> In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing animal abuse (by consuming meat).
I suppose you can teach disgust, so once it becomes the cultural norm that will probably be true.
But the crux of the matter seems to be that some people just don't have that visceral reaction to the suffering of others. Group 1 (feels compassion for others' suffering) and Group 2 (does not) just talk past each other because of this. I imagine similar discussions happened regarding slavery.
Elsewhere in this thread [0]:
> Would you be ok with killing another human to consume in a non-emergency scenario? If yes, then I understand your confusion. If not, then why not?
> Self preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for food because that means they could kill me for food. It is unlikely I will be killed by a cow anytime soon. (...) I meant that I wouldn't want to live in a world where humans eat humans because it would be dangerous.
Pure self-preservation. The sensations of other beings are simply not a factor to the responder above and many people think like this (usually justified by the classic "plants could also feel pain for all I know, I don't care either way").
> In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing animal abuse (by consuming meat).
I suspect it's hard to find a place to watch it, but "Carnage" addresses this very point. I highly recommend it for meat eaters and non-meat eaters alike.
> Carnage is a 2017 mockumentary directed by Simon Amstell. Set in the year 2067, when veganism is the norm, the film looks back on meat-eating today.
As they say, science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it just communicates what present people think about the future.
The “future generations will look back at us in horror” and “we’re on the Right Side of history” are both nonsensical positions that have zero historical basis and function more as a religious eschatology than as a serious scientific prediction.
I must be misunderstanding you, because your claim sounds absurd to me.
You seem to be claiming that making a prediction about the future is inappropriate. I don't understand what "zero historical basis" even means.
A prediction is just that -- a claim of what the person uttering it expects will happen in the future. The prediction is falsifiable (could turn out to be false). So what's the problem with making a claim about how you think the future will be?
No, I am claiming that the narrative of ever-marching progress (of which vegetarianism is a often participant) is just a narrative and not a serious prediction based on analysis and data.
You can see a similar thing with religion. The progress narrative says we will outgrow these supposedly outdated myths, while the actual data indicates that religion is growing, largely due to birth rates.
You are claiming that people who make predictions of this sort are not making a "serious" prediction. And I am claiming that you don't get to say that.
You may dismiss their predictions; you may feel they are worthless to listen to; you might have an explanation for why we shouldn't take such predictions seriously. I can agree with all that. But none of this makes my claim any less of a prediction.
My claim is that in the future people will have a certain point of view. That is what a prediction is.
I am confident you know that predictions can be false, and calling something a prediction doesn't mean "it will come true" or "it is more likely to come true than not".
I'm just puzzled about your use of the word "prediction" -- perhaps we mean different things.
No futuristic films have come true when they try to predict society changing - ideas and beliefs are passed on from generation to generation. Food is much more sticky since meat-eating humans are likely to feed their children meat. When they come of age to understand things like veganism (beyond "vegans choose not to eat meat"), the fact that they've been eating meat for years will play a large part in whether or not they even consider taking on those new morals.
vegetarians choose not to eat meat. vegans choose not to consume animal products, e.g. often also avoid leather shoes and similar products not necessarily limited to food
Sure, that would be great if everyone suddenly ate less meat, but until we have a global cultural shift, aren't solutions like this much more valuable?
One time a project manager asked told the developers that they shouldn't introduce any new bugs in the next release, this feels like the same kind of argument.
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), 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.
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.
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.
This is a great point. One of the things several of our customers who hail from India have told us is that our chickens remind them of the chickens they got back home, and can still get back home, but are aside from small producers like us, unavailable widely in the USA.
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.
This being true doesn't invalidate their point of the GP representing "consuming meat" in a bad light based on the acts of those cultivating factory-farmed meat. Nuance doesn't have to always be front-and-center, but when discussing a topic, i'd rather see major counter-points considered rather than omitted. Preferably with numbers and percentages stacked next to it.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
