5 ms·

I think that you correctly identify this as a privilege. This points to another deeper problem that drives this. Americans expect to be able to eat meat, even

by pacaro 4y ago

I think that you correctly identify this as a privilege. This points to another deeper problem that drives this. Americans expect to be able to eat meat, even when eating cheap food. Historically the food of poverty has either not included meat, or has used less desirable parts of the animal. If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat, or not often. The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality

cbrozefsky 4y ago
I hear you, but I also think that something must be said for the fact that I am getting all the meat I want, at prices that are competitive with and in many cases cheaper than the heavily subsidized industrial farms, but I am doing it with a family that gets none of those subsidies, and processed at a butcher in my county that doesn't get those subsidies either. This could not scale to feed my old neighborhood in Chicago, for example. In that place, sourcing this way would be so much more expensive. I pay other prices for living in a very small city in the mountains, but this is a perk. I guess I just want to caution us from applying the usual "privilege" critiques and pretending like only super-scalar universal solutions are worth considering. I agree with the whole of your comment. Subsidies of industrial food systems shape our collective diets. My diet includes bulk purchased lentils and chickpeas, rice, home-ground wheat and other very cheap staples that are the majority of my calories. We're eating lentils, beans, rice, making our own bread, and the meat is in about 1/4 our meals. I feel like we eat very well, perhaps better than I have in my whole life if I measure it by health and ethics. I spent years in Chicago where my corner bar had a Michelin star, and there were dozens of equally good places and man did I enjoy my privilege of being a well paid single remote working hacker there.
nebula8804 4y ago
>The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality This right here is the key and its just not meat. So many foodstuffs are nothing but sugar and corn. It makes you think that you are wealthy since you have so much food to choose from. The reality is that it is disguising the increasing devaluing of the dollar + decades of income stagnation. Now you got me on a rant: With the rising costs of everything due to what CEOs claim is "inflation", we are seeing this reduction in quality in everything we buy. I would protest this by only buying locally and spending as few dollars as I can just to stick it to the man and this captured government that we have but the fact that year after year the currency is being whittled away to 0 means I lose no matter what I do. So what can I do to preserve the effort spent to earn that wealth? Can't invest in stocks, the market is down and so I could lose, don't want to spend the money and reward all these CEOs who have been price gouging and selling us products with quality fade. Maybe buy real estate? I will probably lose on that as well. There seems to be no escape, I am trapped with no recourse.
- cbrozefsky 4y ago
  I think you are just recognizing that capital is not wealth, and that the instinct to grow and preserve it is alienating you from solving the problems and generating the wealth thru cooperation with your neighbors. Buying locally, keeps more money circulating locally. It wont offset inflation, but it makes a bigger impact on the people around you, who grow your food, ship and transport your food, sell you food and goods, install your heat pumps or wood stove, maybe even build the wood stove. The fabric of social relations that drives modern production, light industry as they sometimes call it, is what makes us collectively wealthy.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    Fair enough, I seen "money" as a store of the work effort that was done to earn it...sort of like storing energy in a battery. Yes the "energy" needs to be able to flow. And yes it is a net benefit of the community to circulate the money among itself. I didn't rule this out as in my comment I did mention buying locally. However what you describe is largely out of my control and this is where my frustrations lie. The locally sourced money eventually finds its way heading in one direction: the portfolios of all these elites who have the capacity to shape policy and help accelerate this one way flow of capital. In my 30+ years of living I have not seen this trend reverse. Like I mentioned, any attempts to stem this flow is futile since even my outflow is reduced to 0, I lose that "energy" stored in the battery anyway in the form of inflation. I guess in a way if you think about it, a real battery cannot hold energy indefinitely (as far as I know) but still...how do I reconcile with the fact that the effort used to generate that money is either stolen by these people, either by it moving in one direction from me to them or by their monetary policy that makes it eventually worthless?
    - cbrozefsky 4y ago
