For literally thousands of years humans personally slaughtered animals and had no problem with it. But you assume people wouldn’t do this without some fanciful words for it. Based on what? Wishful thinking?
Anecdotal “proof”: In the heart of Manhattan’s ultra trendy Chelsea neighborhood is the Chelsea market which is now this super trendy food hall. In the basement is a delicious butcher named Dicksons where literally hundreds of New Yorkers and tourists eat and drink craft beers while they literally saw entire pigs and baby calfs in half and dangle their carcasses in clear eye sight of where you sit and eat. I take my family there all the time because of how tasty and fresh the meats are and my children love it.
Showing people where their meat comes isn’t going to reduce the demand in my opinion. I personally believe people should know where their food comes from as it reduces waste and garners introspection about our role in the planet and ecosystem.
I’m Greek American and lamb on the spit is a cultural tradition on Easter. As a kid, it was very weird for my American friends to pick food directly off of a carcass but so many told me over the years it was an unforgettable experience. My uncle once took me to the farm in Georgia where he got the lamb, handed me a large knife and asked me to slit its throat, I was 13 at the time. I couldn’t do it, I cried and watched him do it. I will never forget that. To this day I have a profound love and appreciation of animals, especially lambs. I still eat them. The two ideas for me are not conflicted to me. The only thing I abhor when it comes to meat is wastefulness.
Go show your kid a real factory farm instead of a high-end butcher in a trendy food hall and report back! Easy experiment to run and your kids’ reaction could settle this debate.
Of course seeing something you haven’t seen is shocking. To make someone give up meat is a stretch. My kids have been up close and personal to butchers in wet markets chopping up fish, pigs and chickens in Taiwan. This is the daily way of life for billions of people. I believe people over estimate the reaction this would garner from most of the world’s population, which indicates to me that a similar reaction would happen here if we saw it regularly.
So the shock of a factory farm is just the shock of “seeing something new,” akin to going to Disneyland for the first time?
OP said “more people would be vegan” which I think is strictly true. Everyone? No. Would a lot of people reduce their meat consumption from the currently obscene 150+ animals per year (average American)? Probably.
Count chickens it's a plausible number. If you count things like small fish and shrimp then it's probably a severe underestimate. I guess he isn't counting those, self-described vegans often don't for some reason.
Again; butchers are fine.
The animal is dead already.
What you are missing is the industrial process we put together in the last 70 years to produce more meat; cheaper and faster.
Those are weird, and inhuman.
Those technics make most people uncomfortable.
If not, the amount of antibiotics we have to pump into the animal to keep them healthy will hirk another slice of the public.
A data point here is the % of depression in slaughter house worker. Those are the one that are exposed for real.
Not a wet meat market worker, not a fancy butcher.
When I was in elementary school it seemed like we took a field trip to a dairy farm two or three times a year every year. Not some traditional dairy farm for tourists, but a big factory-style dairy farm owned by a big company that had farms and distribution covering the entire state. They showed us the calves in veal crates.
I don't think it turned many people off milk and cheese. Actually the grossest field trip we ever went on was to a potato chip factory, the stink of rotten potatoes was overwhelming. They never took us to a pig or chicken farm though, I've been to a few at other times and those would have beat the chip factory easily. A lot of people who grow up around cows say they appreciate the small (I do, to an extent) but I've never heard anybody say that about pigs or chickens.
But showing people factory farms, I think, is less likely to make people become vegans than it is to make people agitate for more humane forms of slaughter.
I think it'd do both, and either/both is an improvement. Which is, of course, why factory farms try so hard to disallow their operations from being shown.
Oh, I agree that would be an improvement. I'm just saying most people will get more emotionally distressed by animal torture than about killing animals for food.
But I should admit my bias here: I am not a vegetarian (although I don't eat a great deal of meat either) and so I'm not upset that animals are killed for food. But I get very worked up about animals being tortured whether they're ending up as food or not, so I'm ascribing to "most people" what I feel myself, which is always a bit questionable.
you must realize that a high end butcher has nothing to do with a meat factory where the bulk of our meat is coming from?
Bring your family to the one where they crush the male chick on a conveyor belt next time. ( chick culling, you can find video online and watch it before the omelet dinner )
Or just a good ol’ bunch of pigs understanding very well what’s gonna happen and try to escape.
