5 ms·

Anything that gets us closer to a world in which chickens are not farmed for their meat or eggs is good. The incomprehensible violence of factory farming for me

Anything that gets us closer to a world in which chickens are not farmed for their meat or eggs is good. The incomprehensible violence of factory farming for mere taste is unforgivable, and stuff like this is a small step to its undoing.

GordonS 5y ago
I'm aware that the USA has shockingly, appallingly low animal welfare standards, especially for a developed country - but chickens don't have to be farmed like that. I haven't bought a non-free range egg in at least a decade, and I make sure any poultry I buy has been reared with good welfare.
- dewey 5y ago
  > but chickens don't have to be farmed like that They probably have to if you want to keep the same, low and subsided price that people, who don't want or can pay more, got used to.
  - slap_shot 5y ago
    I think I pay $8 a dozen for Vital Farms eggs. My assumption is that a lot of that price is for whatever overhead is required to run things a bit more humanely than the average.
    - oezi 5y ago
      Unfortunately in the case of animal wellfare or Bio as the call it in Europe your extra money mostly goes to supermarkets as profit, to the low volume producers and less than 5% actually go towards a better product or animal wellfare. For things like eggs I would be very surprised if more than 1 cent extra per egg is actually spend towards improving the conditions of chickens.
      - brimble 5y ago
        This seems to undercut the "doing it ethically would significantly increase prices" argument for why it doesn't happen. Does this mean we could legislate the worst kinds of egg production out of existence and, once things settled down, only pay single-digit-percentages more for a dozen eggs, because most of the difference now is just middlemen gouging price-insensitive buyers? $5 more per dozen is a shock and would have people up in arms (probably literally), $0.20 more per dozen seems... not so bad.
      - slap_shot 5y ago
        The argument is that keeping the price low requires inhumane practices, but providing human practices doesn't command a price that would offset the overhead of being more human? That doesn't make sense.
    - squeaky-clean 5y ago
      I also pay more for pasture raised chicken eggs as well, but the regular eggs by me are almost always on sale for $1.50 for dozen if you're willing to jump between a few brands. That's a pretty massive difference, especially for someone with a family who probably goes through a couple dozen eggs per week. I'm aware that making a software-engineer salary I can easily afford more humanely raised eggs, but I'd never judge my friends who are, say, schoolteachers, for not being able to justify eggs that are 6x more expensive. inb4 the inevitable comment of "pasture raised doesn't mean anything, the chickens can still...." Yes I researched the specific farm my eggs come from to make sure it's humane.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  A couple of things about "free-range" chickens: 1 - They might not actually be free-range after all. I've seen multiple exposes where the chickens advertised as "free-range" actually weren't, or they were allowed out of their cages for an hour a day and they called that "free-range". 2 - Even if they're are free-range, their conditions could still be appalling. Overcrowding and debeaking are common.
  - 0des 5y ago
    In my locality, free range means your friend has chickens, you pet them during barbecues and feed them boudain balls to encourage bigger eggs. Not often in life are the best things also free or cheaper than the store bought alternative
  - GordonS 5y ago
    I presume you are talking with regards to the US? I'm in the UK, and we have proper regulation that sets out what "free range" is - it is not whatever ludicrously tenuous definition the US has dreamt up. I live in rural Scotland, and can see free range chickens for myself - they seem to be living a good life.
    - gondo 5y ago
      For now. After Brexit, UK will most likely adapt more US standards to allow more US imports to offset the lack of trade with EU.
    - Aromasin 5y ago
      Say what you will about how they spend their best years, but they still come from hatcheries where 50% of the population upon hatching are gassed or dropped live off the end of a conveyor belt into a macerator. Equally, they end their life more often than not in a slaughterhouse where the conditions are abysmal to say the least. The UK has some of the strictest animal welfare in the world, but they are still continuously broken by most farms across the country it seems. One example of many would be the private investigation into the suppliers for M&S's free range organic eggs in 2016. One of the most well reputed retailers in the country, yet they found barns full of ill chickens unable to walk, rotten corpses littering the place, and overcrowding throughout: https://investigations.peta.org/marks-spencer-cruelty-chicken-farms/ https://investigations.peta.org/marks-spencer-cruelty-chicke... All throughout my teens I worked on cattle and poultry farms across the South of England and to be frank, I saw disturbing scenes at every single one of them. Even though I've somewhat reconciled with eating animal products morally in recent years, I've lost any and all trust in the food production system to do it ethically, despite appearances on the surface. If rigorous legislation doesn't stop farmers from abusing their livestock, then the only option left it seems is a return to self-reliant homesteading where you know exactly where the food comes from, or the production of synthetic alternatives as discussed in OP's article. Personally, as much as I enjoy the eggs from my rescue hens, I hope for the latter.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  Free range means nothing. This is humane washing, and is incredibly misleading. Here’s a good rule of thumb: any animal product you use, outside of veeery rare cases like backyard eggs, you _know_ it is the result of needless suffering. Even things like backyard eggs can easily be rife with issues, however. https://www.surgeactivism.org/humanewashing https://www.surgeactivism.org/humanewashing
  - kkfx 5y ago