      Yah, I mean, that's one take on it. A take that I still think confuses money with wealth and energy. That kind of metaphor works because it's still putting money as a stand-in, a generalization, an abstraction, for the social relations that reproduce our culture, that feed and clothe and educate and entertain us. It's a useful metaphor sometimes, but we should not mistake the map for the territory, the accounting for the experience. The wealth is in the social relations and material goods even (you are not wealthy because you have the money to buy a house, you are wealthy because you have a well insulated, sturdy house). Turn the abstract capital into the means of production and (social) reproduction. Just trying to give a pep talk, not disagreeing with your sentiment 8^)
ROTMetro 4y ago
My grandparents ate tons of meat despite their income level. Why? Because they lived in a small rural town. City folks not wanting to pay the true cost of living in a city and be able to live like they live in a small rural ag town (while making fun of people who chose to live in rural ag towns) is just like meat producers not wanting to pay the true costs of creating antibiotic resistance, it is an unspoken cause of these sorts of discussions.
goodpoint 4y ago
> a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat, or not often. US has the highest obesity rate. Even more among the poor. Eating healthier food sounds like a big improvement.
standardUser 4y ago
"If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat" We might eat less meat, but you can buy meat today that is humanely raised for marginally more expensive than the factory farmed stuff. And that's with the overhead associated with small producers in a niche industry. If we were to make humane standards universal, cost savings would obviously follow. Just look at Europe. This is a solved problem that only persists due to mass American indifference to how our meat is tortured and poisoned before we eat it.
- cbrozefsky 4y ago
  I think regulatory capture and the power of absolutely massive monopolies in our industrial agriculture systems are what makes the problem persist. Awareness of the issue is not the obstacle. We can all be aware of it, people regularly complain about this or that part of the food system, but when we organize and fight to improve it, we meet incredible power arrayed against us. We can win, and do, but that poeer, not our lack of awareness, is the problem, IMO
- Thlom 4y ago
  Meat production is not that much more humane in Europe to be honest. It's difficult to humanely produce meat at the same scale and price as industrial meat production.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    European standards don't allow many of the worst techniques that are used routinely in US meat production. And everything is difficult until you do it. And everything costs more until its done at scale.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
uxcolumbo 4y ago
The definition of humanely includes compassion and sympathy. Even if you raise a cow on a 'happy' farm, at the end the cow will end up in a slaughter house where the cow experiences immense terror and fear. To be humane would mean not to eat animals if our survival doesn't depend on it and in most parts of the world we don't need to eat animals anymore. I think 'less cruel' would be a more apt description - but eating animals that came from a happy farm is still cruel.
- cbrozefsky 4y ago
  Interestingly, on my last visit to the farm stand picking up beef, the owner was talking about how made their choice of butcher based on those principals. They take them to one whose operation was designed with consultation from Temple Grandin. She takes the cows she has raised there herself, and witnesses the operation. I've processed chickens and ducks that I have raised. Much smaller scale, and actually when it comes to duck I'm much more about the eggs than the meat 8^)
  - uxcolumbo 4y ago
    If there is no other way to survive - yes raising or hunting animals and doing the best we can to minimise suffering is essential. There are videos of farmers who gave up farming animals because they realized 'there is someone in there'. In the BBC docu series 'dark side of dairy' a farmer starts crying when he's asked to explain what happens to the baby cow. Chickens are deeply social animals and can create deep bonds with humans. You might have seen the video of a hen waiting for her human friend coming back from school and running towards him. Or how about Monique - the hen that traveled around the world and 'kind of saved my life' [0] of her human friend. Cows are these gentle and curious giant creatures and yet we betray their trust by killing them in the end. [1] Also, why are we not using the actual words like killing and butchering vs processing. The meat industry comes up with all these words to soften what is actually happening to animals. Humanity will eventually give up killing & consuming animals for pleasure and future humans will see what we are doing now to other sentient beings as barbaric [2] [0]https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/21/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-globe-french-sailor-guirec-soudee-monique https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/21/why-did-the-c... [1] https://moustache-farmer.de/en https://moustache-farmer.de/en [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA

by pacaro 4y ago

cbrozefsky 4y ago

I hear you, but I also think that something must be said for the fact that I am getting all the meat I want, at prices that are competitive with and in many cases cheaper than the heavily subsidized industrial farms, but I am doing it with a family that gets none of those subsidies, and processed at a butcher in my county that doesn't get those subsidies either. This could not scale to feed my old neighborhood in Chicago, for example. In that place, sourcing this way would be so much more expensive. I pay other prices for living in a very small city in the mountains, but this is a perk. I guess I just want to caution us from applying the usual "privilege" critiques and pretending like only super-scalar universal solutions are worth considering. I agree with the whole of your comment. Subsidies of industrial food systems shape our collective diets. My diet includes bulk purchased lentils and chickpeas, rice, home-ground wheat and other very cheap staples that are the majority of my calories. We're eating lentils, beans, rice, making our own bread, and the meat is in about 1/4 our meals. I feel like we eat very well, perhaps better than I have in my whole life if I measure it by health and ethics. I spent years in Chicago where my corner bar had a Michelin star, and there were dozens of equally good places and man did I enjoy my privilege of being a well paid single remote working hacker there.

nebula8804 4y ago

>The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality This right here is the key and its just not meat. So many foodstuffs are nothing but sugar and corn. It makes you think that you are wealthy since you have so much food to choose from. The reality is that it is disguising the increasing devaluing of the dollar + decades of income stagnation. Now you got me on a rant: With the rising costs of everything due to what CEOs claim is "inflation", we are seeing this reduction in quality in everything we buy. I would protest this by only buying locally and spending as few dollars as I can just to stick it to the man and this captured government that we have but the fact that year after year the currency is being whittled away to 0 means I lose no matter what I do. So what can I do to preserve the effort spent to earn that wealth? Can't invest in stocks, the market is down and so I could lose, don't want to spend the money and reward all these CEOs who have been price gouging and selling us products with quality fade. Maybe buy real estate? I will probably lose on that as well. There seems to be no escape, I am trapped with no recourse.

cbrozefsky 4y ago
I think you are just recognizing that capital is not wealth, and that the instinct to grow and preserve it is alienating you from solving the problems and generating the wealth thru cooperation with your neighbors. Buying locally, keeps more money circulating locally. It wont offset inflation, but it makes a bigger impact on the people around you, who grow your food, ship and transport your food, sell you food and goods, install your heat pumps or wood stove, maybe even build the wood stove. The fabric of social relations that drives modern production, light industry as they sometimes call it, is what makes us collectively wealthy.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Fair enough, I seen "money" as a store of the work effort that was done to earn it...sort of like storing energy in a battery. Yes the "energy" needs to be able to flow. And yes it is a net benefit of the community to circulate the money among itself. I didn't rule this out as in my comment I did mention buying locally. However what you describe is largely out of my control and this is where my frustrations lie. The locally sourced money eventually finds its way heading in one direction: the portfolios of all these elites who have the capacity to shape policy and help accelerate this one way flow of capital. In my 30+ years of living I have not seen this trend reverse. Like I mentioned, any attempts to stem this flow is futile since even my outflow is reduced to 0, I lose that "energy" stored in the battery anyway in the form of inflation. I guess in a way if you think about it, a real battery cannot hold energy indefinitely (as far as I know) but still...how do I reconcile with the fact that the effort used to generate that money is either stolen by these people, either by it moving in one direction from me to them or by their monetary policy that makes it eventually worthless?
  - cbrozefsky 4y ago
    Yah, I mean, that's one take on it. A take that I still think confuses money with wealth and energy. That kind of metaphor works because it's still putting money as a stand-in, a generalization, an abstraction, for the social relations that reproduce our culture, that feed and clothe and educate and entertain us. It's a useful metaphor sometimes, but we should not mistake the map for the territory, the accounting for the experience. The wealth is in the social relations and material goods even (you are not wealthy because you have the money to buy a house, you are wealthy because you have a well insulated, sturdy house). Turn the abstract capital into the means of production and (social) reproduction. Just trying to give a pep talk, not disagreeing with your sentiment 8^)