It’s kinda cute.
Or you could discuss why a cow produce milk.
That it needs to had deliver a calf recently. And how impregnate the cow ( it’s a “rape rack” device ) and then finish by the cow following the calves in despair over cookie and milk.
The emotions one feels watching a video of a factory farm are very, very different from what one feels watching a family raise some livestock and then kill them. They’re obviously not the same thing.
During those thousands of years where humans personally slaughtered animals, they often built complete philosophies around their relationship to those animals. Those philosophies are way, way more complex and personally involved than the modern grocery shopping experience, obviously.
> The emotions one feels watching a video of a factory farm are very, very different from what one feels watching a family raise some livestock and then kill them
Is this really true? People who kill animals for a living doesn't have any emotions about it, watching them do it is like watching them cut a tomato.
You're talking about relatively few people -- I too would bet that most people (those of us not working in slaughterhouses) would find videos from factory farms disturbing.
There's a reason big-ag farmers are afraid people will see videos showing their operations. So afraid that they pay off politicians to ban such video recording.
> I too would bet that most people (those of us not working in slaughterhouses) would find videos from factory farms disturbing.
But why would they be more disturbing than watching a person slaughtering and cutting up an animal? You didn't answer the question, you just said that one was disturbing, not why one was more disturbing than the other.
Why is it relevant whether one can put a finger on the difference? The claim was that people use their economic distance from meat production to protect themselves from the negative feelings that would be created if they had to do it themselves, especially in the manner of factory farming.
Anyway my theory for the distinction is 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter and 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species.
If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation of how much meat to eat and how to handle that animal while it’s alive. As someone else mentioned, this isn’t some crazy avant garde hypothesis: this is exactly why mass meat producers don’t want people filming their operations.
The prior argument that “people always killed animals!” is irrelevant. They certainly did not kill animals the way we do today and again, this is evidenced in the belief systems that emerged during times where people couldn’t afford to be hundreds of miles removed from the production of their food.
> Why is it relevant whether one can put a finger on the difference?
You brought this up, not me.
> 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter
Not if every family has to slaughter their own meat, the scale is the same just distributed so you don't see it.
> 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species
This isn't inherent to factory farming though, just the ways it is done in some places. And this goes for family farming as well, some families would put animals in small cages and not take care of them to save money and because they are lazy. If you filmed them and their animals I don't think people would feel any different.
No, I pointed out the difference, which is obviously real. The reason for the difference is irrelevant.
Uhhh no, the scale certainly wouldn’t be the same. An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year. You can’t seriously think people would be consuming at that rate, or could even afford to consume at that rate, without factory farming.
> some families [abuse their animals]… people wouldn’t feel any different
We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
> An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year
Most of that are chickens. Have you seen a family farm where people eat their chickens? They just take one and behead it, killing it takes no effort and is just a part of preparing the food no different than peeling the vegetables. Killing a chicken a day per family is very little work.
> We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Those laws also applies to factory farms, unless you do worse than them you are fine.
I think you lost the thread. The claim was factory farming doesn’t change the volume of meat consumption and production, only the geographic location of it.
It is economically not viable for every American family to produce and kill their own 2lb of (currently, on average) consumed meat per day. That is why we have factory farming and why it dominates our food supply: economies of scale. The lack of these economies is why you objectively and in actual fact do not see the same scale of meat consumption in less industrialized food systems.
It has nothing to do with whether it’s physically or psychologically possible to kill x chickens per day.
I think you've lost track of the difference between other people and yourself. The words you're using seem to talk about how other people feel, but you're actually talking about how you feel and assuming that any difference between the two is rooted in ignorance.
> "your kids’ reaction"
Maybe this should be "my reaction as a kid", since you don't know that person's kids.
> "The emotions one feels"
Should be "the emotions I feel"
> "If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation"
Should probably be "seeing it changed how I feel".
People are more than the sum of our experiences, two people raised in the same environment with the same kind of experiences can have completely divergent values. Therefore it's wrong to assume that people would share your values if they had your experiences. In the case of meat eating particularly this should be obvious; the reality is that most people exposed to the industry, either for the first time as adults or as kids, don't turn vegetarian.
I’m putting my bet on what those experiments would show, which is people’s consumption patterns would be adversely impacted by more in-depth knowledge of the food supply chain.
This is also where meat producers place their bets and why they fight tooth and nail against transparency within their industry.
I'm sorry -- how expensive do you think chickens are? In fact, if everyone had them, they'd most likely be freely shared. You seem very out of touch with your own species.
Almost certainly, we’re talking about videos where batches of animals are kept suffering in tiny cages and the slaughter is done by machines. Watching a bunch of live hatchlings get sucked into some grinder is not the same as watching a Halal killing or some tribal hunting ritual.
Those videos turned my stomach, and almost everyone I know who has watched them admits the same. My friends and I all still eat meat, but no question that might change if we had to watch those videos on how our mass produced cheap meat products are made.
> Watching a bunch of live hatchlings get sucked into some grinder is not the same as watching a Halal killing or some tribal hunting ritual.
You aren't comparing like for like, most people who kill animals doesn't perform a ritual, they just kill it.
Also you can't compare a video trying to show something in a positive light "ritual killing" vs a video trying to show something in a negative light. If they showed you a video about a slaughter that went wrong, the animal is crying as the slaughterer ends it, blood everywhere, then people would feel very bad as well. Or if they showed you a slaughterer joking about as he was slaughtering animals, you probably would feel more as well. Those things are the reality of traditional killing, I don't see how it is any better than a machine doing it. The end result is the same.
The main difference is that we no longer need to train a lot of people to be killing machines like we did before.
The main difference is the scale of suffering that we are choosing to create because we simply prefer the flavor of meat over other sources of nutrients.
I think you are correct. People will be fine with the general idea of killing animals.
But.
In those thousand of years, was the meat produced the same way?
What type of antibiotics alternative were our elders using to prevent sickness in large groups of animals?
Did they raised them squeezed next to each other without moving for their all life?
Where our forefathers feeding a purée of the dead one to the next generation to boost their immune system?
Did they had to pasteurize the milk, not for enhanced shelf life but mostly because sanitary condition are so poor that other wise you found particles of shit in it?
I could go on. But I think the comment you responding to as a fair point.
Real; 2023 technic of meat/eggs/milk production are horrifying. we don’t know how the sausage is made.
I’m not vegetarian. I’ve kill and skinned large mammals ( goats .. not that fancy but well ) but I avoid industrial meat as much as possible.
Those are meat factory with advance industrial processes. I do thing folks would be concern for their own health and kinda disgusted if it was displayed more transparently.
They would have used any and every type of antibiotic or other technique that resulted in being able to make more food, because they probably had personal memories of loved ones starving to death when there wasn’t enough food. I know for a fact they would do this because it is in fact what they did.
Producing food at the right price and on the right schedule is important. It is no good to produce food people can’t afford or that bankrupts the producer. It is no good to produce food only after people are starving and riots have broken out. What kind of profit margins do you imagine food producers are making? This is not Google where they sell little ads at a 30% margin. It’s a commodity business with a lot of competition.
I don’t know. But I do know that the food supply chain is not something you mess around with lightly because if you screw it up literally tens of millions of people could die in a famine.
So, before anyone decides we need to implement some “small change” the burden is on them to prove that it won’t kill everyone. The burden is not on me to prove that the thing that’s currently feeding us all is the only conceivable way to do it.
If you think you have a more humane technique that will produce meat just as efficiently, by all means, open a farm and use it. If it really is better and more profitable I’m sure the industry will be happy to adopt it.
Very fair point, food supply chain are brittle! We saw that recently.
Of course the debate over the need for industrial meat farming is ongoing, and it involves complex trade-offs between efficiency, ethics, and environmental sustainability.
The latter is the kicker for me. I do care that we're building horror slaughterhouses for animals. But honestly not that much. I could live with that. What irks me it that it does not seems sustainable on the long run.
On a personal level I don't eat much meat. Like a handful of time a month? Mostly when I'm out. I don't buy meat when grocery shopping.
And when I do eat meat I either :
- kill the beat myself and then skin it. That happen less than once a year so it's anecdotal.
- Or it's hippie dippie meat raised close to where I live. You know, "pasture", "grass-fed" and all that shit.
I do use milk that is probably produce in detrimental ways to the cows and the environment. Maybe a gallon/month? To cook. I would love a better plug for milk.
I produce my own eggs, I'm blessed by a large yard and their is no city code. I think I could raise pigs nobody would care?
But that's just me.
At least I'm kinda opt-out of industrial meat? Still standing! But agreed: I'm a rich guy in a rich country, with too much time on my hands.
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To your point:
I can't find any data on the percentage of industrial meat in the US diet, compared to "hippie-dippie" meat. It's probably a staggering 90 to 10%. But I would love to find that data.
So, agreed. It looks scary to mess with that.
That being said:
I do think the way we were growing meat until ww2 is a decent way to do it. And that having less meat around would be just fine.
I get my protein from mostly plants. Yes it takes place to grow that too. But pigs, beef and chicken needs similar plants to be feed as well.
But correct. I can't prove that, it's anecdotal. And I know nothing about those subject for real :)
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> If you think you have a more humane technique that will produce meat just as efficiently, by all means, open a farm and use it.
Introducing Temple Grandin! She did it so much better than I could ever do. I'm a software guy, I can barely keep up with a food garden :)
Grandin produced lot of work geared toward exactly that,from within the industrial meat complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
She deserve some recognition. She proved that you can be less of a dick to your meat and actually have better yield
Her work is not theoretical, she consulted for Hormel, Cargill and Tyson. Those 3 might represent like, idk, 80% of meat production in the US? They were happy to adopt her recommendation.
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But the above is animal welfare. Again, I would be OK with immense suffering of tons of animals. ( really) I guess I'm not an emphat!
What I'm not ok in my personal book, is the risk that those concentration bring us. For our health, germ-wise, land-use wise, and all that jazz! It seems wise to tame it down. Eat more lentils, chickpeas and soy. That's all I'm saying.
Have you considered the possibility that "Earthlings" is one data point among a very complex web of superficially opposing ideas/arguments that are actually all part of a coordinated agenda to try to fundamentally change your behaviour and psychology by messing with your emotions?
Go look up B.F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning (His book Walden 2 is a semi-fictional work that provides a pretty good approximation to the game that's afoot). I'm sure I'll get shot down for presenting a conspiracy, but once you open your eyes to Operant Conditioning, considering the possibility that power hungry groups haven't been using it is kind of like trying to imagine a world where people chose not to use the internet. The only difference is that applied behavioural psychology is more dangerous and powerful than the internet.
This game is happening quite pervasively and a lot of smart people have been coercively brainwashed into being passive if not active players in this process.
There are of course a litany of justifications used by those that do the brainwashing.
Or selling you products
Impossible burgers
Tofu.
It's like a coordinated agenda to stigmatize the internal combustion engine and promote renewable energy sources like solar and wind. You might just be in the prime demographics for both but a majority of the population isn't.
Nobody has stigmatized engines, people are trying to reduce emissions because the greatest body of knowledge we have access to (science) suggests we should.
Based on the observation that most modern people have no idea where the meat or the vegetables come from. The packaged goods did the consumers from the o
Production. Activist are using videos of production lines to promote their agenda.
The fact that activists are doing something does not mean that it’s effective or anyone cares.
People need food. If they don’t happen to know where it comes from they would figure it out with a quickness if it ever became necessary for them to learn.
People need food but they don't have to eat factory produced meat that requires huge amounts of CO2 footprint and antibiotics that make our own human populations less resistant to bacteria.
Biologically we are carnivores but factory farming is leaving evidence for modern society to determine whether or not it's okay and it definitely gives me pause. People care. I think maybe you're just not caring.
>People need food but they don't have to eat factory produced meat that requires huge amounts of CO2 footprint and antibiotics that make our own human populations less resistant to bacteria.
Biologically we are carnivores but factory farming is leaving evidence for modern society to determine whether or not it's okay and it definitely gives me pause. People care. I think maybe you're just not caring.
Why do you write this? I don't control the food policy of the world and I wasn't arguing that people should be vegans.
Why people provide unsolicited arguments for eating meat? Why just don't you order a burger instead so we can stay on topic? I don't care who eats what.
> most modern people have no idea where the meat or the vegetables come from
Most modern people knows that meat comes from killed animals.
> Activist are using videos of production lines to promote their agenda.
The reason we don't like to watch that is the same reason we don't want to watch people take a shit, it isn't that we feel shitting is morally wrong its just not something we want to watch because it is gross.