    Did you know how in free, natural nature animals eat? grass is literally eaten alive, animals are normally torn apart by other animal teeth. What you propose? Change nature to be a false/artificial paradise? Humans are omnivores, we need to eat meat and animal proteins to live well, that's is, we can and we should treats animals we eat differently but that's not just a mere business issue, it's also a dimensional issue: we are many, too many. I doubt we can live without certain practice. I do not say, of course, that TINA, we are in the sole possible world etc, just saying that going from an extreme to another is a good way to makes disasters.
    - sweetheart 5y ago
      Every major nutrition and dietetics association agrees unanimously that a vegan diet is healthy for all stages of life including pregnancy. https://youaretheirvoice.com/pages/the-clear-consensus https://youaretheirvoice.com/pages/the-clear-consensus So you’re simply not correct that we need animals to thrive.
      - kkfx 5y ago
        Every scientific associations in the recent past have said that sardines, blue fish are the proteins of the sea, we need to eat them, few years later the same say that are full of poisons. Few years earlier eggs are the best nutrient we have, few years after eggs are hard to digest, full of "cholesterol" [1]. Long story short "dietetics association" means mostly lobbyist associations on sale to the best offer. Oh, BTW just a bit more time ago most MDs agreed that radioactivity is good for health and they try to determine the best dosage of radium to be put on skin and eat for various purposes like fight baldness or fortifying the fetus in pregnant women. Years later most MDs agree that smoking tobacco is very good for many things, especially useful to fight flu and cold. Few years later we discover that that's was an Eduard Bernays advertising campaign: he created a medical journal that start publishing real studies and he distribute it between medical offices and universities, then he start injecting few false but false but credible studies that praised tobacco smoke. In little time many real researchers have follow claiming other discovering. I can't really know for sure why there is a push against meat, what I know for sure is that's not a matter of fighting climate change, nor adapting to it. Another thing I know for sure is that ultra-processed foods, like foods based on insects and grains, cost very little for their producers on scale, and can be sold with a very big margin and are complex enough to make them taste good that no small player can compete. Meanwhile I know how sales of statins climbs in the recent years and who profit for them. [1] witch is a common world and a completely true and false statement since LDL is digested thanks to all animal proteins and pushed up by starchy foods.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  In the US a free range chicken gets a couple square feet of space to move around it. If you want a chicken that can actually walk around and go outside you want a pasture raised egg.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    I'm in the UK, and we have proper regulation that sets out what "free range" is - it is not whatever ludicrously tenuous definition the US has dreamt up. I live in rural Scotland, and can see free range chickens for myself - they seem to be living a good life.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      I mean that’s great. We have rural chickens too. It’s not that hard to find. The supermarkets here (Massachusetts) have pretty clear labels on what all the chicken raising options mean.
- bjoli 5y ago
  I live in Sweden. We have OK-ish animal welfare laws. Even here free-range means very very little. I use to think of it in numbers of a4 sheets of paper per hen. In a battery cage they have almost one. In fee range systems they have almost 3. Not nearly enough for them to avoid stress behaviour and them killing eachother.
ComradePhil 5y ago
What do you mean by "mere taste"? Hominids didn't evolve for 22 million years to have taste buds that are completely useless. More often than not, better tasting food means it has higher nutritional value. This has been slightly butchered by modern food science when they started mixing chemicals to help sell industry waste as food... but for vast majority of foods that humans culturally ate before the food industry took over, good taste does mean higher nutritional value.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > but for vast majority of foods that humans culturally ate before the food industry took over, good taste does mean higher nutritional value Ah, yes, just ask the Romans, who liked to flavor their food with nutritious lead. (The Romans' lead-based flavoring is an extreme example, but people have been eating pretty dubious things, particularly sugar, for a very long time because they taste good)
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "What do you mean by "mere taste"? Hominids didn't evolve for 22 million years to have taste buds that are completely useless." Not for nothing. It can be useful and pleasurable, but taste has a dark side as well. Having a sweet-tooth has been a stab in the back for many modern humans, as it leads to over-consumption of sugar, which can be horrible for one's health. More on-topic, the craving for the taste of meat has led to the suffering and slaughter of countless animals.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    >Having a sweet-tooth has been a stab in the back for many modern humans, as it leads to over-consumption of sugar, which can be horrible for one's health. Sugar is overvalued by taste buds because of its low availability when our taste buds evolved. This argument does not extend to every other taste. >More on-topic, the craving for the taste of meat Meat is craved by the taste buds because it is the most nutrient dense natural food... with very few substitutes. All known surviving human cultures eat one of meat, fish or milk; no exceptions. Certain essential nutrients are not bioavailable to us without those. >has led to the suffering and slaughter of countless animals. Animal "suffering" is completely arbitrary view based on shallow view of the ecosystem. Cells die all day but do you mourn their deaths? Zebras die all the time in the savannahs but do you think it is a good idea to capture all lions and feed them fake meat to "reduce animal suffering"? From the ecosystem point of view, individual organisms "suffering" is a part of a much bigger thing where it doesn't matter as much as an individual organism would think.