ROTMetro 4y ago

My grandparents ate tons of meat despite their income level. Why? Because they lived in a small rural town. City folks not wanting to pay the true cost of living in a city and be able to live like they live in a small rural ag town (while making fun of people who chose to live in rural ag towns) is just like meat producers not wanting to pay the true costs of creating antibiotic resistance, it is an unspoken cause of these sorts of discussions.

goodpoint 4y ago

> a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat, or not often. US has the highest obesity rate. Even more among the poor. Eating healthier food sounds like a big improvement.

standardUser 4y ago

"If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat" We might eat less meat, but you can buy meat today that is humanely raised for marginally more expensive than the factory farmed stuff. And that's with the overhead associated with small producers in a niche industry. If we were to make humane standards universal, cost savings would obviously follow. Just look at Europe. This is a solved problem that only persists due to mass American indifference to how our meat is tortured and poisoned before we eat it.

cbrozefsky 4y ago
I think regulatory capture and the power of absolutely massive monopolies in our industrial agriculture systems are what makes the problem persist. Awareness of the issue is not the obstacle. We can all be aware of it, people regularly complain about this or that part of the food system, but when we organize and fight to improve it, we meet incredible power arrayed against us. We can win, and do, but that poeer, not our lack of awareness, is the problem, IMO
Thlom 4y ago
Meat production is not that much more humane in Europe to be honest. It's difficult to humanely produce meat at the same scale and price as industrial meat production.
- standardUser 4y ago
  European standards don't allow many of the worst techniques that are used routinely in US meat production. And everything is difficult until you do it. And everything costs more until its done at scale.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

uxcolumbo 4y ago

The definition of humanely includes compassion and sympathy. Even if you raise a cow on a 'happy' farm, at the end the cow will end up in a slaughter house where the cow experiences immense terror and fear. To be humane would mean not to eat animals if our survival doesn't depend on it and in most parts of the world we don't need to eat animals anymore. I think 'less cruel' would be a more apt description - but eating animals that came from a happy farm is still cruel.

cbrozefsky 4y ago
Interestingly, on my last visit to the farm stand picking up beef, the owner was talking about how made their choice of butcher based on those principals. They take them to one whose operation was designed with consultation from Temple Grandin. She takes the cows she has raised there herself, and witnesses the operation. I've processed chickens and ducks that I have raised. Much smaller scale, and actually when it comes to duck I'm much more about the eggs than the meat 8^)
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  If there is no other way to survive - yes raising or hunting animals and doing the best we can to minimise suffering is essential. There are videos of farmers who gave up farming animals because they realized 'there is someone in there'. In the BBC docu series 'dark side of dairy' a farmer starts crying when he's asked to explain what happens to the baby cow. Chickens are deeply social animals and can create deep bonds with humans. You might have seen the video of a hen waiting for her human friend coming back from school and running towards him. Or how about Monique - the hen that traveled around the world and 'kind of saved my life' [0] of her human friend. Cows are these gentle and curious giant creatures and yet we betray their trust by killing them in the end. [1] Also, why are we not using the actual words like killing and butchering vs processing. The meat industry comes up with all these words to soften what is actually happening to animals. Humanity will eventually give up killing & consuming animals for pleasure and future humans will see what we are doing now to other sentient beings as barbaric [2] [0]https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/21/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-globe-french-sailor-guirec-soudee-monique https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/21/why-did-the-c... [1] https://moustache-farmer.de/en https://moustache-farmer.de/en [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA