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I'm not surprised. I saw a whistle blower at a pig farm showing them grinding up waste food from super markets, packaging and all feeding it to the pigs. They e

I'm not surprised. I saw a whistle blower at a pig farm showing them grinding up waste food from super markets, packaging and all feeding it to the pigs. They eat all the plastic and junk, we eat them.

jahnu 5y ago
And this is why industrial farmers have pursued, and sometimes succeeded, legislation making it a crime to secretly film this sort of thing :(
politician 5y ago
That’s disgusting. It breathes new life into the biblical rules of abstaining from pork.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  It surely isn't just pig farms though. Cows, chickens....
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    It's mostly pigs. Remember that they're omnivores, so they eat the same things humans eat. Cattle eat grass, they're also fed grain commercially, and after the mad cow outbreaks, cattle are no longer fed meat and bone meal. Chickens mostly eat grain and worms, though I assume they're getting some meat and bone meal. Found this on youtube. I grew up around farms, and it looks about right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrRprZ8C93g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrRprZ8C93g Also, classic scene from Snatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUynRdzzsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUynRdzzsM
    - ornornor 5y ago
      Of course, there is also the option of not eating animals altogether.
      - meristohm 5y ago
        For adults, yes. I'm not yet convinced we're able to raise healthy children without a little meat, and if we collectively scaled back to eating meat once a week it wouldn't matter how many of us are vegetarian or vegan. I see animals as individuals and as people. I grew up on and around family farms (for sustenance, not profit). I'd rather we had less of The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) and more of everyone at least witnessing the butchering of the animals they'll be eating. I wish I'd gotten on a fishing boat at some point when I was younger. I'm trying out eating three times a week (not a magic number, just what I've settled on for now), and now that I'm used to it I want the food I eat to be the best we have--fresh land greens, less-fresh sea greens, fruits and vegetables, whole grains (oat groats, wheat berries, etc.), local eggs, and definitely-not-local sardines, mackerel, and oysters because I love seafood and my child's pediatrician says the omega-3s are good for a child's brain development (and no, I don't impose this regimen on anyone else in my family--I still make meals and sit down together with my warm salty water). Red meat maybe once a month, maybe. Delicious bacon a few times a year. Mostly chicken, eggs, fish, and butter when I eat animal products. I'm not wasting my eating time with anything sweet or "deliciously processed" because it doesn't feel good afterwards and is not as nutritious as the other stuff (this after half a lifetime of snacking on sweet foods, prepackaged and homemade). I know fungus can supply some things meat otherwise would, like cyanocobalamin (B12, I think). I like nutritional yeast for that. Feel free to refute and/or add to any of this mostly emotion-based perspective--I'm still learning.
        elevaet 5y ago
        Eating only 3 times a week? The metabolic breadth of the human body is impressive. I have a hard time eating only 3-4 times a day. I do 2-3h of solid exercise every day, so I burn a lot of calories. I'm pretty sure I could get away with less, but I'm fit, not getting injured, and doing a lot more than 99% of people my age, so not going to mess with my eating habits too much at this point. From what I understand fungus does not produce B12, it's only produced by bacteria. It's added to nutritional yeast ... to make it more nutritional. Bacteria in our (and other animals') guts do produce B12, but we tend to need extra B12 nonetheless. I don't eat meat aside from a bit of fish, but I agree that a little meat in everyone's (especially children) diet would not be a bad thing. It's best not to be puritanical or extreme when it comes to diet. We're omnivores after all. I have a pet idea that a real paleo diet would include insects and grubs, but not sure if there's much anthropological evidence for that.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Anecdote is not data. Extrapolating one video filmed by a non objective part, in one "farm" as a proof that everybody is doing the same is just lying to yourself. Anybody could feed pigs gross things to videotape it.
    - elevaet 5y ago
      On the other hand anecdotes like these are plentiful, and eventually they add up to a pattern that causes cognitive dissonance vs the story we'd like to believe. It's a brutal industry where profits come down to how cheap you can raise a pound of flesh.
- azth 5y ago
  It's also prohibited in Islam. One of the most important things to understand is that why something is prohibited may not be immediately (or even ever) apparent to us, The Creator knows us better than we know ourselves.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    Seems like a bit of a dangerous game of broken telephone though, if The Creator is giving very specific tips to barely literate people in the desert and then never bothering to check back to clarify. Maybe Moses was told "Be careful with consuming those underground fossil fuels" and, lacking context, he wrote down: "Be careful with eating those underground ancient insects" - which turned into a ban on eating grasshoppers.
    - tsol 5y ago
      I mean if you can accept that God is sending down messages, it isn't a huge stretch to think he might also make sure they are preserved to some extent
      - azth 5y ago
        It's easily provable that the Quran has been preserved.
    - azth 5y ago
      Very bad analogy. The Quran has been preserved word for word since its revelation. The Arabs went on to become one of the most advanced societies history has ever seen, read up on the Islamic Golden Age. Many things we take for granted trace their roots directly to that era. Secondly, you're making a huge fallacy. While many Arabs did not read or write at the time (and this wasn't just specific to the Arabs), they were not ignorant or dumb, which you seem to be implying. We have many surviving poems from the pre-Islamic era. They were very smart people, as we know from history.
- meristohm 5y ago
  Why did those rules come about?
serverlessmom 5y ago
This is horrifying but ultimately not surprisingly either. Profit over the health of the people, always.
heurisko 5y ago
In the UK I watched a company being filmed that openly admits that peeling all the, in this case, biscuit (cookie) packaging, off of biscuits wasn't economically viable, so they just grind it all up.