GordonS 5y ago

I'm aware that the USA has shockingly, appallingly low animal welfare standards, especially for a developed country - but chickens don't have to be farmed like that. I haven't bought a non-free range egg in at least a decade, and I make sure any poultry I buy has been reared with good welfare.

dewey 5y ago
> but chickens don't have to be farmed like that They probably have to if you want to keep the same, low and subsided price that people, who don't want or can pay more, got used to.
- slap_shot 5y ago
  I think I pay $8 a dozen for Vital Farms eggs. My assumption is that a lot of that price is for whatever overhead is required to run things a bit more humanely than the average.
  - oezi 5y ago
    Unfortunately in the case of animal wellfare or Bio as the call it in Europe your extra money mostly goes to supermarkets as profit, to the low volume producers and less than 5% actually go towards a better product or animal wellfare. For things like eggs I would be very surprised if more than 1 cent extra per egg is actually spend towards improving the conditions of chickens.
    - brimble 5y ago
      This seems to undercut the "doing it ethically would significantly increase prices" argument for why it doesn't happen. Does this mean we could legislate the worst kinds of egg production out of existence and, once things settled down, only pay single-digit-percentages more for a dozen eggs, because most of the difference now is just middlemen gouging price-insensitive buyers? $5 more per dozen is a shock and would have people up in arms (probably literally), $0.20 more per dozen seems... not so bad.
    - slap_shot 5y ago
      The argument is that keeping the price low requires inhumane practices, but providing human practices doesn't command a price that would offset the overhead of being more human? That doesn't make sense.
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    I also pay more for pasture raised chicken eggs as well, but the regular eggs by me are almost always on sale for $1.50 for dozen if you're willing to jump between a few brands. That's a pretty massive difference, especially for someone with a family who probably goes through a couple dozen eggs per week. I'm aware that making a software-engineer salary I can easily afford more humanely raised eggs, but I'd never judge my friends who are, say, schoolteachers, for not being able to justify eggs that are 6x more expensive. inb4 the inevitable comment of "pasture raised doesn't mean anything, the chickens can still...." Yes I researched the specific farm my eggs come from to make sure it's humane.
pmoriarty 5y ago
A couple of things about "free-range" chickens: 1 - They might not actually be free-range after all. I've seen multiple exposes where the chickens advertised as "free-range" actually weren't, or they were allowed out of their cages for an hour a day and they called that "free-range". 2 - Even if they're are free-range, their conditions could still be appalling. Overcrowding and debeaking are common.
- 0des 5y ago
  In my locality, free range means your friend has chickens, you pet them during barbecues and feed them boudain balls to encourage bigger eggs. Not often in life are the best things also free or cheaper than the store bought alternative
- GordonS 5y ago
  I presume you are talking with regards to the US? I'm in the UK, and we have proper regulation that sets out what "free range" is - it is not whatever ludicrously tenuous definition the US has dreamt up. I live in rural Scotland, and can see free range chickens for myself - they seem to be living a good life.
  - gondo 5y ago
    For now. After Brexit, UK will most likely adapt more US standards to allow more US imports to offset the lack of trade with EU.
  - Aromasin 5y ago
    Say what you will about how they spend their best years, but they still come from hatcheries where 50% of the population upon hatching are gassed or dropped live off the end of a conveyor belt into a macerator. Equally, they end their life more often than not in a slaughterhouse where the conditions are abysmal to say the least. The UK has some of the strictest animal welfare in the world, but they are still continuously broken by most farms across the country it seems. One example of many would be the private investigation into the suppliers for M&S's free range organic eggs in 2016. One of the most well reputed retailers in the country, yet they found barns full of ill chickens unable to walk, rotten corpses littering the place, and overcrowding throughout: https://investigations.peta.org/marks-spencer-cruelty-chicken-farms/ https://investigations.peta.org/marks-spencer-cruelty-chicke... All throughout my teens I worked on cattle and poultry farms across the South of England and to be frank, I saw disturbing scenes at every single one of them. Even though I've somewhat reconciled with eating animal products morally in recent years, I've lost any and all trust in the food production system to do it ethically, despite appearances on the surface. If rigorous legislation doesn't stop farmers from abusing their livestock, then the only option left it seems is a return to self-reliant homesteading where you know exactly where the food comes from, or the production of synthetic alternatives as discussed in OP's article. Personally, as much as I enjoy the eggs from my rescue hens, I hope for the latter.
sweetheart 5y ago
Free range means nothing. This is humane washing, and is incredibly misleading. Here’s a good rule of thumb: any animal product you use, outside of veeery rare cases like backyard eggs, you _know_ it is the result of needless suffering. Even things like backyard eggs can easily be rife with issues, however. https://www.surgeactivism.org/humanewashing https://www.surgeactivism.org/humanewashing
- kkfx 5y ago
  Did you know how in free, natural nature animals eat? grass is literally eaten alive, animals are normally torn apart by other animal teeth. What you propose? Change nature to be a false/artificial paradise? Humans are omnivores, we need to eat meat and animal proteins to live well, that's is, we can and we should treats animals we eat differently but that's not just a mere business issue, it's also a dimensional issue: we are many, too many. I doubt we can live without certain practice. I do not say, of course, that TINA, we are in the sole possible world etc, just saying that going from an extreme to another is a good way to makes disasters.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    Every major nutrition and dietetics association agrees unanimously that a vegan diet is healthy for all stages of life including pregnancy. https://youaretheirvoice.com/pages/the-clear-consensus https://youaretheirvoice.com/pages/the-clear-consensus So you’re simply not correct that we need animals to thrive.
    - kkfx 5y ago
      Every scientific associations in the recent past have said that sardines, blue fish are the proteins of the sea, we need to eat them, few years later the same say that are full of poisons. Few years earlier eggs are the best nutrient we have, few years after eggs are hard to digest, full of "cholesterol" [1]. Long story short "dietetics association" means mostly lobbyist associations on sale to the best offer. Oh, BTW just a bit more time ago most MDs agreed that radioactivity is good for health and they try to determine the best dosage of radium to be put on skin and eat for various purposes like fight baldness or fortifying the fetus in pregnant women. Years later most MDs agree that smoking tobacco is very good for many things, especially useful to fight flu and cold. Few years later we discover that that's was an Eduard Bernays advertising campaign: he created a medical journal that start publishing real studies and he distribute it between medical offices and universities, then he start injecting few false but false but credible studies that praised tobacco smoke. In little time many real researchers have follow claiming other discovering. I can't really know for sure why there is a push against meat, what I know for sure is that's not a matter of fighting climate change, nor adapting to it. Another thing I know for sure is that ultra-processed foods, like foods based on insects and grains, cost very little for their producers on scale, and can be sold with a very big margin and are complex enough to make them taste good that no small player can compete. Meanwhile I know how sales of statins climbs in the recent years and who profit for them. [1] witch is a common world and a completely true and false statement since LDL is digested thanks to all animal proteins and pushed up by starchy foods.
oneoff786 5y ago
In the US a free range chicken gets a couple square feet of space to move around it. If you want a chicken that can actually walk around and go outside you want a pasture raised egg.
- GordonS 5y ago
  I'm in the UK, and we have proper regulation that sets out what "free range" is - it is not whatever ludicrously tenuous definition the US has dreamt up. I live in rural Scotland, and can see free range chickens for myself - they seem to be living a good life.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    I mean that’s great. We have rural chickens too. It’s not that hard to find. The supermarkets here (Massachusetts) have pretty clear labels on what all the chicken raising options mean.
bjoli 5y ago
I live in Sweden. We have OK-ish animal welfare laws. Even here free-range means very very little. I use to think of it in numbers of a4 sheets of paper per hen. In a battery cage they have almost one. In fee range systems they have almost 3. Not nearly enough for them to avoid stress behaviour and them killing eachother.

