because agro-industry doesn't allow it, and they have captured the regulatory framework in their favor. If you changed the regulatory framework in a way that penalizes (or downright prohibits) a lot of these horrendous industrial practices sufficiently, then sustainable and human agriculture absolutely could fill the demand even of the very carnivorous American public (at somewhat higher prices, but not more than say double the price.) I'm not saying we shouldn't reduce mean consumption, just that the argument that sustainable and humane methods couldn't meet the demand are BS.

krsdcbl 5y ago

I'm afraid you on the other hand vastly underestimate what an outlier farms like yours are when taking the whole population into account. For the amount of meat that is consumed, such production also wouldn't be feasible to provide for everybody - that's why i think OPs point is very valid, without _reducing_ total consumption, there simply is no "not factory farmed meat". Considering the population has grown, and cost of life (specially rent) is inflated compared to the 50s, I don't really see any path to achieve what you propose without really reducing consumption.

criddell 5y ago

Do you think you are comfortable with your role in the food system only because the mainstream option is way worse? If lab grown meat becomes viable, aren't you next in line to be demonized?

sjwalter 5y ago
I think the notion of "lab-grown meat" is laughable. As mentioned in another reply, it seems to be based on this idea that we can somehow grow in a lab something that requires an incredibly complex environment to grow into healthy food, that we can somehow simulate these conditions, and that the result will somehow be just as good as, e.g., 100% pasture-raised Angus.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Impossible's rumored $10B valuation[0] and BYND's current market cap of $7B would say otherwise. Once you have a product, the only limiting factor is how much you can scale. 0: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/impossible-foods-ipo-spac-stock-market-listing-10-billion-valuation-2021-4 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/impossible-f...
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    These, I've learned upthread, are not "lab-grown meat" producers, at least not yet. They're in the factory-produced GMO soy-based, highly-processed meatlike substance business, currently.
- harpersealtako 5y ago
  It doesn't need to be as good as the grass fed kobe beefsteak, it just needs to be as good as the feedlot mcdonalds hamburger. I'm optimistic about lab meat -- not because it will make everybody vegan (it won't), but because it might be able to create an alternative to the cheap factory-farmed meat we have today, enabling us to pass legislation to ban abusive factory farming practices without severely affecting consumers. The people who want quality meat will go to farmers like you, the people who want a chicken tender will buy it from the lab-grown folks, and the net amount of suffering in the universe decreases just a little.

judge2020 5y ago

Thanks for the good chuckle > Mulligan Farms, LLC maintains a copyright notice (below), though we're not sure what it really means for us from a legal perspective. What we do know that a bunch of small text in a page's footer lends an air of gravitas and professionalism. To boot, as far as we can tell, nobody reads this stuff, so we're rolling with this.