jahnu 5y ago

And this is why industrial farmers have pursued, and sometimes succeeded, legislation making it a crime to secretly film this sort of thing :(

politician 5y ago

That’s disgusting. It breathes new life into the biblical rules of abstaining from pork.

hungryforcodes 5y ago
It surely isn't just pig farms though. Cows, chickens....
- dehrmann 5y ago
  It's mostly pigs. Remember that they're omnivores, so they eat the same things humans eat. Cattle eat grass, they're also fed grain commercially, and after the mad cow outbreaks, cattle are no longer fed meat and bone meal. Chickens mostly eat grain and worms, though I assume they're getting some meat and bone meal. Found this on youtube. I grew up around farms, and it looks about right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrRprZ8C93g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrRprZ8C93g Also, classic scene from Snatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUynRdzzsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUynRdzzsM
  - ornornor 5y ago
    Of course, there is also the option of not eating animals altogether.
    - meristohm 5y ago
      For adults, yes. I'm not yet convinced we're able to raise healthy children without a little meat, and if we collectively scaled back to eating meat once a week it wouldn't matter how many of us are vegetarian or vegan. I see animals as individuals and as people. I grew up on and around family farms (for sustenance, not profit). I'd rather we had less of The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) and more of everyone at least witnessing the butchering of the animals they'll be eating. I wish I'd gotten on a fishing boat at some point when I was younger. I'm trying out eating three times a week (not a magic number, just what I've settled on for now), and now that I'm used to it I want the food I eat to be the best we have--fresh land greens, less-fresh sea greens, fruits and vegetables, whole grains (oat groats, wheat berries, etc.), local eggs, and definitely-not-local sardines, mackerel, and oysters because I love seafood and my child's pediatrician says the omega-3s are good for a child's brain development (and no, I don't impose this regimen on anyone else in my family--I still make meals and sit down together with my warm salty water). Red meat maybe once a month, maybe. Delicious bacon a few times a year. Mostly chicken, eggs, fish, and butter when I eat animal products. I'm not wasting my eating time with anything sweet or "deliciously processed" because it doesn't feel good afterwards and is not as nutritious as the other stuff (this after half a lifetime of snacking on sweet foods, prepackaged and homemade). I know fungus can supply some things meat otherwise would, like cyanocobalamin (B12, I think). I like nutritional yeast for that. Feel free to refute and/or add to any of this mostly emotion-based perspective--I'm still learning.
      - elevaet 5y ago
        Eating only 3 times a week? The metabolic breadth of the human body is impressive. I have a hard time eating only 3-4 times a day. I do 2-3h of solid exercise every day, so I burn a lot of calories. I'm pretty sure I could get away with less, but I'm fit, not getting injured, and doing a lot more than 99% of people my age, so not going to mess with my eating habits too much at this point. From what I understand fungus does not produce B12, it's only produced by bacteria. It's added to nutritional yeast ... to make it more nutritional. Bacteria in our (and other animals') guts do produce B12, but we tend to need extra B12 nonetheless. I don't eat meat aside from a bit of fish, but I agree that a little meat in everyone's (especially children) diet would not be a bad thing. It's best not to be puritanical or extreme when it comes to diet. We're omnivores after all. I have a pet idea that a real paleo diet would include insects and grubs, but not sure if there's much anthropological evidence for that.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Anecdote is not data. Extrapolating one video filmed by a non objective part, in one "farm" as a proof that everybody is doing the same is just lying to yourself. Anybody could feed pigs gross things to videotape it.
  - elevaet 5y ago
    On the other hand anecdotes like these are plentiful, and eventually they add up to a pattern that causes cognitive dissonance vs the story we'd like to believe. It's a brutal industry where profits come down to how cheap you can raise a pound of flesh.
azth 5y ago
It's also prohibited in Islam. One of the most important things to understand is that why something is prohibited may not be immediately (or even ever) apparent to us, The Creator knows us better than we know ourselves.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Seems like a bit of a dangerous game of broken telephone though, if The Creator is giving very specific tips to barely literate people in the desert and then never bothering to check back to clarify. Maybe Moses was told "Be careful with consuming those underground fossil fuels" and, lacking context, he wrote down: "Be careful with eating those underground ancient insects" - which turned into a ban on eating grasshoppers.
  - tsol 5y ago
    I mean if you can accept that God is sending down messages, it isn't a huge stretch to think he might also make sure they are preserved to some extent
    - azth 5y ago
      It's easily provable that the Quran has been preserved.
  - azth 5y ago
    Very bad analogy. The Quran has been preserved word for word since its revelation. The Arabs went on to become one of the most advanced societies history has ever seen, read up on the Islamic Golden Age. Many things we take for granted trace their roots directly to that era. Secondly, you're making a huge fallacy. While many Arabs did not read or write at the time (and this wasn't just specific to the Arabs), they were not ignorant or dumb, which you seem to be implying. We have many surviving poems from the pre-Islamic era. They were very smart people, as we know from history.
meristohm 5y ago
Why did those rules come about?

serverlessmom 5y ago

This is horrifying but ultimately not surprisingly either. Profit over the health of the people, always.

heurisko 5y ago

In the UK I watched a company being filmed that openly admits that peeling all the, in this case, biscuit (cookie) packaging, off of biscuits wasn't economically viable, so they just grind it all up.