ComradePhil 5y ago

What do you mean by "mere taste"? Hominids didn't evolve for 22 million years to have taste buds that are completely useless. More often than not, better tasting food means it has higher nutritional value. This has been slightly butchered by modern food science when they started mixing chemicals to help sell industry waste as food... but for vast majority of foods that humans culturally ate before the food industry took over, good taste does mean higher nutritional value.

rsynnott 5y ago
> but for vast majority of foods that humans culturally ate before the food industry took over, good taste does mean higher nutritional value Ah, yes, just ask the Romans, who liked to flavor their food with nutritious lead. (The Romans' lead-based flavoring is an extreme example, but people have been eating pretty dubious things, particularly sugar, for a very long time because they taste good)
pmoriarty 5y ago
"What do you mean by "mere taste"? Hominids didn't evolve for 22 million years to have taste buds that are completely useless." Not for nothing. It can be useful and pleasurable, but taste has a dark side as well. Having a sweet-tooth has been a stab in the back for many modern humans, as it leads to over-consumption of sugar, which can be horrible for one's health. More on-topic, the craving for the taste of meat has led to the suffering and slaughter of countless animals.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  >Having a sweet-tooth has been a stab in the back for many modern humans, as it leads to over-consumption of sugar, which can be horrible for one's health. Sugar is overvalued by taste buds because of its low availability when our taste buds evolved. This argument does not extend to every other taste. >More on-topic, the craving for the taste of meat Meat is craved by the taste buds because it is the most nutrient dense natural food... with very few substitutes. All known surviving human cultures eat one of meat, fish or milk; no exceptions. Certain essential nutrients are not bioavailable to us without those. >has led to the suffering and slaughter of countless animals. Animal "suffering" is completely arbitrary view based on shallow view of the ecosystem. Cells die all day but do you mourn their deaths? Zebras die all the time in the savannahs but do you think it is a good idea to capture all lions and feed them fake meat to "reduce animal suffering"? From the ecosystem point of view, individual organisms "suffering" is a part of a much bigger thing where it doesn't matter as much as an individual organism would think.